Art Attack: Make agriCULTURE Your Summer Art Destination

There's no shortage of opportunities to get outside in this warm weather, even for art trekking, and this year that's exemplified by at least one exhibition with many destinations, including museums and farms. Meanwhile, there are big shows indoors, too.

It’s summer! Here’s where you'll find shows inside, outside and always artside:
agriCULTURE: Art inspired by the Land

Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA), 1750 13th Street, Boulder
Thursday, June 8, through October 1
Opening Reception: Thursday, June 8, 6 to 8 p.m.

Longmont Museum, 400 Quail Road, Longmont
Saturday, June 10, through January 7
Opening Reception: Friday, June 9, 4:30 to 8 p.m.

Off-site Installations:
Gravity Fed: Futurefarmers Procession
Sundays on the Farm: Barnyard Critter Day at the Agricultural Heritage Center
Sundays on the Farm at Ollin Farms
A map of installations is available here.

The collaborative exhibition series agriCULTURE: Art Inspired by the Land, by the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and the Longmont Museum, can’t be traversed in a day, or even a week. A project more than four years in the making, it spreads work by eighteen artists not only between the two museums, but to farms and agricultural ventures sprinkled around Boulder County, where on-site installations and projects have bloomed (find additional related events here).

Curated by a committee that includes lead curator Jaime Kopke, Jane Burke of BMoCA and Jared Thompson from the Longmont Museum, agriCulture could be your big summer project. The curators paired artists both local and national with farms to address the farm-to-table mindset or, more loosely, our relationship with the land and the food we eat — important stuff and worth the time. Longmont Museum admission is $5 to $8 (members and children age three and under get in free); at BMoCA, it’s $2, and free on Wednesdays and Saturdays during the Boulder Farmers Market.
The Big Draw Colorado, Main Gallery
Drawn: From the Source, in the Upper Gallery
Ramón Bonilla: The boundary lines have fallen in pleasant places for me, Theatre Gallery
Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, 6901 Wadsworth Boulevard, Arvada
Thursday, June 8, through August 27
Opening Reception: Thursday, June 8, 6 to 9 p.m.; RSVP here
Visual art often begins with an idea contained in a drawing or sketch, yet drawings themselves as complete artworks can be given short shrift. The Arvada Center is fighting back with The Big Draw Colorado, a massive love letter to the most basic of art forms, which is really the backbone of visual composition. Seventy-one Colorado artists were selected for the show, contributing everything from divinely simple studies of flora and faces to Trine Bumiller’s "Close Encounters," an installation of hundreds of drawings of the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. Two satellite shows — a solo by Ramón Bonilla, who is known for his architectural geometrics, and a group exhibition by seven artists concerned with representational views — round out the Center’s summer art spectacular.
Biome 006: Elle Hong: Dancing With the Camera
Grasslands, 100 Santa Fe Drive
Thursday, June 8, 6:30 p.m.
Space limited; to RSVP, email your name (and current favorite song) to [email protected]
The Denver biennial Biome keeps the home fires burning with exhibitions that include artist workshops led by biennial artists. Elle Hong, a queer interdisciplinary artist who prefers calling it “antidisciplinary,” is facile in dance, performance and new media, and will share her skills in a Dancing With the Camera workshop. Hong will begin by recapping the biennial performance before teaching basic movement techniques to use while dancing through Grasslands using green-screen technology to capture movements in video. Want to try? Email Biome to save a spot.

Denver Digerati, Reality Shift
Evans School, 1115 Acoma Street, room 325
Thursday, June 8, 6 to 8 p.m.
Under the leadership of Sharifa Lafon, Denver Digerati is extending its reach beyond the annual digital animation festival formerly known as Supernova (now the Digerati Emergent Media Festival, coming this September) to present smaller screenings of digital motion art on a local level. Reality Shift is a showcase of student work from the University of Denver’s Emergent Digital Practices Program, giving audiences a view of the medium’s stars-to-be. It’s a brave new world.
Vibrant Accessibility
Tales in Textiles: Mid-Century Style
McNichols Building, 144 West Colfax Avenue
Thursday, June 8, through August 27
Opening Reception: Friday, June 16, 4 to 7 p.m.

Denver Arts & Venues Cultural Runway Series: FashionAbility: Saturday, July 29, 7 p.m.
The McNichols Building gets set for summer with two shows this week. Vibrant Accessibility explores the world and work of visually impaired artists who beat the odds by using accommodating tools and techniques. Texan John Bramblitt, a blind artist who lost his sight as an adult, relies on haptic visualization, using touch to guide his brush along raised lines on the surface, while the legally blind Denver collagist Chloé Duplessis uses digital techniques and sensory materials. Boulder artist Melanie Walker, who teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder, is legally blind in one eye and has double vision, but grew up with cameras at the side of her father, photographer Todd Walker, so she is comfortable with the medium. She also uses haptic techniques that include applying photo negatives to fabric and building sculptural works or hanging banners, some in a postmortem collaboration with her father’s work.

Tales in Textiles: Mid-Century Style delves into the influence of modern artists such as Alexander Calder and Joan Miró on mid-century fabric design, and will be displayed in a runway component on July 29 by the Denver Arts & Venues Cultural Runway Series: FashionAbility.
James-Allan Holmes, Here to Love
Ashton Lacy Jones, In Pursuit of Curiosity
Barbara DeMarlie, 3 Years of Painting, in the East Gallery
D’art Gallery, 900 Santa Fe Drive
Thursday, June 8, through July 2
Opening Reception: Friday, June 9, 6 to 9 p.m.
Abstract painter James Holmes completes a trilogy of exhibitions at D’art with Here to Love, the cap to Lifelines and Origins. All three explore free expression; Holmes says he picks a color palette and just goes with it. He’s joined by encaustic painter Ashton Lacy Jones, who brings a similar free spirit to her abstract works, which are as delicate as Holmes’s are bold, with subtle mark-making and emerging shapes.
Wendi Schneider, Finding Grace Artist Talk and Tour
Buell Theatre, Denver Performing Arts Complex
Friday, June 9, noon
Photographer Wendi Schneider, whose show Finding Grace opened in the Buell lobby at the tail end of Month of Photography, will chat with Denver Arts & Venues exhibition curator Shanna Shelby Friday about the show, which covers Schneider’s work across decades. Known for tranquil imagery from nature, often gilded with metallics for a transcendent effect, Schneider’s oeuvre is like a walk through the primeval forest.
Potluck: Muse’s Choice: New works by Valerie Savarie
Balefire Goods, 7513 Grandview Avenue, Arvada
Friday, June 9, through July 8
Opening Reception: Friday, June 9, 5 to 7 p.m.
Valerie Savarie’s painstakingly carved book sculptures, which dig into the depths of an old book’s pages, commonly sport bold themes from stories and lore, but — as we are about to see — sometimes they don’t. Though she says they’ve mostly ended up “lost in my sketchbooks,” Potluck: Muse’s Choice comprises the fruition of some of her unfinished ideas.
Code Blue: The Ocean
Niza Knoll Gallery, 915 Santa Fe Drive
Friday, June 9, through August 12
Meet the Artists Reception: Friday, June 16, 5 to 8 p.m.
Conversation and stories about coral reefs by “Coral Crusader” Shari Regenbogen Ross: Sunday, August 6, 2 to 3 p.m.
The new show at Niza Knoll Gallery dives into the sea for inspiration, running in conjunction with National Ocean Month in the U.S. and World Ocean Day to showcase the dead-serious cause of ocean conservation. Seven artists explore the ocean blue for the exhibition, capturing imagery reflecting the interaction of light and water, natural flora and fauna, and the colors and forms of coral reefs.
Layl McDill, Mary Robinson and Andrea Alonge, Crafted: Subverting the Frame
Firehouse Art Center, 667 Fourth Avenue, Longmont
Saturday, June 10, through July 23
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 10, 6 to 8 p.m.
Fine craft is very much an art, regardless of what we call it, requiring the same level of mastery of medium and technique, a sense of image and design, and a reason to be. Crafted: Subverting the Frame means just that: The final product is freed from the square, often taking wild, outrageous and gorgeous shapes. Artists Layl McDill, Mary Robinson and Andrea Alonge use mediums both mundane and miraculous: McDill favors the polymer clay we play with as children, Robinson goes through the trash for inspiration, and Alonge makes tapestries woven from materials both traditional and purely plastic.
Vanessa Lemen, Bloom
Ryan Joseph Gallery, 2647 West 38th Avenue
Saturday, June 10, through July 12
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 10, from 5 to 11 p.m.
Vanessa Lemen, a deft fantasy painter who makes her solo debut in Denver with Bloom, brings figures to life with her paintbrush, swirling between dimensions in subtle earthy and metallic colors.

Highlands Art Festival
Highland Masonic Lodge, 3550 Federal Boulevard
Saturday, June 10, and Sunday, June 11, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
The brand-new Highlands Art Festival comes to you from Colorado Art Weekend, the same folks who handle the Park Hill version, bringing a similar ambience and quality of art to the table, on the lawn of the Highlands Masonic Lodge. It’s free to browse, has a kids’ art tent and, each day, a draw for a $1,000 art festival shopping spree.

Douglas Land Conservancy Plein Air Community Day
Sandstone Ranch Open Space, 8309 South Perry Park Road, Larkspur
Saturday, June 10, 7 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
$10 to $20, and $40 family at Eventbrite
The Douglas Land Conservancy Plein Air Community Day might be the most egalitarian event of its kind in Colorado, welcoming people of all ages and skill levels to come enjoy nature with paintbrushes in hand. Entry into the private side of Sandstone Ranch Open Space in Larkspur is part of the deal. Painters are free to use watercolor, colored pencils, acrylic, oil, pen and ink, pastel, finger painting or any other art medium they like, but your time in the space is also open to hikes, picnics and other recreational pastimes. Finished works must be turned in by 3 p.m. for judging; awards will be given out at 4 p.m., and up to thirty paintings will be selected for a future sale.

Second Saturday Art Walks
Historic Westminster Art District, from Lowell Boulevard to Bradburn Boulevard on 73rd Avenue, and Lowell Boulevard, between 72nd and 73rd avenues
Saturday, June 10, noon to 5 p.m.
The Historic Westminster Art District spans just a few blocks of the 73rd Avenue corridor, centering around the Aar River Gallery at 3707 West 73rd Avenue, Westminster, but in some ways, it’s like a lengthier trip back in time. Be sure to begin or end your journey at Aar River, home to work by thirty or more local artists in a variety of mediums, sizes, prices and styles, as well as an outside flower garden, patio and sculpture garden. The art walks continue monthly through September 10.
Ansel Adams: Early Works
Justin Favela: Vistas in Color
Freyer-Newman Center, Denver Botanic Gardens, 1007 York Street
Sunday, June 11, through October 1
Two new shows that couldn’t be more different are opening at the Denver Botanic Gardens Freyer-Newman Center galleries. Ansel Adams: Early Works, a collection of 35 vintage gelatin silver prints from a period spanning the ’20s to the ’50s, includes some of Adams’s iconic images of Yosemite National Park and other views of the American West. Justin Favela’s Vistas in Color, on the other hand, will put a smile on your face and increase your appreciation for the Latinx culture of the Southwest. Favela’s oeuvre is wrapped up in tissue paper rectangles like a piñata: The artist re-creates the paintings of Mexican artist José María Velasco using the inexpensive medium, and will be covering the gallery walls with a floor-to-ceiling piñata-paper mural. Both exhibitions come with activities, from tours to hands-on workshops; check the DBG website for information.

Interested in having your event appear in this calendar? Send the details to [email protected].