Art Attack: All the Shows, Old and New, to See in Denver This Week

Art Attack took a travel break last week, leaving a bumper crop of new shows in the cold. A few worth seeing, if you haven’t already, include Floyd Tunson: Hearts and Minds in Colorado Springs, through July 9; Culture of Hair, Colorado Photographic Arts Center, through June 25; Lauri Lynnxe Murphy, Ill-Fitting, Bardo Coffee House, through June 30; Casting Currents, Walker Fine Art, through July 16; AURA, Union Hall Gallery, through July 9; CHNK and Chris Haven, Phone Eats First, ILA Gallery, through June 5; new co-op shows at Core New Art Space, Next Gallery and Edge Gallery; and Jonathan Saiz and Mychaelyn Michalec, K Contemporary, through June 25.

And now on to this week: Some shows require a bit of travel, others are close to home, more co-op shows are opening, and some last chances will pass soon. Time to hit the trail.

Belgin Yucelen, Praise of Uncertainty
Art Gym Gallery, 1460 Leyden Street
Thursday, May 19, through June 19
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 19, 6 to 9 p.m.
Boulder artist Belgin Yucelen defects to Denver’s Art Gym Gallery to unfold narratives held together not by weighty substance and clean finales, but by space, silence and open-ended conclusions in the nine-painting series Praise of Certainty, like a collective art haiku or visual map of a cool Miles Davis solo. These dreamy scraps continue in Yucelen’s short film, Borrowed Stories, inspired by scenarios half seen through clouded windows. See both when the exhibition opens on Thursday, May 19.

Bill Ballas, New Pieces: Paintings and Collages
Gary Manuel, sculpture
Robert St. John, The Room of Angels, in the North Gallery
Spark Gallery, 900 Santa Fe Drive
Thursday, May 19, through June 12
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 21, noon to 5 p.m.
Last Look: Sunday, June 12, 1 to 4 p.m.
Spark has paired members Bill Ballas, who shares recent abstract paintings and sculptural collages incorporating wood, metal and found objects, with Gary Manuel, whose wood and metal sculpture prototypes fit right in. In the North Gallery, photographer Robert St. John’s The Room of Angels, an installation focused on ghost figures, sets a mood in sympathy with the world’s immigrant populations, living suspended in a place that’s neither here nor there.

Jean Herman and Taylor Coble, Discoveries
Sync Gallery, 931 Santa Fe Drive
Thursday, May 19, through June 12
Opening Reception: Friday, May 20, 6 to 9 p.m.
Sync Gallery’s Jean Herman combines paint, collage and stitchery into lush, textural landscapes, portraits and figures, while fellow member and photographer Taylor Coble captures figures and portraits in motion, with a painterly eye.

inVISIBLE | hyperVISIBLE
Dairy Arts Center, 2590 Walnut Street, Boulder
Friday, May 20, through July 16
Artist Talk: Friday, May 20, 4:30 to 5:30 p.m.
Opening Reception: Friday, May 20, 5 to 8 p.m.
inVISIBLE | hyperVISIBLE, first seen in Denver last fall at RedLine, returns to the area in an expanded version with new work by five Boulder-based artists at the Dairy Arts Center. The exhibition openly examines stereotyping and intolerance toward Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) through the eyes of fifteen artists, scholars, performers and community organizers from different cultural backgrounds. An artist talk preceding Friday’s reception includes a panel of local artists Erin Hyunhee Kang, Sammy Lee, Renluka Maharaj, Liz Quan, Chinn Wang and Thomas Yi. The Island, a short film by Tuan Andrew Nguyen about Pulao Bidong, an island off the Malaysian coast that served as a camp for 250,000 Vietnamese refugees from 1978 to 1991, will also screen twice during the show’s run, on May 29 and June 5.

Robert Hyatt and Paul Corbitt, Specimens of Abstraction
Foothills Art Center, 809 15th Street, Golden
Friday, May 20, through June 6
Meet the Artists: Saturday, May 21, 2 to 5 p.m.
Denverite Robert Hyatt might be the son of Beat hero Neal Cassady, but he’s also an artist, lately working on the next stage for some colorful polyresin castings he made in 1980. To complete the process, Hyatt’s friend, photographer Paul Corbitt, was needed to enable the final touches. For Specimens of Abstraction, on view for a short run beginning Friday in the Foothills Community Gallery, the candy-colored polyresin shapes have now been captured up close by Corbitt, using a macro-lens. The collection of resulting photos is up on the walls (and on wide-screen TV) only through June 6.

Julie Jablonski, Cabaret Voltaire
Tom Mazzullo, Sometimes I Draw Birds
Ella Srholez, guest artist
Pirate: Contemporary Art, 7130 West 16th Avenue, Lakewood
Friday, May 20, through June 5
Opening Reception: Friday, May 20, 6 to 9 p.m.
There’s a new load of art up at Pirate from members Julie Jablonski and Tom Mazzullo, with extra looks from guest artist Ella Srholez, a young artist, TEDx speaker and polymath creative from the Eagle Valley. Jablonski, inspired by the legacy of the short-lived WWI-era Dada club Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, re-creates the mood of the European art world more than 100 years ago, while Mazzullo experiments in silverpoint with a lovely series of avian portraits.

Nature. Nurture. Structure. Art Night.
D’art Gallery, 900 Santa Fe Drive
Opening Reception: Friday, May 20, 6-9 p.m.
Artist Talk: Saturday, May 21, 1 to 2 p.m.
Join spouses Carrie MaKenna, a painter, and Craig Rouse, a graphic designer, in the middle of their joint exhibition for an artist talk and second look at their contrasting styles. The show, Nature. Nurture. Structure., runs through May 29.

Due to weather predictions, the Storeroom’s event cited below has been postponed to Wednesday, May 25, at 7:30 p.m.

Esther Hz, “Tired Iron Slump Dump,” closing performance
The Storeroom, 1700 Vine Street
Friday, May 20, 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., postponed
The always inventive artist and performer Esther Hz’s picture-window installation “Tired Iron Slump Dump,” is interesting on its own, but you haven’t really seen it unless its been in motion, grinding through the unending toil of a mechanized world, generating a tedium as powerful as living through two years of lockdown. See it while you can. The show remains on view through the end of the month, but this is the last live performance.

in one space.
Center for the Arts Evergreen, 31880 Rocky Village Drive, Evergreen
Friday, May 20, through June 25
Opening Reception/Artist Q&A: Friday, May 20, 4 to 7 p.m.
The show in one space is a study in process and aesthetics as practiced by artists in four different mediums. Compare and contrast the work of Pam Caidin (jewelry), Judith Eastburn (photography), Erica Iman (ceramics) and artist/curator Michele Renée Ledoux (encaustic painting).

Trail Song
A.R. Mitchell Museum of Western Art, 150 East Main Street, Trinidad
Opening Reception: Friday, May 20, 6 to 8 p.m.
Max Kauffman picked up roots in Denver a year ago for Walsenburg in Huerfano County, taking a blend of urban art to the working-class town, which recently became part of the new La Veta Creative District. Now he’s raising awareness of those contemporary influences by curating Trail Song, a modern show with an Old West title, for the A.R. Mitchell Museum of Western Art in Trinidad, with art by a collection of younger Colorado- and New Mexico-based artists, including Jaime Molina, Johnny DeFeo, Alexander Richard Wilson, Johanna Mueller, Mike Strescino and Anthony Garcia Sr. 

Ben Kinsley Tree Talk: Spring
Kenosha Pass, Highway 285, Colorado Trail Section #6 Trailhead, near Fairplay
Saturday, May 21, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Free, RSVP online in advance at Eventbrite
Ben Kinsley’s year-long Tree Talks: Populus tremuloides art project, which studies the quaking aspen tree through each season, continues with the spring edition in an aspen grove off Kenosha Pass. Join Kinsley and his curated roster of speakers — installation artist De Lane Bredvik, Forest Therapy Guide Jaime Kopke and artist/Oglala Lakota activist Walt Pourier — for a discussion with a multi-disciplinary reach.

Julie Anna Lewis
Masters Gallery, 2616 East Third Avenue
Saturday, May 21, noon to 5 p.m.
Master Gallery artist Julie Anna Lewis, who creates romantic mixed-media portraits of women and other imagery, layered with fine script or music scores, will be painting live in the gallery this weekend.

Steven Yazzie, Gold King
The Yard, Coordinates: 38.847596,-104.799216, Divine Redeemer neighborhood, Colorado Springs
Sunday, May 22, through September 4
The aforementioned Ben Kinsley and his partner, Jessica Langley, reopen their Colorado Springs front-yard gallery, aka The Yard, to the public Sunday for a summer installation by Steven Yazzie, who is installing a sign reading “Reality Group, Land & Resource Speculation; Gold King & Associates.” If curious lookers-on try calling the number on the sign, they’ll encounter not a sales pitch, but a sixty-second reading from an unknown person who shares a poem, quote or excerpt from a story, book or related source conveying environmental concerns related to urban development and the scarcity of resources. We call that the human touch.

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