This year’s All Colorado Show is 2024 Fiber Art Colorado, juried by Cecily Cullen, the Director and Curator of Metropolitan State University’s Center for Visual Art. Bringing together 75 artworks by 49 artists from across the state — some of whom are members of the guild — the show quite literally fills the entire exhibition space, spanning three rooms with weavings, sculptural pieces, clothing, and more. 

I belong in a museum: Colorado Women Artist Museum Members Exhibition, Part 1, currently on show in D’art Gallery East, is the museum’s third exhibition since its formation in August of 2023. Curated by Carrie MaKenna, Rebecca Gabriel, and Carlene Frances, the exhibition features work by over 20 artist members of the museum ranging in medium, style, and theme.

Mychaelyn Michalec’s first major solo exhibition at K Contemporary showcases new directions and experiments in her fiber paintings. Trying to get all my birds to land in the yard is made up of shifting organic forms and allegorical, collaged compositions. With these new works, the artist examines the cultural and historical uses of avian symbolism to articulate womanhood, domestic life, and freedom.

“My body is my home,” writes Boulder-based artist Tanja London in her statement for HOME: A Photographic Journey into Identity, Place, and Belonging, the current exhibition at Lafayette’s The Collective Community Arts Center. “I am embodied within a vast network of beings, places, and timelines. What goes around—comes around.” London’s words demonstrate how broad and encompassing the notion of “home” really is in this exhibition—it is objects, landscapes, people, memories, and more. Composed of photographs selected by the City of Lafayette’s Arts & Cultural Resources Department from an open call for art in which Colorado-based artists were invited to submit three works showing “‘who is home,’ ‘what is home,’ and ‘where is home,’” the show tackles the contrarian notions of home as both universal and specific; elastic and concrete.

As someone drawn to kitsch, I was immediately excited by the theme of Memento Mori Gallery and Tattoo’s current exhibition Draped in Velvet, which features artworks by eleven artists experimenting with velvet as material and as canvas. Through a sense of wit and its showcasing of technical dexterity, Draped in Velvet looks towards the wider possibilities available within velvet painting, challenging its characterization as cheap souvenir art while celebrating its distinctive aesthetic qualities.

The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA) has kicked off their fall season with three exciting new exhibitions: Kevin Hoth and George Perez: Plane of Action, Kristopher Wright: Just As I Am, and Erin Hyunhee Kang: A Home In Between. These shows are all connected by the artists’ impulse to push the potential of photography as form and medium through distinctive methods and processes. The result is a wonderfully multifaceted program in which the simultaneous harmony and particularities within the three exhibitions expand photography practices and create a cathartic interplay between themes of transforming the mundane, destruction, (re)construction, memory, healing, and hope.

“Vessel” at the Dairy Arts Center in Boulder is a substantial show encompassing the work of 19 contemporary artists. It allows the works themselves to assert the meaning of the show’s namesake, without the need for hefty historical analysis. The focus lies on what each artist offers up with “vessels” featuring their own distinctive layers of contextuality, referentiality, and significance.

Featuring the work of nine contemporary Japanese artists—Hina Aoyama, Eriko Horiki, Kyoko Ibe, Yoshio Ikezaki, Kakuko Ishii, Yuko Kimura, Yuko Nishimura, Takaaki Tanaka, and Ayomi Yoshida—the exhibition Washi Transformed at the Longmont Museum unifies the artists’ diverse practices through an exploration of their shared use of the ancient medium of washi (和紙), handmade Japanese paper. The result is a show both distinctly focused and wonderfully abundant in unique expressions created through the artists’ contemporary aesthetic interventions.

Transcendent Glitch—the title for Art Gym Gallery’s fifth iteration of the Impressed national printmaking exhibit—sets an interesting tone for the show. Referring to an extraordinary error, it’s a surprising description for a juried exhibition featuring works of impressive technical skill from 27 different artists. Further, the term “glitch” connotes flaws in both the digital and electronic realms.

Encompassing 25 individual works and one large installation, Sinners, Saints & Fools—the exhibition currently illuminating the main gallery space of Valkarie Gallery—is the largest solo show of artist Maria Valentina Sheets’s stained glass art to date. The impressive display demonstrates her deep knowledge and appreciation for the material and the traditions of the genre. However, it also captures her impulse to experiment and expand the potential of the medium. Through a combination of complex portraiture and contemporary parables with not so simple answers, Sheets works to bridge the divide between the binaries of timely and timeless and worldly and unworldly, all while renegotiating social and cultural consecration.

Movable Medley, the current exhibition at Art Students League of Denver (ASLD), challenges our understanding of books as merely functional vehicles for text. Made up of 29 artworks by 26 artists, the exhibit encourages visitors to deliberate over how the artists unravel and reimagine the mechanics of storytelling, the concept of books as objects, and the interwoven nature of literary and visual art.

As Jess T. Dugan (they/them/theirs) describes in their statement for the exhibition Inward—which they curated as part of the Critic and Artist Residency Series (C.A.R.S.) Online program hosted by CSU’s Gregory Allicar Museum of Art—introspective time spent unpacking the differences between intimacy and isolation has defined this last year. Dugan performs this personal process in a public manner by curating themselves as both an artist and a subject alongside other works in the Allicar Museum’s collection. The results expose how this past year’s mediated relationality has underscored the complexities of seeing and being seen.