Voelz Chandler: Justice Center, museum projects bear watching

Saturday, December 24, 2005

The top art and architecture stories of 2004 were easy to spot: It was the year of the museums and the bear.

Move ahead 12 months and we're still following three major museum projects, along with the Denver Justice Center competition, which promises a courthouse by architect Steven Holl.

And now there are two bears. The "big blue bear" - Lawrence Argent's I See What You Mean, peering into the Colorado Convention Center - was hoisted into place in June.

Meanwhile, the white bear, the mascot for the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District, has been scratching its head for a year, as the district board tried to figure out how - or whether - to pay massive bills from the 2004 election. Almost a year after the bills began to hit, the board approved partial payments in 2006.

Most players in the world of art and architecture did not face that kind of challenge, although some hit a tough patch. And the cold hand of censorship made its presence known in a time as fraught politically as it is economically.

So what will we remember after 2005 is gone?

The stories

If people five years ago had said we'd be tracking three museum projects here, I would have asked what they were smoking.

But the Denver Art Museum's new building by Daniel Libeskind is aiming for a fall opening and officials of the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver are now talking about a spring groundbreaking. At issue at the latter: raising the necessary money, as well as working out the materials to be used in the building designed by David Adjaye. And the Clyfford Still Museum hired a project manager, named a board, launched a Web site and received even more work (and Still's archives) from his widow, who died in 2005. A site announcement may come in early 2006.

They're back

Over the River is squarely on the front burner, as Christo and Jeanne-Claude returned to Colorado last summer to talk about the project that would cover stretches of the Arkansas River with swaths of silvery fabric. This may be their last massive earth-transforming project, coming mere years (2009 at the earliest) after their triumphant The Gates last February in New York. Public meetings are planned in mid-January in Cañon City, Cotopaxi and Salida.

The wrong moves

Short-sighted Metropolitan State College of Denver officials reconfiguring its Center for Visual Art, and losing director Kathy Andrews. . . . Short-sighted Lakewood City Manager Mike Rock yanking a piece of art by Gayla Lemke out of a show in that city's cultural center because it had an obviously subversive message about pacifism. . . . The short-sighted Colorado Council on the Arts not defending artist Tsehai Johnson when her ceramic works that resemble dildos ticked off some anti-Referendum C types; her work was yanked from the CCA Web site.

A new look

The elegant Ellie Caulkins Opera House brought new life to 14th Street. So did completion of the Hyatt Regency Denver at the Colorado Convention Center, notable for its sleek lines and bonanza of art. And the installation of many other works at the convention center moved the city's Percent for Art program to a new level.

Gone, or diminished

The Colorado Arts Festival in May apparently was the last gasp of that event, victim of tangled financial issues. . . . Studio Aiello owners Tyler and Monica Petty Aiello retrenched, first closing the back space, then preparing to sell the building and rent it back. . . . Pod, the art-full boutique that shared an address with Capsule Gallery, closed, but not before building a devoted fan base. . . . Pirate a Contemporary Art Oasis slimmed down by half, as landlord Reed Weimer divided the place to create another rental property. . . . And the Colorado Photographic Arts Center shut its doors - right after returning to its newly renovated home; board members promise exhibitions, but not organized by Skip and Lisbeth Kohloff, who did yeoman service.

Exhibitions:

• "Siqueiros: Spirit of a Revolutionary," at the Museo de las Americas: Not only did it signal new vigor at the Museo, it also was a welcome look at Siqueiros' rich work.

• The two-pronged examination of Floyd Tunson, at both the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center ("American Standard") and Sandy Carson Gallery ("Rudiments"): a solid review of work old and new.

• The CU Art Museum's investigation of technology and beauty in "Techno-Sublime." Director Lisa Tamiris Becker found a way to meld the two worlds so content didn't get lost in the circuitry.

• The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center's massive Dale Chihuly show. It was a crowd pleaser (and how: attendance and membership soared). The work, and its sensitive but glittering installation, demonstrated why Chihuly rules in the realm of American art glass.

• It's a tie: shows by painters Dale Chisman (Rule Gallery) and Bruce Price (+ Gallery). In both cases, the impulse in these paintings was abstraction, but interpreted in different ways, Chisman through impeccably precise compositions and signature forms, Price through the expansion of his use of highly controlled geometric creations.

Goodbyes:

In Colorado: Aspen gallery founder Harley Baldwin, 59; ceramist James McKinnell, 86; modernist (and humanist) architect Eugene Sternberg, 90; ground-breaking landscape architect Jane Silverstein Reis, 96; painter and photographer Lew Tilley, 84; photographer Gary Lynch, 51, and architectural historian Olga Jackson, 85.

Elsewhere: the eminense grise of American architecture, Philip Johnson, 98; pioneering comic book artist Will Eisner, 87; architectural force Kenzo Tange, 91; artist (and wife of the late painter Jacob Lawrence) Gwendolyn Knight, 91; painter Fritz Scholder, 67; veteran curator Harald Szeeman, 71; avant-garde sculptor Philip Pavia, 94; painter Al Held, 76; noted Philadelphia city planner and theorist Edmund Bacon, 95; found-object sculptor Arman, 76; "desert modern" architect E. Stewart Williams, 95, and an architect of elegance (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), James Ingo Freed, 75.

Mary Voelz Chandler is the art and architecture critic. Chandlerm@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2677.