click to enlarge The Middle East Images Foundation brings photographs of unrest in Iran to Leon Gallery in Denver. Middle East Images Foundation
Painter Michael Dixon and ArtLab interns mine the twists and turns of racial self-identity. Michael Dixon, courtesy PlatteForum
click to enlarge David Ocelotl Garcia restores a whitewashed mural of Huitzilopocthli on West Eighth Avenue. David Ocelotl Garcia
click to enlarge A still image from Tobias Fike’s “Fractions.” Tobias Fike
click to enlarge Shelby Shadwell’s art in Emergency Blankets. Firehouse Art Center
click to enlarge Join D3 Arts in Westwood for an art show and free painting hour. Courtesy D3 Arts
click to enlarge Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center
click to enlarge New Red Order, “Never Settle: The Program,” still image. Courtesy New Red Order
Jamie Zerr-Lockwood: “Thrive,” oil on wood panel. Jamie Zerr-Lockwood
click to enlarge The group show Plantopia spreads flower power at Spectra Gallery. Photograph by Tania Kaaz
Brian Adams (Iñupiaq, born 1985), “Marie Rexford, Kaktovik, Alaska,” from the series I Am Inuit, 2015, chromogenic print. Brian Adams
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If you’re ready for a road trip, the 160-acre earthwork, created by art superstar Marguerite Humeau and Black Cube, debuts this weekend in the San Luis Valley; learn more here . But you can also go places by sticking in town and visiting local galleries and museums: to protests in Iran and to Alaska, Aztec Mesoamerica, childhood and the botanical world of Plantopia, to name a few.Plan your route below:, the current exhibition at Leon Gallery, tells a story about women in Iran who chose life or death consequences to protest strict hijab laws after the death of arrested dissenter Mahsa Jina Amini. Images by anonymous photographers collected by the Middle East Images Foundation document their bravery. A panel discussion, with MEIF director Hossein Fatemi, University of Denver professor of Emergent Digital Practices Laleh Mehran and, via Zoom, some of the photographers included in the show, will give deeper insights into why it’s important to provide such documentation to the rest of the world.Award-winning painter Michael Dixon and ArtLab interns mine the twists and turns of racial self-identity, inspired by Dixon’s own mixed roots and discovery of family members through genetic testing, including his biological father and siblings he’d never met before. Self-portraits by the interns whom Dixon mentored in techniques of performance art and oil painting will be displayed alongside. Beyond the reception, the gallery is open to the public on Wednesdays and Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., and every First Friday.Jeromie Dorrance shut Dateline’s doors early this year, but Leftovers lets fans back in for the fire sale (don’t panic: There’s been no fire). Dorrance is bringing out what’s left of the Dateline archive, including artworks by many noteworthy artists who’ve shown in the gallery since it opened in 2014, for a last-chance art sale. Drop by and feel the magic.Long before Denver became an outdoor gallery of murals and street art, the city was adorned by murals from the Chicano community renaissance sparked in the ’60s and ’70s by El Movimiento, a call to arms led by civil rights leaders César Chávez in California, Reies Tijerina in New Mexico and Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales in Colorado. From artist Emanuel Martínez, who began in Denver as a guerrilla muralist at the age of thirteen and is still producing murals and sculpture today, to a new generation of young wall-painters such as David Ocelotl Garcia, Diego Florez, Santiago Jaramillo and others, artists referencing Chicanx history, tradition and symbols have been a part of the inner-city fabric for decades, influenced by the great Mexican muralists of the last century. When one mural created by Garcia in 2008 was whitewashed by building owners on West Eighth Avenue, the artist was able to restore his magnificent depiction of “Huitzilopocthli” with help from the the Chicano/a/x Murals of Colorado Project overseen by Lucha Martínez de Luna, the daughter of Emanuel Martínez. The repaired mural, along with another new work on the building, “Xipe Totec,” painted by Alicia Cardenas, Victor Escobedo and Marco Antonio García, will be welcomed with a community celebration on Friday. The Aztec dance troupe Grupo Tlaloc will conduct an opening ceremony, and the party and dedications will follow.Denver’s first Month of Video is reaching a close, but it’s not over yet. Denver Digerati will host Tobias Fike’s screening of, an autobiographical visual feast of the artist’s childhood and current home videos projected onto a mirror ball, allowing his child self to cavort with his own children in joyful rays of color. Friday is also an Open Studio night at the Evans School, where Denver Digerati is located; hang around and visit with a variety of artists between 6 and 9 p.m.Interdisciplinary artist and curator Drew Austin and Navajo comedian, writer and actor Joshua Emerson invite museum-goers to join them in “Hanging Around Bilagaána,” an Untitled: Artist Takeover series evening referencing an early Navajo term for “white man” or “American” and created in conjunction with the Denver Art Museum’s new exhibition, which examines Indigenous and Latinx identity in the Southwest. It’s a well-developed program for this summer episode of the quarterly series that kicks off with a blessing performed by Indigenous elder Sid Whiting, leading into a universe of entertainments.Choose from a couple of art tours, one led by Indigenous drag queen Buffalo Barbie and the other by Lafayette Poet Laureate ZBassSpeaks; three comedy performances, with one by Emerson; several musical journeys, including a rooftop reprise by Opera on Tap of Denver composer Nathan Hall’s modern opera; a drag show; three one-night art installations by Austin; and Denver Digerati video projections by Max Mather. And there’s more: hands-on art workshops and a food demonstration with free samples by Tocabe. That should hold you until the next Untitled (the last one until 2024), scheduled for the last Friday in October.Shelby Shadwell, who teaches at the University of Wyoming, brings a series of charcoal and pastel drawings of those shiny Mylar blankets that have been appearing in clips of immigrant camps at the border. For some, they also evoke alien conspiracy theories that link them to material found in 1947 at the Roswell crash site. Shadwell is interested in how a useful polyester film can plant seeds of imaginative thought in the human brain.The artists of Westwood’s D3 Arts gallery and event space, which also serves as a safe, sober gathering space for people in recovery, will hang an open-entry art show and host a participatory free painting hour with supplies donated by Colorado Artists in Recovery.As an artist, Krista Franklin covers a huge span of interrelated disciplines connected to the book arts and beyond.collects her series of collaged book and album cover art using appropriated images and text as an act of collaboration with fellow artists, writers and musicians. Or as she puts it, “What has the body latched onto to make sense of the experiences scratched into it, and how can we facilitate release?” Her emphasis is on Black women and Black experiences, and turning a work of art into a living, breathing expression.RedLine, where the stunning Month of Video exhibitionhas been on display throughout July, will finish the fest with a screening of two NRO films —and— topped off by a closing party. The first film centers on the dispute between the Nez Perce, Umatilla, Yakama and Colville tribes and anthropologists over the remains of Kennewick Man, found in Washington state, and the larger constellation of disputes over Indigenous artifacts kept in museums., on the other hand, likens Christopher Columbus to a vampire spreading the disease of colonialization, one neck at a time. Then it’s party time.Valkarie Gallery artists Jamie Zerr-Lockwood and Zachary Reece claim the main gallery for, a pair of solos that view the world through different prisms. Oil painter Zerr-Lockwood, who is also a pet portraitist, mixes animals and primly dressed women in surreal scenarios, or by themselves, while Zachary Reece works digitally with a stylus and geometric overlay to draw densely dotted and patterned black-and-white imagery of all types.blooms at Spectra Gallery this weekend, with florals and other plant imagery by more than twenty artists. At Spectra, openings also mean live music, free drinks and discounted access to the brand-new iteration of the Novo Ita immersive series:, a perfect partner to theart show.Two new shows concerned with personal history open Sunday at the Denver Art Museum’s photography galleries on the sixth level of the Martin Building. Colorado photographer Trent Davis Bailey draws from his series, a collection of images detailing life in the farming communities of western Colorado. Anchorage-based photographer Brian Adams combed his Iñupiaq heritage and travels across Alaska and the Arctic to document the Inuit way of life in contemporary times.