First Friday! Still Going Strong!

This past Friday my sister Susan and I, long with our friend Susan L, who lives in our building, drove down to the Santa Fe Art District on Santa Fe Drive here in Denver to attend the First Friday Art Walk. It has been quite a while, perhaps as long as 3 years, since I last attended this event. However, Susan L. had me beat - it has been 15 years since she last attended First Friday, back when she was living in the area. In any case, we parked just to the north of the district, and the first thing we saw was some sort of acrobatics show going on, as seen in the photograph on the left, which I definitely don't remember from the last time I was there. It was kind of interesting in a boring kind of way, but we soon moved on to the Santa Fe Art District proper, which was jampacked with people. Navigating through the crowds on the narrow sidewalks was quite the challenge. 

The first gallery we stopped at was the Center for Visual Art, which is run by Metropolitan State University. I always stop at this gallery because it has a fairly large exhibition space and is the first gallery you pass when coming from the north. It features works by local and international artists, as well as MSU students. The art on display is almost always what we art fanciers call "just plain weird." The current exhibit is called "Sequesterings," and features works made from unwanted materials, making a statement about our throwaway culture. And as usual, the art was very weird indeed, a sample of which can be seen in the photograph on the right. What they are I cannot tell you. Neither my sister nor Susan L. were taken with the work, and so we hurried on to the next venue.

That next venue was SYNC Gallery, which was hosting an exhibition called "Being on Earth," featuring the work of Clare Scott and Monica Hokeilen. Scott works in pastels and her paintings feature landscapes and figures that express the "wonder, beauty, and common humanity" here on earth. And they are quite good. Hokeilen's oil paintings feature the wildlife found in the Rocky Mountain region and are also very good. The photograph on the left shows Susan L, on the left, talking to Monica Hokeilen, on the right, about one of her paintings. Clare Scott is standing right behind Susan, looking on. The next gallery we visited was the Niza Knoll Gallery, which was hosting an exhibition called "The Mix, One," featuring their in-house artists, one of whom was photographer Jerry Scezney, whose photographs are very good indeed. From there we visited a number of other galleries, but we all agreed that the best part of the evening was the peoplewatching. I must say I have never seen such a wide variety of people anywhere else in Denver. But then again, I don't get out much in the evenings these days, which might explain a lot.