Colorado Currents exhibition brings together artists exploring history, place, self
A large piece of white marble is suspended from the ceiling with a series of heavy duty chains. Beneath it is a bucket, with a tube flowing water, recycling the water through a hole in the marble. Before I even read the statement accompanying this piece of art, I’m already making connections to the land. The marble potentially represents the history of mining. I think of slaves when I see chains, and industrial labor. The contrast of the white stone, almost polished in some areas, with the heavy chains is an unsettling site. The simple white five gallon bucket beneath it is reminiscent of construction sites.
The land is chained to a resource being sucked dry through a straw, I thought. Whose straw? Was it my straw, my impact on the environment, that I saw in the piece? The tube went through the marble, like threading a needle. I was that marble, I was that needle being threaded, through connection to the land.
The statement by the artist Ana González Barragán states she is exploring the “exploitative often violent” nature of extraction of the earth’s precious resources. I am immediately taken with this work, and its critique of land and labor sets the tone for the rest of my time in the exhibition.
Colorado Currents at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver brings together artists from Colorado and its diaspora to create a diverse exhibition of works that explore land, identity, labor, pop culture, history and more. The materiality of each piece is important; there are works in watercolor, color pencil, collage, mud, salt, fiber, and wood.
I’ve been in Denver all of 2 hours and my first stop had to be a museum. I’d spent enough time on this family trip looking at incredible natural vistas and smiling bouncing babies, it was time to clear my visual field and feed my eyes from a cultural institution. My day to day life in Vegas is inundated with images, but we lack a dedicated contemporary art museum. I had to give my brain something to reset with.
When I think of the West, especially Colorado, the myths of mining and cowboys come to mind. In the second room adjacent to the large marble installation is a series of plexiglass fabric works. These works use bent plexiglass to mimic the folds of fabric.
Artist Maeve Eichelberger calls these three-dimensional collages. Through layering of plexiglass she creates images onto the acrylic sculptural forms. A series of red hankies line the wall, and each hanky has a design that shows a flowing spigot of water, a reminder that we live in a drought, and the precious resource that is at the core of all labor, water. One form is of a men’s long sleeve button up shirt, with a map translucently visible through the plexi. Another is of a saddle, a form the artist is known for creating multiples of. Her saddle looks real, it is detailed with filigree on the “leather” areas. But each fabric work is plastic, a toxic material that reminds us of the human intervention in nature and industry.
The opposite wall features a large collage by Libby Barbee, whose work uses found images to create large scale tableaus. This composition features a rocky mountain vista, typical of the scenery you might picture when thinking of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. The mountains vibrate with purples and blues, and each layer of images creates a new form that when stepping back looks like a Rocky Mountain scene, but upon closer inspection is a cacophony of images layered on each other.
Next to this large collage are several smaller digital collages by another artist. Each digital collage features the landscape of mountains surrounded by floating flowers, making psychedelic compositions. Each composition features a different series of wildflowers, and one includes hemp, a reminder of Colorado’s large cannabis industry. I’m tickled because of course, I’ve been given a mission by a roommate to get as many cheap edibles and sneak them back in my suitcase. I look up nearby dispensaries on my phone.
In another room, a large mud cylinder is surrounded by ledger drawings. This cylinder is made from even distributions of brick-like mud piles that create a uniform body-sized mud “room” that is impenetrable.
On the walls, the drawings use ledger paper, a traditional form of drawing in plains indigenous cultures due to colonialism and boarding schools. The works are by father and daughter duo, George Curtis Levi and Halcyon Levi. Both artists use ledger paper, but in unique ways. Halcyon Levi’s color pencil drawings of indigenous women, flowers, dresses, all stand out vividly against the bland ledger paper, and vibrate in the room against the contrast of the large mud sculpture.
Taking up three floors, the lower level of the gallery is split into two rooms. In the first room are large scale, hyper realistic paintings of forest floors. The natural flora and the skillful hand capture imagination of where these paintings are from. I found myself hypnotized by the details of the moss and lichen on each twig, and the deft strokes that almost seem like a photograph, until you come close enough to realize this is a painting.
In the second room the lights are low, and one wall glows with an installation of blue lights created in zig zag patterns, large scale on the wall.Suspended from these zig zag lights are strings of what I know to be rolled up lids of tobacco tins. Now they are sold individually as cones for native american jingle dresses, but originally these metal cones were the tops of tobacco tins, and became a staple of wear thanks to the ingenuity of indigenous women.
On the second floor is a room where two piles of sand take up space in the middle of the floor. On one wall is a picture of Stevie Nix, and the other is an enlarged collage, several feet tall. The masking tape on the original image is larger-than-life now with the image looming large over the piles of sand - or is it salt? The work is about something I cannot grasp, a statement that is too obtuse for me to understand. But I appreciate the physicality of the work, and the impressiveness of the salt and sand that occupies the middle of the room.
At this point, my visual field had been inundated with art and I started to find myself walking quicker through the exhibition and skipping works that I might otherwise find important, like a large scale Bierstadt-inspired landscape, or a fiber installation, or the large cut out of Snoopy made of collage.
I made my way downstairs and with each step down the staircase I found myself reflecting on what I just saw. I made my way to the first floor again and stood in front of the marble sculpture. What is it about this sculpture that mesmerises me? The crudeness of it, the unpolished marble, the variety of chains it took to suspend this from the ceiling while it circulates water through a tube. I am taken with its simplicity, yet the thoughts that went into this were immense.
I thought about how I would explain this exhibition to my family, and why the rough-hewn marble sculpture, industrial and elegant, was so important. They would not see the beauty in the simple nature of it, they might dispute its presence in the art gallery.
“There was this sculpture,” I told my dad later in the car ride back to our hotel, bag full of edibles, “it was made of marble. It was very conceptual but beautiful.”
“Oh,” he replied, “I love marble sculpture, it’s so skillful, for them to have imagined a shape and then carved it from stone.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “It is very impressive.”
Colorado Currents is at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver from July 24, 2026 — November 15, 2026.