Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art celebrates 25th anniversary

Nora Abrams directs the Museum of Contemporary Arts and led MCA Denver through COVID-19 lockdown.

On Friday the 13^th of March 2020 – three days before Colorado sank into quarantine — Denver’s  Museum of Contemporary Arts closed its doors due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As post-lockdown reemergence unfolds, MCA Denver prepares to celebrate a silver anniversary in 2022.

Museum director Nora Burnett Abrams celebrates the silver linings forged by tumultuous events of 2020 and the first half of 2021. When I met with Abrams, I caught her contagious enthusiasm for the museum’s newest direction: a flourishing online presence that extended MCA Denver far beyond the bricks and mortar museum.

Here’s a link to “Curating Community,” my feature about MCA Denver in the new issue of Colorado Expression magazine

The art of flowers, fabrics and embroidered birdsong at Denver Botanic Gardens

Flowers inspire multi-media artist Ana Maria Hernando.

Ana Maria Hernando’s exhibition titled “Fervor” at Denver Botanic Gardens displays the artist’s love of and reverence for nature. Hernando associates the word “fervor” with devotion. She said, “‘Fervor’ has connotations to the spirit. Many times, we think about people praying with fervor — that commitment to action. It’s a word that’s very passionate, and that word brings that passion forward. Nature has fervor. The intent, the vocation for life.”

In her work as a painter and/or sculptor inspired primarily by flowers and fabrics, she has her own fervor, her own intention and vocation and passion.

“I like very much the idea of learning, so I make a lot of mistakes. When I am beginning to work with one material, many things don’t come out the way I want or I intended, but I like that process,” she says. “I like how alive that process is.

Here is a link to the article in Colorado Expression magazine with more details about the exhibit at Denver Botanic Gardens.