Colorado has a wizard, and his name is Lonnie Hanzon. The artist and storyteller has bewitched audiences via storefronts and interactive experiences since 1980, and he now dons his sorcerer’s cap to revamp Cabinet of Curiosities and Impossibilities at the Museum of Outdoor Art’s (MOA) Greenwood Village headquarters, alchemizing fable into history and oddity into treasure.

In her series Woven and Book of Miracles, on view in the exhibition Laws of Nature at the Denver Botanic Gardens’ Freyer-Newman Center until March 31, 2024, Tanya Marcuse lauds earth’s fertile excess in meticulous natures mortes, weaving life and death together in velvet-hued ritual. The artist has venerated nature’s transience since at least 2005, when she began photographing fruit trees and their offerings.

Aging Bodies, Myths and Heroines, a group show at East Window Gallery in Boulder, on view through February 28, considers the space in between these tropes. Curator and gallery owner Todd Edward Herman has gathered “a small selection of playful, critical, and tender images made by and about elder artists” to shift perceptions from “the ‘pornography of old age’ within consumer culture” towards lived experience. The resulting exhibition is heartfelt and substantive, even humorous, and successfully considers aging’s realities without devolving into pity or romanticization.

Orisons perforates a now vacant central-pivot irrigation and former cattle field. The fallow plot is labeled “unfarmable” on the artwork website but it’s one of many parcels in North America’s highest, and the world’s largest, alpine valley that may produce crops in the right circumstances. The region’s endorheic (closed) basin is critical for retaining water and equilibrating via evaporation. Deep wells have so far sustained agriculture. But twenty-three years of climate change-induced aridification and megadrought worsened by over-pumped aquifers and invariant farming have left this region dry and sere. It is from this narrative that Humeau builds Orisons.

Last Chance Module Array (2015-2016), iterations four and five in M12 Studio’s Prairie Module series created with Onix Architects from Groningen, the Netherlands, stands halfway between Denver and the Kansas state border as a lone, contemporary monument.

On view through July 2 at Lane Meyer Projects in Denver, High Strangeness features eight paintings by Littleton, Colorado-born and -based artist Mark Farrell that are gleefully sinister and ominously playful. Farrell’s works are ideal for the room in which they are featured. The exhibition evokes a corresponding impishness to RiNo’s PoN pOn art bar—through which visitors must walk to reach the project space—while indulging in macabre spectacles that parody cultural façades. But Farrell does more than blur the line between “classic horror and the suburban mundane,” producing multi-layered scenes that delight in the true comedic horror of living in the twenty-first century: life itself.

The Everyday and Everyday Objects Recontextualized at fooLPRoof Contemporary Art Gallery is a soft offering that will cushion the discordant shift from summer into fall. Led by gallery owner and artist Laura Phelps Rogers and true to its title, the large group exhibition edifies the commonplace through a medley of color, contour, and craft. Grounded in a loose thematic interpretation of “the everyday” over any single aesthetic, the fooLPRoof show leaves the “recontextualizing” to the viewer and rewards those who stop in to look.

During his architectural master’s program at Gdańsk University of Technology, Polish artist Krzysztof Syruć learned that most artists create “the same painting” over and over again. Vexed by this notion, Syruć—who also goes by the graffiti name PROEMBRION, and who had already developed a compelling visual language in that medium—determined to uncover and construct new, anomalous forms. His pursuit of generative abstraction is now assembled in a stunning solo exhibition at Ryan Joseph Gallery titled Adimensionalities, on view through October 12.

Denver has hosted three shows about Malinalli this year, and it’s been instructive to view them in conversation. But the final show to close—and perhaps the most visionary—is Malinalli on the Rocks at Museo de las Americas, curated by Maruca Salazar, the museum’s former executive director. In a deliberate move to amplify new aesthetics for Malinalli’s 500-year legacy as the “Mother of Mexico,” Salazar assembles eleven other Chicanx and Latinx artists for a regenerative exhibit that requires everyone to “choose sides.”

Around 1503-1507, a Nahua girl later known by various names—Malina, Malinalli Tenépatl, Doña Marina, Malintzin, La Malinche—was born on Mexico’s Gulf coast. Malinche was a principal, if overlooked actor during this period, garnering a complicated, yet impassioned heritage of criticism and admiration as both a traitor and “the mother of Mexico.” Traitor, Survivor, Icon: The Legacy of La Malinche at the Denver Art Museum is the first ever comprehensive art exhibition examining Malinche’s significance.

The Fantasy Show is a group exhibition of eleven participants, on view through December 17. Six “Design and Build Emerging Artists” join five 2021 Artists in Residence in a curious blend of styles and materials under a generalized “fantasy” theme. By inviting viewers to reignite their relationship with play, The Fantasy Show asserts that great art depends upon good make believe. Moreover, the works demonstrate that art is a playground to indulge the senses, a medium to contact our inner children, and a carte blanche to imagine the world we want, even as we try to escape the one we don’t.

Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Art's exhibition New Year / New View, presented by Deputy Curator Christopher Herron and scheduled to be on display until March 14, 2021, is a study in novelty. The show highlights recent additions to their Colorado and regional art collection and signals a museum-wide reset after the crises of 2020. Showcasing 33 never-before-seen works by 31 artists and spanning the years 1918 to 2016, New Year / New View is also the first exhibition in the museum’s history to present new acquisitions. Nine of the artists on display have never been shown at Kirkland before this year.

This group exhibition, currently on view at Artworks Center for Contemporary Art in Loveland until July 31, features work by Tiffany Danielle Elliott, May Kytonen, Cicelia Ross-Gotta, and Connor Walden. By coupling textiles with technology, Interfacing With Missed Connections brings tangibility back to our increasingly digital interactions. Most notably, the exhibition reminds viewers that human contact is thickly layered with meaning and identity, and that we inevitably work through the histories of our own missed connections in all of our most vulnerable communications.

In The Late Works: Clyfford Still in Maryland, on view at the Clyfford Still Museum (CSM) now through March 21, 2021, curator Dean Sobel examines Clyfford Still’s rich and experimental period after his hallmark Abstract Expressionist era. Bookended by Still’s removal from New York to Maryland in 1961 and his death in 1980, six of the museum’s nine upper level galleries survey the artist’s his restless pursuit of artistic and individual truth in his last two decades. The exhibition’s approximately 40 paintings and 30 works on paper cohere into a brief but provoking treatise on the value of the artist’s prolific time in Maryland. Consequently, Sobel asserts that Still’s late works ought to be considered some of his best.

Anticipating flight as I slipped through the door of the Firehouse Art Center in Longmont, Colorado, I half-expected to catch artist Jen Rose’s work in mid-air. Instead, I found myself happily sunk into a colorful, more subaquatic dreamworld. Flight of the Polychromatic Zooids, on view at Firehouse until February 7, is Rose’s solo, one-piece exhibition curated by Brandy Coons and inspired by marine colonies. Yet unlike the images of departure or frenzy conjured by the title’s noun “flight,” the Dallas, Texas-based artist’s sculptural installation settles the viewer, drawing them not up into the air, but down into the calming depths of the sea.

Sculptor and painter Julie Maren wants to know what we’re making of it all. Prompted in large part by the COVID-19 pandemic, this year’s onslaught of socio-political upheaval has taught us about our fears, vices, loyalties, and internalized systems. In Covidia, a small but whimsical exhibition at Bricolage Gallery, on view inside Boulder’s Art Parts Creative Reuse Center until November 21, Maren explores another lesson of 2020: that is, our deeply human impulse to continue creating, no matter the crisis at hand.