Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits @ Denver Art Museum

Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits

Denver Art Museum

November 17, 2024 – May 11, 2025

DAWOUD BEY

A Young Man Resting on an Exercise Bike,

Amityville, NY, from the series Street Portraits, 1988 

Pigment print 

Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago 

© Dawoud Bey

DAWOUD BEY

A Couple in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, NY,

from the series Street Portraits, 1988 

Pigment print 

Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago 

© Dawoud Bey

The Denver Art Museum (DAM) presents Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits, featuring 37 portraits by celebrated photographer and 2017 MacArthur Fellow DAWOUD BEY (American, born 1953).

From 1988 to 1991, Dawoud Bey collaborated with Black Americans of all ages whom he met on the streets of various American cities. He asked a cross section of people in these communities to pose for him, creating a space of self-presentation and performance in their urban environments.

“We’re pleased to present the first standalone museum show of this important work,” said Eric Paddock, Curator of Photography for DAM. “Dawoud Bey’s Street Portraits mark a turning point where the deliberate, closely observed portraits he had been making with a handheld camera began to contain what he has called ‘the kind of lush physical description’ he wanted his pictures to convey—and that is a consistent part of all the work he has made since. The slower process of working with a camera on a tripod invited collaboration between the artist and his subjects, making each picture both an experiment and a discovery.”

Dawood Bey used a large format tripod-mounted camera and a unique positive/negative Polaroid film that created both an instant print and a reusable negative. Bey considers photography an ethical practice that requires collaboration between the artist and his subjects. To reciprocate with the people who posed for him, he gave each person a small black-and-white Polaroid print.

"This is the first standalone museum show of Bey’s Street Portraits," said Eric Paddock, Curator of Photography for the DAM. "Each picture is an experiment, a discovery that describes people and the places where they live. At the same time, these photos are attentive to the quality of light on a particular day and the way the artist orchestrates all those things through his camera. This was a transformational work that evolved through the 20 years of Dawoud’s signature photography."

The exhibition is organized by the community the photographs were made: Brooklyn; Washington, D.C.; Rochester; Amityville; and Harlem. Defying racial stereotypes, the resulting photographs reveal the Black subjects in all of their psychologically rich complexity, presenting themselves openly and intimately to the camera, the viewer, and the world.

DENVER ART MUSEUM

100 W. 14th Avenue Pkwy, Denver, CO 80204

denverartmuseum.org

Portals Exhibition @ Walker Fine Art, Denver - Featuring Melana Bontrager, Ana Zanic, Sharon Strasburg, Melanie Grein, Aaron Morgan Brown, Caprice Pierucci

PORTALS

Melana Bontrager, Ana Zanic, Sharon Strasburg, Melanie Grein, Aaron Morgan Brown, Caprice Pierucci

Walker Fine Art, Denver

May 17 - July 13,  2024

Art is a connecting link: it is bound to this reality, yet can transport us to new realms of experience and new ways of thinking. Art can quiet the mind, pull us into an intriguing narrative, elicit a sensory experience, or give us reprieve while finding emotional buoyancy. Suspending and perhaps even escaping time, these six artists featured in PORTALS offer a gateway to limitless exploration of time, place, and consciousness through painting, sculpture, watercolor, and printmaking. Walker Fine Art in Denver, Colorado, invites you to step inside a story, time travel, find solace, and fall into an immersive landscape, escaping the laws and regulations that govern our day to day lives.

In an orchestra of colors, MELANA BONTRAGER explores the tension and relationship between humans and history in her new series. Much like history, Bontrager includes layers of existence in her work. Man-made marks, ever-changing terrain, and fractions of new horizons, Bontrager offers us a lens into a landscape unbound by time, but rich with evidence of both the past and future.

SHARON STRASBURG’s sensuously colored and textured landscapes provide harmonious yet complex arrangements where eye and mind can roam in peaceful reverie - a place to meditate, to imagine, to dream. The luminosity and saturation of the colors, rhythm and movement in the juxtaposition of shapes suggest the natural world. Connections to a remembered place are left to the inventiveness of the viewer. 

MELANIE GREIN offers an alternative approach to landscape through space, line, color, and texture. Focused primarily on buoyancy, each piece of Grein’s new series sets forth a distinct upward force that resists and transcends the descending weight of worry that surrounds us at times. Seeking to highlight the meeting point between land and sky, sky  and water, and what that marriage produces ; her end result offers us moments of solace. 

AARON MORGAN BROWN’s new series invites his viewers inside alternate interior universes sewn together from his daily observations, memories, impressions of the world at large, cultural ephemera, and his imagination. His paintings act as prismatic lens through which Brown re-views reality and transcribes subconscious directives. This new series illuminates intersections of the seen and unseen.  

Through the quiet tension between the richness of colors and the delicacy of the medium of watercolor, ANA ZANIC seeks to expose the fragility and grace of nature’s realms - reefs - in her new series. Scattered moments of human existence trickle in through her intricate mark making and blend with textures of the natural world to create a harmonious pair.

Inspired by small moments in nature, earth erosion, cave formations, wind on desert sand, and fascinated by the concept of eternity and time, CAPRICE PIERUCCI’s work invites the viewer to look at the larger picture. Through the undulating rhythms in her organic sculptures, Pierucci seeks a sensorial experience for her viewers, to find those small moments of beauty and take time to reflect on the expansion of time behind its creation. 

WALKER FINE ART 

300 W. 11th Avenue #A, Denver, Colorado 80204 

www.walkerfineart.com

Noelle Phares, Chelsea Kajah: Tracking Time @ BMoCA, Boulder, CO - Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art

Noelle Phares, Chelsea Kajah 

Tracking Time

BMoCA, Boulder, CO

May 23 - September 2, 2024

Chelsea Kaiah 

Ndee (detail), 2024 

Leather, red mylar, leather glue, rope, wood frame 

Courtesy of the artist 

Noelle Phares 

This Fickle Bounty (detail), 2024 

Oil, acrylic, oil pastel, and colored pencil on wood panel 

Courtesy of the artist 

Tracking Time is a two-person exhibition featuring newly commissioned work by painter Noelle Phares and multi-disciplinary artist Chelsea Kaiah. The work on view situates two different interpretations of our evolving relationship to the natural world through the lenses of environmental studies and Native American cosmology, respectively. 

Anchored by seven personally relevant sites along the Colorado River, Noelle Phares translates the human impact on land and water in her signature painting style. Chelsea Kaiah employs recurring materials associated with her indigenous hunting practice, including animal hides and blue plastic tarps, to reinvent traditional Ute and Apache symbolism.

Each body of work serves as a map to help navigate the current conversation around our ecological crisis and as a reflection of our interrelated past, present, and future.

BMoCA - BOULDER MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART

1750 13th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80302

bmoca.org

Suzanne McClelland @ Marianne Boesky Gallery, Aspen - MUTE Paintings

Suzanne McClelland: MUTE

Marianne Boesky Gallery, Aspen

Through April 18, 2021

Marianne Boesky Gallery presents a selection of paintings from SUZANNE MCCLELLAND’s MUTE series.

Systems of communication and exchange are at the center of Suzanne McClelland’s practice. The artist explores the inherent interdependence between abstraction and representation as it appears in painting and the printed, written and spoken word. In large-scale canvases as well as collaborative books and prints, Suzanne McClelland has opened new avenues for painting, investigating its linguistic and acoustic dimensions and reflecting our broader cultural and political concerns. Built from visual as well as auditory observations of this world, her works underscore the ways in which language itself is gendered and politicized by its context and therefore naturally infused with social commentary.

Suzanne McClelland’s MUTE paintings disassemble language. The series comprises 26 paintings, one for each letter of the Latin alphabet. Rather than representing the letters as we see them, each painting in its own way mutes the elemental components of language, so much so that these letters dissolve or melt into the unutterable. McClelland liberates language from an existential bind: severing symbols from their function, she prevents their vocalization and articulation. They exist now as solitary devices, allowing them to return to their potentiality. The MUTE series deconstructs symbols and structures into abstractions that manifest an alternate alphabet, which in turn demands a new context to acquire legible meaning. The result is an expression of language that cannot be spoken or read, yet demands to be seen, felt, and understood as present.

In the process of painting this work, Suzanne McClelland engages with notions of control and doubt. The artist seizes on intuition as well as chance as powerful means of responding to systems of describing and naming, quantifying and predicting, categorizing and identifying. While their verticality is suggestive of portraiture, the abstracted compositions are formed by viscous spills: records of the pouring, staining, and hardening of pigments. The surfaces of these paintings – simultaneously sparkly, dusty, and inky – are encrusted with frozen sprays of glitter, charcoal, and dry pigments.

SUZANNE MCCLELLAND (b. Jacksonville, FL) has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad since the early 1990s. The artist has had solo presentations at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art (Philip Morris), the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, and the Orlando Museum of Art, among others. Suzanne McClelland participated in the 1993 and 2014 Whitney Biennials and her work has been presented in group exhibitions, such as those at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Wexner Center for the Arts, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art. The artist has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Anonymous Was A Woman Award, and a Nancy Graves Foundation Grant; and she has participated in international residencies, including most recently the Troedsson Villa Residency in Nikko, Japan and the Skowhegan School. Her work is held in numerous public collections including that of the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. The artist will have her first solo exhibition with Marianne Boesky Gallery in 2021. Suzanne McClelland lives and works between New York and the tip of Long Island, NY.

MARIANNE BOESKY GALLERY

100 South Spring Street, Aspen, CO 81611

marianneboeskygallery.com

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Anthony Pearson @ Marianne Boesky Gallery, Aspen

Anthony Pearson
Marianne Boesky Gallery, Aspen
June 28 - July 20, 2019

Marianne Boesky Gallery presents Los Angeles-based artist ANTHONY PEARSON’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, at its location in Aspen, Colorado. The exhibition features works from Anthony Pearson’s Embedments, Etched Plasters, and Tablets series, each of which capture his sensitivity to the experience of light, texture, and color. Pearson’s work is powerful in its quietude, revealing layers of complexity as one explores the surface, patterning, and material closely and from a range of perspectives and environments. Pearson’s work feels particularly at home in Aspen, where set against the rugged landscape and open expanses, his evocations of light and materiality are further amplified and affecting. 

The exhibition coincides with the release of the Anthony Pearson’s new monograph, featuring a substantive essay on the artist’s vision and approach, written by Alex Klein, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia’s Dorothy and Stephen R. Weber Curator, as well as a wide selection of images highlighting the range of his practice.

Anthony Pearson’s practice is fueled by a longstanding engagement with the dichotomies of lightness and darkness—first sparked by his early work as a photographer. His explorations manifest through a spectrum of processes with materials such as clay, bronze, and gypsum cement, which he develops methodically and contemplatively through time to yield a wide range of visual effects. His innate ability to capture the sensation of light emanating from deep within his materials positions him within the trajectory of California’s Light and Space Movement, which has concerned itself with the effects of form and light on viewer perception and experience.

Further underlying Anthony Pearson’s practice is an experimentation with physicality, which results in works that behave in instances as both sculpture and painting as well as both object and image. This interplay between formal vocabularies is particularly felt as one experiences and considers the progression of his distinct series, starting with the Tablets, which Anthony Pearson produced between 2010 and 2014. Abstract sculptural works that are affixed to the wall, the Tablets appear as soft organic forms folding onto themselves or as small bundles of volumetric cylinders. Handcrafted in clay, cast in bronze, and coated with cobalt and silver nitrate patina, the Tablets actively respond to their environment, absorbing and reflecting the light within the space. While their physicality positions them clearly within the trajectory of sculpture, their placement on the wall retains some suggestion of the experience of painting.

Anthony Pearson’s development of the Tablets series gave way to an extensive exploration of the formal possibilities of hydrocal, a gypsum cement, which continues to today. To create the Etched Plasters—the second of his hydrocal series—Anthony Pearson pours the material, mixed with colored pigment, into a frame and then uses a carbide knife and custom-made wood guides to make incisions into the surface. The finished pieces are distinguished by the intricate interplay of line and density, as the subtle and precise cuts stand in dynamic contrast to the solidity of the hyrocal. Here, Anthony Pearson’s work on the surface replicates the expression of paint on canvas or pencil on paper, while the material itself provides the dimensionality of sculpture—fusing the two media into a new kind of object. The incisions, which actively read as line drawings, are executed in rich, arabesque-ing patterns that evoke vibrant energy and fluid movement. As the mica-based pigments in the hydrocal catch the light, this sensation is heightened, and the lines take on the quality of rays of light or wisps of sand flowing through one’s fingers.                                                   

With his Embedments series, Anthony Pearson more fully embraces the language of free-form gesture, most often associated with painting. In this most recent series, Pearson pours the differently colored hydrocal in layers, into a mold backed by a stretched canvas. In instances, Pearson shifts the mold, while in others he allows the cement to settle organically. This action results in the creation of rich color fields that weave together to suggest abstract landscapes. In this way, the painterly gesture is inextricably tied to the physicality of the work itself, which is also emphasized by the textural impressions and traces of fiber filament left on the surface from the stretched canvas that is removed upon the material’s hardening. These actions shift Anthony Pearson’s work more directly into the space between object and image, with the formal qualities of painting and sculpture coalescing into a new whole. At the same time, these newest works retain their sense of light, as they allude to the setting sun and the desert and ocean views of California.

Anthony Pearson (b. 1969, Los Angeles) is well-known for his highly formalized and sensitive use of both process and materials. By experimenting with the formal limits of photography, where his practice originated, he found a visual vocabulary rooted in abstraction that explores the balances between positive and negative, lightness and darkness. He continues to investigate these dichotomies across a range of media. Anthony Pearson has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY (2018), David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2017), the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO (2012), and Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis, MN (2008), among numerous others. Group exhibitions include Tantric drawings: sites of transformation, Drawing Room, London, UK, and Peninsula Arts, Plymouth University, Plymouth, UK (2016-17); L.A. Exuberance: New Gifts by Artists, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2016-17); The Sun Placed in the Abyss, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH (2016); Variations: Conversations in and Around Abstract Paintings, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2014); second nature: abstract photography then and now, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA (2012); and The Anxiety of Photography, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO, and Arthouse at the Jones Center, Austin, TX (2011). Anthony Pearson lives and works in Los Angeles.

MARIANNE BOESKY GALLERY - ASPEN
100 South Spring Street, Aspen, CO 81611
www.marianneboeskygallery.com

Mark Grotjahn, Aspen Art Museum - A survey of paintings and drawings from the 1990s to now

Mark Grotjahn

A survey from the 1990s to now 

Aspen Art Museum, Aspen CO 

February 17 - April 29, 2012 

MARK GROTJAHN, Untitled (Red Face 773), 2007-08. 

Image courtesy of the artist. Photo: Douglas M. Parker Studio

A comprehensive survey of paintings and drawings by artist Mark Grotjahn dating from the late1990s to the present will be on view at the Aspen Art Museum (AAM). Mark Grotjahn makes conceptually grounded works that collide abstract and figurative elements to unsettle the conventions of each medium. By continuously combining these seemingly incompatible poles, as well as those of mimesis and expressionism, rational logic and intuitive process, Grotjahn stakes a claim for the continued vitality of abstraction and of painting itself. 

A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition, featuring texts by Aspen Art Museum CEO, Director, and Chief Curator Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson and distinguished critic Barry Schwabsky. 

AAM and Aspen Skiing Company Lift Ticket Project

For the 2011-2012 ski season in Aspen, Mark Grotjahn has also designed five limited-edition lift tickets that feature images of his exuberant mask sculptures. Four of the sculptures are on public display at the peaks of each of the Aspen Skiing Company’s four mountains, allowing skiers to make the connection between the images on their lift tickets and the actual artworks. The fifth sculpture will be on view at the Aspen Art Museum in conjunction with the exhibition. 

 MARK GROTJAHN 

2011-2012 Aspen Skiing Company Lift Ticket (1 of 5), 2011. 

Image courtesy of the artist and the Aspen Skiing Company 

MARK GROTJAHN was born in 1968 in Pasadena, California, and lives and works in Los Angeles. He has had one-person exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland; and the Portland Art Museum, Oregon.  

Aspen Art Museum admission is free courtesy of John and Amy Phelan 

AAM online: www.aspenartmuseum.org