Although the small yet ambitious Aspen Art Museum regularly presents exhibitions of national and even international importance, its relative isolation has kept it from gaining much recognition in Denver and elsewhere along the Front Range.
The museum hopes a new initiative might help change that. For the first time, it is engaging the state’s art scene with the inauguration of a Colorado biennial exhibition, with the first of two two-week installments continuing through Oct. 29.
The new exhibit stirred controversy in the Aspen region: It replaced the Aspen Valley Biennial and Roaring Fork Open – two longtime presentations that alternated each year and focused on local artists.
When Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson took over as director and chief curator a little more than a year ago, she assessed all the museum’s programs, keeping some and eliminating others. She decided that too many of the same artists were displayed repeatedly in the two shows and it was time for something different.
“So, I thought, ‘How do we honor the history that this institution has had, but how do we update it?” Jacobson said, “So for me, a logical thing was to say, ‘Well, let’s still do a biennial, but let’s look across the state.’
“I know this was a model that had been used by some of the museums in Denver – some more effectively and some less effectively. Why don’t we throw our hat in the ring and see what we can do?”
The exhibition comes at a perfect time. The Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver broadened its state biennial in 2005 to encompass the Rocky Mountain region, and the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center suspended its juried statewide showcase several years ago.
In a January 2005 column, I wrote, “However worthwhile a regional biennial might be, the state still needs a high-profile, tightly focused showcase for its own artists. Colorado’s growing art scene is large enough and important enough to warrant such an offering.”
Not only does Aspen’s exhibition fit the bill, it adds a welcome new point of view on the state’s art scene and ensures that the Front Range art institutions do not hold a monopoly on how the state’s artists are evaluated and ranked.
That fresh perspective pays off in a big way. Among the 12 artists featured in the biennial are at least a half-dozen who are virtually unknown in the state. These range from Senga Nengudi of Colorado Springs, a veteran artist who mostly exhibits elsewhere, to Ben Koch of Snowmass Village, a promising newcomer to the scene.
Unlike most biennials, which offer a few works by each artist, this one is organized in such a way that each participant has what is essentially a solo show within a partitioned, largely self-contained space.
This approach gives viewers a thorough look at each artist’s work, and allows each group of pieces to be seen to best advantage without the intrusion of other potentially distracting selections in the same room.
For the first installment, Assistant Curator Matthew Thompson, working in consultation with Jacobson, selected six deserving artists who nicely complement each other in style, medium and experience.
They range from Phil Solomon, an internationally noted experimental filmmaker who lives in Broomfield, to former Boulderite Lisa Solberg, whose faddish, loosely rendered paintings draw on street art and contemporary illustration.
Among the show’s highlights are 13 impeccably realized watercolors from the Muse/Museum Series of Jack Balas of Berthoud. With a dose of humor, he re-envisions past art-magazine ads with his own images – examining art stereotypes and packaging along the way.
Ron Pollard, a highly original photographer from Englewood, offers a dark look at suburban life with an ominous set of black-and-white photographs on gray cardboard. They depict seemingly innocuous suburban homes as fortresses, with fences, gates and shutters.
Turning away from traditional oil and canvas, Monica Petty Aiello of Denver blurs painting and sculpture. She uses layers of dyed string and other materials to build dense, patterned compositions; they appear abstract but are inspired by the geography of planets and moons.
Colorado needs a biennial, and the Aspen Art Museum deserves kudos for stepping up to the plate.
Fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan can be reached at 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com.
