The concurrent exhibitions delecTABLE: The Fine Art of Dining and Food-tography at the Art Students League of Denver (ASLD) serve up an abundant selection of punchy photographs and finely crafted ceramic tableware to remind us that enjoying a meal is one of Earth’s greatest delights. Natural cycles and organic shapes appear throughout, balanced by playful pops of colorful work. 

Peeking out behind the government gray walkways of the Wellington Webb Municipal Building, you’ll find Donald Lipski’s tool galaxy. The public art installation, simply titled Tools, spans the height of a sixty-foot limestone wall. Site-specificity reaches a pinnacle in this piece, as the building houses the offices, departments, and services that run the City and County of Denver.

Anna Tsouhlarakis’s text installation YOUR REFUSAL TO SEE: A Native Guide Project at East Window directly confronts the internalized racism of the people she’s encountered in Boulder. Her exhibition reveals that beneath all the liberal policies and personas lies a willful ignorance of Indigenous identities and histories, as well as an intentional upholding of white supremacy. Bold blocks of text glow on the wall like punchy billboards signaling for a collectively informed awakening.

The United States government has proven time and again that it values economic power over human and environmental health. Each passing decade reveals more scorched earth, resources depleted for temporary gains, and tens of thousands of innocent civilians killed in war. Each week another hidden agenda comes to light too late. They enact these histories on a loop—new actors, same destructive decisions. A Thousand Beautiful Lies, organized by The Center for Fine Art Photography at the Center for Creativity in Fort Collins, grapples with this reality in the context of the Atomic Age and the nuclear contamination that still continues to plague communities to this day.

A walk through Nick Ryan Gallery’s current exhibition, Shapespeak, evokes an abstracted American landscape filled with deserted strip malls, fragmented urban life, and flickering nocturnal visions. Ky Anderson, Emilio Lobato, Andy Ryan, and Courtney Sennish each utilize their own combination of highly specific colors and textures to illuminate the layered complexity of humans’ relationship to our environment, both built and natural. 

The artists in the group exhibition X.v, celebrating the tenth anniversary of Michael Warren Contemporary in Denver, have tapped into an elemental energy to create works of spirited material exploration. Grounded in process-led practices, they traverse the range of physical realities, from scorched paper to powder coated steel.

Celestial inspiration encounters geometric precision in the Gio Ponti exhibition, Designer of a Thousand Talents, at the Denver Art Museum. Spanning a liminal, light-filled space between the more formal galleries in the redesigned Martin Building, the collection of architectural drafts and interior objects display a small but enticing sampling of Ponti’s prolific oeuvre. The Italian designer collaborated with master artisans throughout his career to elevate raw materials into imaginative, functional works.

In his latest exhibition at The History Colorado Center, Virgil Ortiz travels through time using the spiritually loaded medium of clay. Revolt 1680/2180: Runners + Gliders offers materially and politically rich insights into Puebloan history. In collaboration with the museum, the genre-bending artist challenges the public to reconsider history not just as a concrete timeline of events but as a porous exchange between people throughout the past, present, and future. Ortiz forges a path where ancestral stories and newly invented narratives can shape the course of lived realities.

Migiwa Orimo’s quietly radical exhibition ]MARGINS[, at Mariani Gallery on the campus of the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, maps out space for the overlooked aspects of life, revealing the poignant significance of untold narratives. She pieces together society’s marginalia to dismantle commonly perceived hierarchies of value. Orimo’s materials include fabric, thread, and paper, but she also uses the spaces between spoken words, fragments of ephemera, and forgotten histories to communicate unspeakable emotions.

If you too have grown weary of the painters who play uninspired poker with Pantone color chips, then Frank Martinez’s collection of paintings at Space Gallery might shine some light onto your winter blues. Modern Love glows with a playful curiosity about life’s colorful offerings. 

In collaboration with Nicole Banowetz, Access Gallery artists DILLPhoenix, Heather H., Jareth J. Charles, and Skylar K. have created an installation of soft sculptures brimming with textural delight and dynamic colors. Abstract fiber forms inspired by a variety of natural organisms activate the entire space from floor to ceiling. Alongside the installation titled It’s a Wrap, two community projects offer generative tactile experiences as outlets for people who have been affected by bullying.