Keep reading for a rundown of this First Friday:
Annalee Schorr, Magnetic/Geometric
Kathryn Oberdorfer, Remembering August
Jerry Johnson, Cut Outs, in the North Gallery
Spark Gallery, 900 Santa Fe Drive
January 4 through January 28
Artist Reception: Saturday, January 6, noon to 5 p.m.
Last Look: Saturday, January 28, 1 to 4 p.m.
Spark Gallery starts the year off with abstracts painted in the hot hues of summertime from Kathryn Oberdorfer and layered geometric compositions fashioned with magnetic sheeting on a metal surface, with additional touches of duct tape, markers and acrylic paint from Annalee Schorr. In the North Gallery, Jerry Johnson keeps the geometric theme going with stenciled cutouts.
John Hitchcock, “Landlines,” 2023, screenprint and acrylic on naugahyde, variable sizes.
John Hitchcock, courtesy CVA MSUD
Center for Visual Art MSUD, 965 Santa Fe Drive
January 5 through March 23
Opening Reception: Friday, January 5, 6 to 8 p.m. (members, 5:30 to 6 p.m.)
Among other things, 2024 marks the return of the biennial Month of Printmaking, aka Mo’Print, to galleries near and far. The CVA gets a head start on the citywide spring print showcase with a show built on the historical base of printmaking as a tool for activism. Curated by the CVA’s Melanie Finlayson, Pressing for Change addresses issues of climate change, ecology and immigration through print artworks by nine local and national artists. Three separate artist talks are scheduled in February for further insights, and in the student-run 965 Project Gallery, a site-specific installation by local print activist Rick Griffith, Two Ways, echoes the main gallery’s politicized theme.
First Friday: Manifesting and Predicting 2024
Museo de las Americas, 861 Santa Fe Drive
Friday, January 5, 5 to 9 p.m.
The Museo makes use of the first First Friday in 2024 to allow patrons to mine the art of making predictions in the new year. Artist and card reader Cal Duran will offer a limpia (or spiritual cleansing) and reading for a fee throughout the evening. Admission is free on First Friday and includes a chance to see the Museo’s current exhibition, Costa Rica: Long Live Peace and Labor, which ends January 28; the reading and limpia cleanse package with Duran ranges from $10 for fifteen minutes to $20 for thirty minutes.
Works of Stevon Lucero: A Small Art Sale
CHAC Gallery, 7060 West 16th Avenue, Lakewood
January 5 through January 27
Opening Reception: Friday, January 5, 6 to 9 p.m.
Arlette Lucero, the widow of Chicano artist Stevon Lucero, will host a show and sale of small works from her personal collection of her late husband’s paintings this month at CHAC’s Lakewood location. Curated by Rob and Tammy Yancey, the show includes examples of Mr. Lucero’s Metarealism and Neo-Precolumbian paintings, both styles of his own invention and powered by inner spiritualism. Consider it an opportunity: Ms. Lucero says this will be the last sale of these works in a gallery.
Catie Michel, “Study 2,” 2023, platinum-palladium print on rag paper.
Catie Michel, Bell Projects
Kiah Butcher, Idle Hands // Idol Hands
Bell Projects, 2822 East 17th Avenue
January 5 to January 28 (Michel); January 5 to February 25 (Butcher)
Opening Reception: Friday, January 5, 6 to 10 p.m.
Catie Michel Artist Talk: Thursday, January 18, 6:30 p.m.
Bell Projects showcases Catie Michel’s multimedia storytelling project Memoria, for which she interviewed a group of female and binary subjects, piecing together personal stories drawn from their relationships to the natural world. Created thanks to a 2023 Sharon Prize for Colorado grant, Memoria took shape in a series of traditional platinum palladium print portraits overlaid with drawn, painted or reprinted imagery from nature and accompanied by recordings from the interviews. In the Living Room Gallery, curator and video artist Kiah Butcher’s two-channel video installation, Idle Hands // Idol Hands, playfully explores hands in repose in contrast to hands engaged in skilled dexterous activity.
Moe Gram: I Just Wanna Have Fun
Alto Gallery, 1900 35th Street, Suite B
Opens Friday, January 5
Opening Reception: Friday, January 5, 6 to 10 p.m.; register here
Collage Workshop: Saturday, January 13, 1 to 3 p.m.
Have fun with Moe Gram, who cuts off the unending flow of bad news long enough to remember joy, expressed through cheerful mixed-media layered collages. Concocted to channel a ray of sunshine into a world wracked by climate change, homelessness, war and genocide, I Just Wanna Have Fun is a chance to just let it all go.
PlatteForum: Spoiled Echoes
Edge Gallery, 40 West Art Hub, 6501 West Colfax Avenue
January 5 through January 21
Opening Reception: Friday, January 5, 6 to 9 p.m.
Spoiled Echoes gave PlatteForum’s ArtLab youth interns an opportunity to voice off on their feelings about contemporary social justice and world issues affecting their generation, from climate change to reproductive rights. These kids, who are more tuned in than their counterparts in any previous generation, know exactly what’s going on and have firm opinions about it.
Counter Cowboy II, group show
Visions West Contemporary, 2605 Walnut Street
January 5 through February 17
Stock Show season brings a wave of Western art to Denver this month, a veritable slam dunk for Visions West, which specializes in art with Western, outdoor and nature themes year-round. But the group show Counter Cowboy II speaks for itself: You’ll get your fill of cowboys and cowgirls, fancy Western dress and boots, mountain landscapes, spirited horses and wildlife.
Mixtape
Access Gallery, 909 Santa Fe
January 5 through February 17
First Friday Reception: Friday, January 5
Meet the Artists: Friday, January 19, 5 to 8 p.m.
Silent Disco Closing Reception: Friday, February 16, 6 to 8 p.m.
Young artists with disabilities are the nonprofit Access Gallery’s reason to be, and more than thirty of them will be honored through their individual works and styles displayed in this 2024 all-gallery group show. Get to know the artists better at a Meet the Artists event on January 19 or celebrate with them at a silent disco event on the eve of the show’s closing day.
New Year, New Ideas
Artists on Santa Fe, 747 Santa Fe Drive
January 2 through January 29
First Friday Opening: Friday, January 5, 5 to 9 p.m.
What you see is what you get: As an aggregation of artists renting studios in the building, Artists on Santa Fe couldn’t describe what happens there more plainly. They make art on Santa Fe Drive. Sixteen artists will kick off 2024 with a show of fresh work in a variety of mediums, hot off their easels and work tables.
Member Show: Core on Coolfax
Core Art Space, 40 West Art Hub, 6501 West Colfax Avenue
January 5 through January 21
Opening Reception: Friday, January 5, 5 to 10 p.m.
Core members say goodbye to 2023 and get on with 2024 by hanging a celebratory all-gallery member show.
Tatyana Hope, Exposé
The Syrian Maze: Artwork From Syria Draws
Member Show: Body of Work
Next Gallery, 40 West Art Hub, 6501 West Colfax Avenue
January 5 through January 21
Opening Reception: Friday, January 5, 5 to 10 p.m.
Next mixes things up to start the year, beginning with Tatyana Hope’s Exposé, a visually active, tri-color statement in red, black and white — the colors, respectively, of passion and danger, death and mourning, and purity and new beginnings. Secondly, a guest show, The Syrian Maze, offers artwork by six Syrian artists caught up in a widespread diaspora while coming to grips with the destruction of their homelands. And Next joins other co-ops in mounting a group member show, Body of Work, which asks artists to express themselves by using the human body as a symbolic vehicle.
Raven Rohrig, No Two Lovers Breathe Alike
Niza Knoll Gallery, 915 Santa Fe Drive
January 5 through January 28
Opening Reception: Friday, January 5, 5 to 9 p.m.
Artist Reception:Friday, January 19, 5 to 8 p.m.
Raven Rohrig’s delicate mixed-media drawings, opening on First Friday at Niza Knoll Gallery, begin with intuitive markings, letting body curves or unfolding chrysalises emerge in simple line compositions. The artist says the finished studies represent coming out as nonbinary later in life.
The Wild Bunch
Memento Mori Gallery, 6451 West Colfax Avenue, Lakewood
January 5 through January 27
Opening Reception: Friday, January 5, 6 to 9 p.m.
The Western theme manifests again at Memento Mori in 40 West with The Wild Bunch, a show described by the gallery as “Western-adjacent.” And it is, from purple armadillos to classic bronze cowboys.
Coors Western Art Exhibit 2024
NWSS Expo Hall, third floor, National Western Complex, 4655 Humboldt Street
Saturday, January 6, through January 21: Sundays through Thursdays, 9 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.
The annual Coors Western Art Exhibit at the National Western Stock Show is your best bet for high-stakes artwork from some of the stars of the genre. That’s where you’ll see art that’s nostalgic or right up to date, focused on the landscape or iconic bison and spirited horses, or riding the range with the rest of the cowpokes. The gallery is open on the third floor of the Expo Hall throughout the Stock Show’s sixteen-day run and is free to visit with basic grounds admission, $17 to $25 ($5 for children three to eleven, two and under admitted free) here, or special-event tickets.
Sasha Novotny, Renaissance Kid
Deep Space Drive-In, 2240 Curtis Street
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 6, 5 to 9 p.m.; free, RSVP at Eventbrite
Sumigaw Ka Release Party: Saturday, January 13, 3 to 6 p.m.
Print Signing and Artist Panel Discussion: Saturday, January 20, 3 to 6 p.m.
Closing Reception: Saturday, January 27, 5 to 9 p.m.
Sasha Novotny, aka Sasha the Kid, is known for his contemporized paintings of Renaissance masterpieces, rendered in brightly colored minimal line drawings. But he’ll also introduce what he’s calling the Sumigaw Ka collection, a nod to his Filipino roots, on January 13, with additional events following on every Saturday in January.
Of Chaos and Order Collective: On the Edge of Transition
Curtis Center for the Arts, 2349 East Orchard Road, Greenwood Village
January 6 through February 24
Meet the Artists: Weekly on Saturdays, January 6 through February 24, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Reception: Saturday, January 13, 6 to 8 p.m.
Members of the Of Chaos and Order Art Collective strive toward experimentation with styles that differ from their tried and true. On the Edge of Transition explores the results, painted with a focus on the edges. Learn more from the artists on Saturdays throughout the show’s run.
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