Colorado in the Present Tense:
Installation view, Colorado in the Present Tense, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, February 26, 2021–August 22, 2021. Photo by Wes Magyar.
Colorado in the Present Tense:
Nora Burnett Abrams, Mark G. Falcone Director
Colorado in the Present Tense: Narkita Gold, Rick Griffith, Nathan Hall, and Maia Ruth Lee centers on four artists of the Colorado region and how they are responding to and reimagining the upended world in which we presently find ourselves. The exhibition features newly commissioned work and reframes existing projects from these artists.
Reflecting on our current moment of upheaval, uncertainty, and complexity, each artist created site-specific responses, including large-scale projects, photography, sculpture, and sonic movements. Such a sweeping approach towards the most pressing issues of the day, from COVID-19 to Black Lives Matter, climate change, and beyond, makes clear how crucial the role of the artist is, particularly during moments of crisis. Colorado in the Present Tense looks to the artists of our region for new perspectives and solutions to our constrained and conflicted new normal. Their responses navigate a range of interpretations, including confusion, fear, humility, despair and hope, likely mirroring the emotional span that many visitors experienced as well.
MCA Denver thanks the citizens of the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District for their support of this exhibition,
Exhibitions
Narkita Gold: Black in Denver
Narkita Gold began her Black in Denver series in 2018. Featuring 100 portraits of those who identify as Black and who live in the Denver community, MCA Denver presents the entirety of Gold’s photographic and text-based project. Launched in part by her relocation from Nashville, Tennessee, Black in Denver reflects Gold’s realization about the uniqueness of Denver’s Black community, including a wide spectrum of Black self-expression. Beyond trying to capture Black life here, she also wanted to understand her own existence in Denver. Visually connecting her individual subjects through the vibrant and bold colors against which each figure stands, she composes a mosaic of experiences and narratives. Gold vividly centers a historically marginalized community in Denver. Celebrating the immense richness of Denver’s Black community, Black in Denver is a joyful testament to what makes Denver unique and serves as a prompt for further recognizing and honoring such singular voices.
Rick Griffith: Tools
Designer, activist, and visual artist, Rick Griffith intertwines these three practices throughout his rigorous and imaginative body of work. Presenting a historic series of his collages, foundational text diagrams detailing his design philosophies, and a new series of prints reflective of his political and ethical values that addresses race and social justice, this exhibition also includes several of his sketchbooks. As registers of his ideas and the foundation for all future projects, these notebooks make clear how images and ideas repeat, reassemble, and are repurposed over time and across projects. They are essential “tools” for his creative approach and inform the other works on view. The cycle of projects on view connects through a shared visual vocabulary that demonstrates, through different media and across different periods of time, an urgency to utilize creative and visual practice in service of personal, political, and moral imperatives – and promotes visitors to consider doing the same.
Nathan Hall: Soundscape 2020
Artist and composer Nathan Hall will explore the sonic arc of 2020 through a series of different sound installations. Occupying the interstitial spaces of the museum, including stairwells and the elevator, as well as the rooftop, his multi-channel project will reflect on the cacophony, silence, and variability that defined the aural landscape of our city over the past year.
Maia Ruth Lee: The Language of Grief
Maia Ruth Lee explores the failure of language to express fully and accurately the meaning of an emotion or an experience. Lee relocated to Colorado in spring 2020, and her work reflects on the events of the year and the profundity of change that they have wrought. Paintings, wall-based installations, works on paper, and a video present an acutely tender response to the upheaval and loss of the last year. Creatively prolific, this exhibition comprises entirely new work borne of a central yet impossible pursuit: to lean on language, both written and oral, to capture the artist’s personal experiences and also to approximate the experiences of others.