Colorado has just a handful of contemporary art museums that reach for world-class status, and none rank higher than the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. Both institutions supply local audiences with well-funded, judiciously-curated exhibits featuring top names in the field from both near and far.
Any artist would consider it a career milestone to earn a solo show in either space.
Artist Ana María Hernando currently has a solo at both. Thatap a rare accomplishment, to say the least, and a double-header I can never remember happening previously. Fair to say, it counts as a critical moment in Colorado art history.
And as much as it is an accomplishment for Hernando, who deserves the recognition, it is also an opportunity for people here to take the deepest of dives into the work of one of our top talents — if they have a spirit of artful adventure.
Because here is the challenge that this unusual occurrence sets up: Go see both exhibits, back-to-back, over the course of one day, or maybe one weekend. I made the trek and gained insights both into the artist and the museums themselves.
In Denver, there is “Seguir cantando (Keep Singing),” an exhibition that fills the museum’s entire second floor with new and recent works, some debuting at the show.
In Colorado Springs, there is “Cantando Bajito (Singing Softly),” which has overlapping material but plays out more like a career retrospective, showing off several approaches to art-making that Hernando has experimented with over the years.
Both exhibits feature multimedia works by the artist –who was born in Argentina and has lived in Boulder and Denver for decades — including paintings, sculpture, works on paper and, most plentifully, three-dimensional textile installations, many made with what has become her signature material: tulle.
There are endless yards of tulle — shaped into small mountains, draped over walls, contained into geometric color fields, tufted into puffs and sent flowing from the walls as if they were waterfalls gushing luscious pink and blue flows of faux liquid that end in puddles on the gallery floors. A visitor could drown in so much tulle.
To have such a precious fabric — delicately-netted, easily fluffed, rendered mostly in pastel shades — in such abundance helps Hernando show viewers the world as she sees it. That view is rooted in Andean traditions that hold a belief that natural formations such as mountains and waterfalls “are living, divine beings containing both masculine and feminine energies,” as the text for the Colorado Springs show describes it.
Hernando gives this idea a decidedly feminist frame in her choice of media. Tulle is traditionally a fabric used in female clothing — its job is to poof up wedding and party dresses, making the garments appear soft, festive, airy.
But delivered in such quantity and with such force, tulle’s feminine essence transforms into power and full partnership with any masculine presence an object might be perceived to have. In Hernando’s hands, tulle plays out more like the material for a military uniform than it does for the cloud-like tutus that ballerinas wear.
The concept becomes inarguable at the MCA show, which climaxes with the new work titled “Seguimos cantando (Waterfalls).” It is monumental — 12 feet high and covering 1,400 square feet — and has two cascades of pink-ish tulle swirling throughout the museum’s largest exhibition space. There is so much of it that the entire room takes on a rosy hue. The piece serves simultaneously as a great Instagram backdrop and the strongest dose of girl power you will ever see in a serious art institution.
Both exhibits have other works to offer. The Colorado Springs show, curated by Katja Rivera in collaboration with the artist, reaches wide, with two standout pieces from Hernando that do not use tulle.
One is 2016’s “Flor presagiada por el agua (Flower Foretold by Water),” a piece that also flows from the wall onto the floor, only this one is made from bits of resin and paper and employs embroidered fabric by the cloistered nuns of the Santa Teresa de Jesús Monastery in Buenos Aires, with whom Hernando has built a creative partnership. The work has a soundtrack by artist Ben Coleman.
The other is “Écoutons / Letap Listen / Escuchemos,” which dates back to 2020 when Hernando, in the midst of a global pandemic, asked friends around the world to record and send bird songs, which she used to inspire her own handmade embroideries. Like much of the artistap work, the piece speaks to being present in the universe, to seeing its beauty, hearing its music.
The Denver show, notably, has the 2026 series “El esplendor de la memoria / The Splendor of Memory,” which features six similarly sized, unstretched canvases that the artist has decorated with images of olive trees, tulips, magnolias and more using graphite, ink and thread. The pieces play with perspective and surface and, more interestingly, memory. They are postcards from Hernando’s visits with nature around the globe and evoke the way we all remember our experiences of such travel– as a dream world that is nurturing and mysterious and at the same time energizing.
That series can get overlooked with all of the tulle floating around, but it is the best work in either exhibit, especially if the point of both is to let us see the real soul instilled into Hernando’s works. They are calm captures of the duality of the natural world, both its playful charm and its power to mesmerize us.
These are paintings by a mature artist, stepping back from spectacle, de-complicating the message, delighting the audience. They are a nice complement to the more showy works, and itap great that curator Leilani Lynch gave them such a prominent position in the exhibit.
As for the institutions themselves, it is wonderful to see them working in coordination — though not actually in partnership; these are fully separate efforts — in the service of giving the public such a hearty dose of Hernando, who has been getting international recognition lately.
In some ways, both could have gone much farther. If the theme is abundance, it would have been nice to see that tulle flowing out of windows, down staircases, out to the exterior of the buildings, into the cities themselves.
Even with all the excess, things feel held back in both cases: While it’s nice to talk about abundance, what does that really mean? There was an unrealized opportunity there that often happens when museums with international ambitions exhibit local artists; they do not go as far as they might in honoring the work.
But these remain grand efforts. Like I said, itap a Colorado moment, a pairing unlikely to happen again soon. Take the dare and go see both.
Ray Mark Rinaldi is a Denver-based fr eelance writer specializing in fine arts.
IF YOU GO
The Colorado Springs exhibit continues through July 3. Info at fac.coloradocollege.edu.
The MCA Denver show ends July 5. Info at mcadenver.org.
