Art Attack: Revisit Christo’s Valley Curtain, Brush on Frank Lloyd Wright and See Art in Suburbia

This week offers unique opportunities to see into the work of artists through artist talks and lectures, appreciate modern developments in Indigenous and Latin American art or just see what’s going on in your own backyard — at co-ops, youth art programs or on someone’s suburban street.

Now, that’s variety. Start plotting your art itinerary with our help.

Third Anniversary Members Exhibit
D’art Gallery, 900 Santa Fe Drive
Thursday, July 28, through August 28
Opening Reception: Friday July 29, 6 to 9 p.m.
American Artist Appreciation Month Reception: Friday, August 12, 6 to 9 p.m.
Anniversary Party: Friday, August 26, 6 to 9 p.m.
D’art Gallery celebrates three years on Santa Fe Drive this summer by showing off the skills of eighteen members working in various mediums and styles. It’s a great way for a thriving young co-op to also commemorate American Artist Appreciation Month, which begins August 1, giving a nod to all artists across the nation, from name-brand successes to symbiotic, independent artist communities like D’art. The gallery has events celebrating both angles throughout the run of the show, as noted above.

The Celestial & The Terrestrial: Artist Talk With Clarissa Tossin
MCA Denver, 1485 Delgany Street
Thursday, July 28: 7 p.m. (doors, 6 p.m.)
Brazilian artist Clarrisa Tossin looks upward, propelling her ideas into space to explore the desire to groom the moon or the planet Mars for colonization. “The 8th Continent,” a trio of large-scale tapestries representing mineable resource areas on the moon, lends a focal point to her solo exhibit Falling From Earth, which also includes commissioned works of sculpture incorporating repurposed industrial materials and meteorite powder, NASA satellite images, tree bark and clay. Finally, the 62-foot-long silicone sculpture “Death by Heat Wave (Acer pseudoplatanus, Mulhouse Forest)” basically mourns the slow death of precious trees. Tossin will elaborate on these themes and more in conversation with MCA’s senior curator Miranda Lash at the museum’s rooftop cafe and bar.

Creature Comforts Juried Show
Niza Knoll Gallery, 915 Santa Fe Drive
Thursday, July 28, through September 3
Sundays on Santa Fe/Opening Reception: Sunday, July 31, noon to 3 p.m.
The artists juried into Niza Knoll’s group show Creature Comforts were tasked (or perhaps we should say they were given free rein) to submit an artwork that encapsulates what in the world brings them simple comforts and happiness. If the results seem a little warm and fuzzy, that’s okay — the show will be right on target, musing freely on favorite things. Whether that’s a place, a situation, a person or an object, it’s bound to strike a chord with viewers.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Reflecting on the 50th Anniversary of “Valley Curtain” and the Artists’ Legacy
Vail Mountain School, 3000 Booth Falls Road, Vail
Thursday, July 28, 6 to 7:30 p.m. (doors, 5:30 p.m.)
$25 in advance
It’s been fifty years since the late artist Christo and his partner, the late Jeanne-Claude, engineered the legendary Valley Curtain project, which bridged the sides of Rifle Gap over Colorado State Highway 325 with a monumental drape of bright orange nylon fabric. It took 28 months and dozens of workers to complete the installation, but most people who remember the project also recall that it only lasted 28 hours before a 60 mph blast of wind tore it down. To mark the event, the Vail Symposium and SummerVail Art Workshop Legacy Project are co-hosting a panel of experts, participants and friends to recount the rise and fall of the Valley Curtain. If you are a follower, it’s a not-to-miss.

Raquel Meyers and Interns, Concrete Redundancy
PlatteForum Annex Gallery, Flight at Taxi, 3575 Ringsby Court, #103
Friday, July 29, through August 29
Opening Reception: Friday, July 29, 6 to 9 p.m.
PlatteForum continues to celebrate its new gallery annex at Taxi with the opening of Concrete Redundancy, a new exhibit created by resident artist Raquel Meyers and student interns in response to the clash between rapidly changing new technology and the redundancy of retired technology, with a dystopian side-trip to a time when tech blows up and stored memory is lost to the general public. Old technology forms a basis for the installation that will be unveiled Friday night.

Action/Abstraction Redefined
Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, 30 West Dale Street, Colorado Springs
Friday, July 29, through January 7
The Institute of American Indian Arts’ Museum of Contemporary Native Arts focused on contemporary Indigenous arts and the integration of twentieth-century art movements by modern Native artists to build its most intensive exhibition to date: Action/Abstraction Redefined. The show is comprised of works incorporating abstract expressionism, color field and hard-edge painting from the 1940s through the 1970s. The traveling display arrives at CSFAC from the Cahoon Museum, where it debuted in May, with 55 works by fifty artist including Fritz Scholder (Luiseño), George Morrison (Chippewa), John Hoover (Aleut), Edna Massey (Cherokee) and Patrick Swazo Hinds (Tesuque Pueblo).

Kristin Aslan, Perspectives
Hypnotic Turtle DreamBox, 115 Garnet Street, Broomfield
Opening Reception: Friday, July 29, 7 to 11 p.m.
At first glance, it looks like another little library — a perfectly normal sight in a quiet Broomfield neighborhood — but up close, it’s no such thing. The Hypnotic Turtle DreamBox, dreamed up by Hypnotic Turtle radio host Arlo White and his wife, Kim Kennedy White, is a miniature guerrilla gallery installation, spreading a tidbit of art to the streets. Friday marks the debut of a new DreamBox exhibition, Perspectives, by artist Kristin Aslan, who muses on the individuality of points of view about everyday things. And what do you do after you’ve peered inside the box? You listen to live avant garde music by local theremin player Victoria Lundy.

Boulder Fine Art Street Festival
Twenty Ninth Street, 1710 29th Street, Boulder
Saturday and Sunday, July 30-31, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily
Free, RSVP at Eventbrite
It’s still high season for art festivals, and the second annual Boulder Fine Art Street Festival is planting itself at the Twenty Ninth Street shopping district just in time to fill a niche before August commences. The two-day fest combines fine art and artisan craft vendors, with paintings, photography, mixed media and sculpture for art lovers and jewelry, glass, clay, wood and leather for craft collectors.

Who Tells a Tale Adds a Tail: Latin America and Contemporary Art
Denver Art Museum, 100 West 14th Avenue Parkway
Sunday, July 31, through March 5, 2022
The Denver Art Museum opens the lid on modern Latin American art with Who Tells a Tale Adds a Tail, a mostly site-specific exhibition that interconnects artists from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico and other countries, using a wide palette of contemporary themes, styles and mediums. A thread of interactivity between the viewer and the artist holds it all together, surrounding the gallery with multimedia elements and personal narratives.

A Total Work of Art: The Expression of Unity in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Designs, lecture by Stuart Graff
Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art, 1201 Bannock Street (or online via Vimeo)
Wednesday, August 3, 6:30 to 8 p.m.
Admission: $25 to $35, live or virtual
If ever there was a time to attend a lecture on the architectural and design legacies of Frank Lloyd Wright, this is it. Stuart Graff, president and CEO of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation at Taliesin West in Arizona, is no ordinary lecturer when it comes to the architect. Graff will discuss Wright’s concept of unity in the integration of all design elements, from the outside environment to the tiniest of architectural details, as seen in the current Kirkland exhibition Frank Lloyd Wright Inside the Walls.

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