Free Day At The DAM!

It was a free day at the Denver Art Museum (The DAM) yesterday, and so my sister Susan and I decided to head down there to see what was new. The DAM now consists of three separate buildings, the Hamilton Building, seen on the left in the photograph on the left, the Martin Building, connected by a pedestrian bridge to the Hamilton, and a new addition, the Kirkland Galleries, which features "the work of Vance Kirkland, international decorative arts, and fine art by Colorado artists," located a few blocks away. Since it was a Tuesday afternoon, the museum was relatively uncrowded, despite free admission to all three areas, which made for a more leisurely viewing of the artwork.

One of the exhibits I wanted to see was "What We've Been Up To: Landscape," a collection of photographs from the museum's collections that have never been shown to the public and seen in the photograph on the right. The purpose of the exhibit is "to serve as an autobiography of the people, societies, and natural forces that shape the world over time." I did like some of the photographs, especially the one titled Buena Vista, featuring a phone booth in front of a house trailer, with wide-open spaces in the background. There was also a very nice winter scene of a drift fence and farm in New Hampshire, and a great photograph by William Henry Jackson titled "Milburn, Utah, from near Hilltop 1891-1892," featuring a train in the foreground and mountains in the background. But many of the photographs were very abstract, some were tight closeups of various aspects of nature, and a number of them showed landscapes marred by development, none of which I was crazy about. Definitely a mixed bag.

Just for fun, we popped into the Modern and Contemporary Art Gallery, seen in the photograph on the left. There were new contemporary works on display, but none that I particularly liked, and many bordering on the ridiculous, such as Michael Joo's Salt Transfer Cycle, featuring a video of a naked man crawling through salt flats. The museum chooses to display this instead of Modigliani's Portrait de Femme, which I think is one of the best paintings the DAM's collection. I once sent a written inquiry to the DAM asking why this painting was not on display and was told it was on loan to another museum. Yesterday I asked one of the museum employees in the gallery the same question, who looked it up and said it was in storage, and had not been on display at the DAM since 2009. Does that not seem strange to you? He said he would ask the curator about it, but I have given up hope of the museum ever displaying it again. No doubt the probably youthful curator feels it is just not weird enough.