Art Galleries & Museums

Artist Winfred Rembert carved leather the way a master carver would shape wood or stone. He learned to do so in prison, where he survived a near lynching, a jail sentence that included time on a Georgia chain gang, and the everyday violence and racism of life in the Jim Crow South.

Like politics, all art is local until it isn’t anymore, a point driven home by Surrealism Beyond Borders, the Met’s tour d’horizon of the global, half-century-long spread of Surrealism from its birthplace in 1920s Paris. The City of Lights wasn’t technically Surrealism’s cradle, however.

The largest, most prevalent treasures of the Denver Art Museum are the DAM’s buildings designed by renowned architects: Gio Ponti and Daniel Libeskind. Ponti’s tile-covered high-rise with unusually placed and shaped windows brings to mind a castle. Libeskind’s titanium-clad triangulations evoke gargantuan origami.

By layering Bo Bardi’s own words with images of her buildings and artist interacting with them, Julien creates a non-linear biography, one that eschews straight facts in favor of feeling, allowing us to experience her creations and life viscerally rather than academically.

In a perfectly paired yin-yang juxtaposition of exhibitions, two artists—Ana María Hernando and Yoshitomo Saito—show works inspired by nature, yet rendered in extremely different media. Coincidentally, both attended the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, CA. The creative energy evident in these exhibitions is nonconformist, particularly in the artists’ use of media.

Davie’s works are at once anxiety-producing, witty, and enigmatic. She takes us both inside and outside the body, through wild dancing lines, swirling movements, and smashed-up forms; pushing upward and outward and roundabout. There’s a unity to it all—mind, body, landscape—tightly bound, keeping the viewer in tow.

Halfway through the sixth decade of his career, Jasper Johns’s output has been prodigious enough to demand a retrospective hosted by not one, but two institutions: The Whitney and The Philadelphia Museum of Art.  While Johns’s insistent self-reflexiveness is more likely to make you go “Hmm” than send a thrill down your leg—unlocking his puzzles has its pleasures.

An exercise in world-building that’s as dense as Life After B.O.B. can only be retold in the broadest of stokes, so your mileage sitting through it may vary depending on your attention span. Still, it’s a fascinating twenty-first-century meditation on basic existential questions: Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going?

After numerous delays due to COVID and personnel changes, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures finally opened on September 30 after a weeklong lead-up that included a gala, an opening night party and a press event featuring luminaries like Tom Hanks.

It has been an eventful couple of years for the art and legacy of Philip Guston (1913-1980). A traveling retrospective was delayed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Then, the four museums involved decided to postpone it to 2022-23.