Opera’s road to the future just might start in Philadelphia

The city’s O17 festival gave audiences an immersive and experiential new way to see the art form

Provided by Opera Philadelphia

By RAY MARK RINALDI October 2, 2017 Opera practices what might be described in the current age as reverse radicalism. When every other engine of 21st century life is telling us to embrace change or die, opera advocates for tradition — preserving the primacy of a certain kind of voice and instrument, of a way of recording notes on a page. The code it writes in was developed centuries ago. Still, it wants to exist with the times, to be relevant and draw young listeners to replace the old ones who will inevitably depart. That means finding ways to position its music in the living, breathing culture of now.

The field has tried a lot of things to stay fresh, and many have been successful. There are terrific new works being written to complement the ones everyone has heard a hundred times. Companies broadcast their fare across the world. Sets and lights have gone high-tech; there is an artful boom in the use of projected scenery over the past decade that’s been exciting to watch.

Still, the most notable advances, at least with audiences, have been its dips into pop culture. If you want to sell out the theater, to get kids in the door and the mainstream media to even care, you’ve got do what the Minnesota Opera did by translating a grisly Stephen King novel into the language of baritones and sopranos. Or what the Santa Fe Opera did, setting the life of the Apple founder and millennial hero Steve Jobs to music.

Provided by Opera Philadelphia

This month, Opera Philadelphia did its own steal, mimicking the biggest thing going in the contemporary concert scene today — the music festival. Pop is all about its Coachella and Bonnaroo and Firefly and scores of other multi-day fests where the entertainment goes on nonstop, day and night. The lineups are stacked so high, fans convene from all over the world to hear them. More than that: to experience it all together, to be thrilled and filled to the brim with music. They love it, so much so that they often have to take drugs to cope with all of the excitement.

I didn’t see any drugs going around at Opera Philadelphia’s O17 last weekend, but I did see a lot of euphoria among the thousands of people who attended the seven operatic “happenings” staged over 12 days across the city. The event wasn’t as compact as a Lollapalooza or a Burning Man fest, but it brought the same joys of indulgence and immersion. The festival, highlighted by three major premieres, was a success, top to bottom. It took risks — on both art and audiences — and it did make opera feel like it was with the times.

Philadelphia, too. The fest took place at the same time as the city’s daring Fringe Festival, a showcase of experimental theater, music and dance, and it combined with O17 to position the metropolis as a world-class cultural leader. If these two festivals continue to program simultaneously, it’s easy to see Philly becoming a high-brow destination every September. The real power of O17 came from its art — and the way it was framed. Operas took place at a variety of locations: the grand and beloved Philadelphia Museum of Art; in Independence Park, a few feet from the Liberty Bell; at the Wilma Theater, a hangout for the stage-play crowd; and at the Barnes Foundation, the new high- architecture museum full of works by Renoir, Cezanne and Matisse.

The productions weren’t just at these places, they were authentically integrated into them. A production of one of Monteverdi’s short works, a Christian-Muslim love story set in the First Crusade, took place inside the 13th century cloister installed on the museum’s second floor. The acoustics were a miracle, and so was the singing, in Italian with no supertitles.

The audience was shuttled around the ornate building, into the armor room, with its swords and shields, to hear a string duo play a musical interlude of Telemann and then, finally, toward the main entrance, where composer Lembit Beecher’s contemporary chamber work about PTSD, titled “I Have No Stories to Tell You,” used the museum’s famous grand staircase as a multi-level set. Programmatically, it was the perfect counterpoint to Monteverdi’s ancient war work, and the two meshed memorably; both operas opted out of expensive sets in favor of the museum’s existing ambiance. The audience totally got it, and in a music fest kind of way: They slammed red wine between the one-acts, they wore comfortable shoes, they chatted about what they liked and didn’t. Things were even looser — wilder, I’d say — down the beautiful Benjamin Franklin Parkway promenade at the premiere of composer/librettist David Hertzberg’s “The Wake World” in the Barnes Foundation’s massive, rectangular atrium hall. The performance took place on a long, long shoulder-high runway and, as the singers bounded up and down it, the audience was invited to walk around and follow along. At the same time, the chorus, dressed in body tights and face paint, walked through the audience as it sang.

Provided by Opera Philadelphia

The room was in constant motion; sonically, this was as trippy an experience as any drug might induce. You could hear the singers individually as they passed by you and then collectively as part of an ensemble. Audiences do not get that experience, ever.

Director R.B. Schlather’s staging fit well with Hertzberg’s fantastical fairy tale, based on Aleister Crowley’s novel. The story was convoluted, not so easy to follow (or, really, possible to recap other than to classify it as a very twisted love story set in some mysterious time) but it didn’t matter. It was a dream, and dreams are always hard to follow and always fully engaging. Hertzberg’s music captured the drama through a combination of new and old classical sounds. He is compared by critics to Ravel, and that was evident here, darkness and romance cobbled together into something quite beautiful and startlingly dangerous. If “Wake Word” was a mythic journey into some mystic past (or future; sorry, I’m still not sure), “We Shall Not Be Moved” at the Wilma Theater brought audiences into the shocking reality of today. The piece examined the lasting effects of what Philly calls “the MOVE tragedy” of 1985, when police ended a standoff with a black liberation group by dropping a firebomb on their West Philadelphia house. Eleven people were killed and 65 neighboring homes were destroyed. No public officials were indicted.

Composer Daniel Bernard Roumain and librettist Marc Bamuthi Joseph create an opera here that connects the story to 2013, when many of Philadelphia’s schools were simply shut down because the city ran out of money. They draw a portrait: a “family” of teens caught up in a street crime who camp out on the site of the MOVE house waiting for their own inevitable and violent confrontation with police.

The score is fully compelling, a contemporary classical work infused with hip-hop, jazz and gospel elements, and the libretto, which allows some spoken dialogue, is anguished without being clean and conclusive. These kids are full-blown characters, doomed angels but also troublemakers, and they are haunted, literally, by a troupe of dancers in ghostly white clothing, who shadow them on stage. O17 turned opera on its head, so much so that its most conservative move was actually to premiere a work by composer Kevin Puts and librettist Mark Campbell, who teamed up most recently to make the Pulitzer-prize winning “Silent Night.” Not that the new “Elizabeth Cree” was routine — it’s a bloody gothic horror story — it’s just that it took place at the Kimmel Center, in a real classical venue with an orchestra in the pit and spectators in seats. It was so 2016.

And it was thrilling, a tight 90 minutes of music that showed why this duo is in high demand. Campbell is skilled at turning characters created to be read into living, breathing beings that demand to be heard, and he made the most of author Peter Ackroyd’s popular murder-mystery about a Victorian anti-heroine who kills it in show business, and then some. There was a real balance of darkness and light in them, a depth developed through a combination of cutting lines delivered in free- wheeling rhymes.

Puts was right there with him, producing a score that was rousing for moments set in a music hall and deadly dark during the story’s grisly massacres. Murder scenes are nothing new to this art form, and here the gut-rendering was depicted through a shadowy sort of animation. Still, I’ve never felt violence as viscerally in an opera house; interesting what these two collaborators, working with director David Schweizer, are capable of. If I have any useful criticism of O17, it’s that all of it felt a little too highbrow. The music fests it was emulating are down-and-dirty affairs held in muddy fields. O17 never quite got real like that; it was set in art museums and theaters, not warehouses and street corners, and it still retained the preciousness that turns off perspective new opera fans. Even O17’s free outdoor performance of “The Magic Flute” — and it was packed — took place in Independence Park, which is groomed to an unnatural perfection by the National Park Service.

There might be a lesson in the Fringe Festival on that; I saw a dance performance in an old Latvian social club that was unmistakably legit (and so Philly). But that’s a matter for O18, and I hope there is one, and that it becomes a destination. Opera is thriving these days, even if it does feel like a small and specialized part of American culture. It doesn’t need a revolution to survive, but it does need a path forward to stay important and influential.

This experiment in Philadelphia, which drew multi-cultured and multicultural audiences, serves as a trailhead.

Is Denver finally getting … interesting?

AAron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post

By RAY MARK RINALDI December 22, 2017 At last count, more than 1,000 new people were moving to Denver each month, and a city that’s never hungered much for change is just now chewing over the very visible reasons why being popular can lead to bad things. Unaffordable housing. Crowded roads. Trendy bars that demand you make a reservation just to get a cocktail.

The good things can be harder to see because they can’t be measured in rent prices or traffic counts. Sure, census data can tell us the population is more diverse, but how do we quantify the un-factual truths that we’re better-fed and and more satisfyingly employed, thanks to all the innovative business startups? That it’s more inviting to walk and bike around the city and the art and music are more sophisticated? These are things you just know. A city gets more interesting in ways that sneak up on you. It happens when things come along that push trends just a bit farther than you thought they would go, or when they put a spotlight on just how varied people and their tastes can be.

That is happening more and more in Denver — surprising little evolutions in the urban landscape that make you ask: “Is that really happening here?”

Like the new Women in Kind co-working space in the developing Clayton neighborhood that is devoted to the needs of women. It takes a trend, shared office spaces for small business operators, and adds a layer that acknowledges — and banks on — the fact that we’re not all the same.

Or the new gay bar in Capitol Hill, called Daddy’s, that caters, unabashedly to older gentlemen, giving a subgenre of a subgenre a measure of visibility and respect.

This steady metamorphosis is easiest to spot in the arts. There’s the Black Cube Nomadic Museum, which eschews the usual brick-and-mortar art building, instead developing pop-up performances and exhibitions in places like downtown parking lots or, as it did last month, at the Denver Wastewater Management Facility in Valverde.

Provided by Black Cube Or the Denver Art Song Project, which performs concerts of underappreciated songs by Mozart, Bizet and other composers. We’ve always had plenty of full- blown opera productions here, but no one has ever performed classical music’s vocal repertoire apart from it. Again, it takes a specialty and makes it more special.

In the past year, artist Derrick Velasquez opened a gallery in his basement in Athmar Park, local poet Sommer Browning started one in her garage in Lincoln Park, and writer and critic Yasmeen Siddiqui opened yet another one in her own garage in Park Hill. Diverse people, diverse places, diverse ideas. Interesting.

Denver, of course, has always been an enriching place to live. But like any city that came along later in this country’s progression, it’s always been a something of a follower, content simply to catch up. Remember how excited people were when we finally got an IKEA here in 2011? It’s far different than the no-thanks attitude Denverites have in 2017 about becoming Amazon’s second headquarters.

It’s not that we haven’t been proud masters of our domain, it’s just that we’ve always been, well, distracted. Those towering mountains a few quick minutes to the West have given us plenty to do, a reason to be proud of our place, and we’ve formed our identity around them.

Provided by Denver Art Song Project But the city is changing now, growing rapidly and no one expects that to slow anytime soon. There are more bodies and brains here and, while it could be argued many of them arrived because of our proximity to snowboarding and hiking trails, they’ve also come for our new breweries, our refreshed downtown and a transit system that, finally, makes it possible to live here without a car.

The truth is all of us can’t fit on Interstate 70 west on a Friday evening anymore anyway, it’s time we looked inward. That has manifested itself into a new civic pride that sparks experimental restaurants and innovative design firms.

We’ve always been, at worst, flyover country or, at best, a launch pad to other destinations. Now we are the destination — desirable, in-demand, as sexy as a city might get — and that has boosted our egos and inspired us to attempt new things.

All these newcomers bring with them fresh ideas and a sense of possibility. The Denver Art Song Project was started by tenor Eapen Leubner, who moved here with his family two years ago and was looking for a way to make a living in a place where singing jobs are hard to find. He didn’t see the fact that there was no existing market for art songs as a limit, he saw it as an opportunity. The concerts show off unique talents and they’re drawing decent crowds.

Daniel Tseng, Special to the Denver Post There’s also the simple fact that more people mean a bigger market, something that entrepreneurs Virginia Santy and Melanie Ulle had going for them with Women in Kind. They knew they had a solid product — a workplace where the room temperature is set a little warmer, as studies show women prefer, where kids can come along on unexpected sick days and where the plumbing can handle the particular needs women have monthly and after childbirth — and they knew the city had enough mass to make their idea worth the investment.

It’s hard to imagine Denver supporting these new and offbeat things even a few years ago. But the phenomenal growth and the fresh perspective it brings mean there are enough open-minded, risk-taking, adventure-seeking locals to make non- traditional things work. There are more people looking at and buying art, more women in the workforce and, one supposes, more daddies looking for a cocktail.

This is a terrifically insular and self-respecting way for a city to grow. Basement galleries and art song ensembles don’t really add to a city’s wider reputation. They’re small and progressive, not historic or necessarily worthy of national attention. While they are specialized, they are accessible to all. The galleries are open to serious customers, but also to local families and high school students. The female-centered work space has a few male tenants and welcomes more.

In that way, these efforts help our gentrifying city grow inclusively. They give a portion of our culture over to the overlooked and underserved. They give everyone a place to express themselves, see themselves and have fun. They make our days and nights — and our collective self — more interesting.

Ray Mark Rinaldi

Why no Aurora Theater Shooting memorial may be better than an imperfect one — for now

Helen H. Richardson, The Denver Post

By RAY MARK RINALDI January 8, 2017 Public memorials are meant to set in stone, or steel, or flowing fountains, our collective passage through the traumatic events that shock our culture. They take the long view, separating out our immediate responses — the grief over souls lost, the hysteria around violence and inhumanity — and serve as symbols of our better, centered selves, that thing inside that allows us to process horrors and survive. They are dedicated to the dead but serve the living, and we have come to depend on their gentle versions of history to move us forward, tapping them to cope with the bigness of global things like the Holocaust, and the smallness of personal tragedies like highway fatalities. They contain calamities and help us understand them — the great human cost of triumphs, like that of Abraham Lincoln, or the vulnerability of defeat, like the 9/11 attacks, or to accept that some things will always be in the frustrating middle of win and lose, like the Vietnam War.

This is the great challenge for the proposed memorial to the 2012 Aurora movie theater shootings, which bears the burden of defining the unusual event for eternity. What actually happened the night of July 20, when a lone gunman entered a screening of “The Dark Knight Rises,” unleashed canisters of tear gas and then opened fire with automatic weapons, killing 12 and wounding 70 more?

Was it an act of global terrorism, like 9/11 or the Orlando nightclub shooting, which are linked, accurately or not, to religious fundamentalism? Or was it domestic terrorism, like the anti-government Oklahoma City bombing? Was it fueled purely by racial hatred, like the 2015 attack that killed nine people at an African-American church in Charleston, S.C.? Categorizing tragic events and their motives make memorializing victims easier. We can say they died because they were Americans, or black or gay, Christians or freedom-fighters, and we can call them heroes for taking the fall for all of us, and we can make a monument to their valor and sacrifice.

But the Aurora victims were none of those things. They were just movie fans, really, not soldiers or civil servants. They died because they enjoyed Batman, not because they were on one side or another of a culture war. They weren’t victims of sacred suicide raids or genocide. They were killed because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

How do you make a monument to bad luck?

That’s the $200,000 question for the nonprofit 7/20 Memorial Foundation, which has raised private funds and is currently seeking design proposals for a memorial to be placed in the middle of a “reflections garden” on 2,500 square feet of city- donated land at the Aurora Municipal Center.

The memorial, according to the recent call for proposals, will be “intended as a place where the community and those affected by loss can remember loved ones, seek comfort, strength, peace and hope.” The memorial committee suggests that something like wind chimes may be an appropriate part of the design, or written poetry, or maybe some sort of sculptural seating, though the surrounding garden has already committed to installing benches to honor each of the victims and is working with their survivors on the surrounding landscape. The call is open and, in some ways, open-minded, except for a few rules that establish a tone: no water features, since the garden is ecology-minded and “water-wise” and, to be clear, it “should not advance themes that are controversial, political, intended to shock, or directly reflect the violence experienced or the perpetrator.”

In other words, the committee wants to impose a tender spin on its version of what happened. No shocks to remember just how shocking it all was, no call to political action meant to generate support for better mental health care or gun control, nothing controversial that might question the level of violence in pop culture. The gunman here was insane by all reasonable definitions and received no meaningful treatment. He was allowed to buy massive amounts of ammunition with the click of a mouse. He did the most violent of acts in the middle of the most violent of movie franchises where scores of people are murdered and the perpetrators are, literally, called jokers.

AAron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post This, of course, is standard procedure for memorials. They whitewash as a matter of habit, and this effort is keen to follow suit. It starts with the presumed name of the thing — the 7/20 Memorial — an exercise in clever, 21st century branding, and runs right through with a demand for “positive energy” and an attempt to broaden its tribute beyond the victims, to “not only loved ones lost, but also the strength of survivors, heroes, the community, and all those affected by this tragedy, and by loss.”

This technique — of paying homage to all, and in the vaguest of terms — works for many commemorative efforts. The memorial to the Oklahoma City bombing really is, essentially, a set of chairs designed by Hans and Torrey Butzer in 2000. It invites little more than psychic rest, for both the victims and those who might have been victims for their American allegiance and who tire of mourning the event.

The official 9/11 memorial, designed by Michael Arad and Peter Walker, is simply two giant fountains on the footprint of the demolished World Trade Center towers. They appear as bottomless pits and water gushes downward, deep into the ground. They underscore the shear power of the attack and recognize that terrorism will always take its toll, and that sadness is a never-ending part of the human experience.

They take no political or social stand, because there is none to take. We know why their victims perished. What might they endeavor to say: that war is bad or terrorism terrible? But we have no explanations for why the Aurora victims died. And that begs for a different kind of memorial, and for creative leadership in developing a more authentic and specific response. It’s easy, perhaps too easy, to create a checklist of everything we can think of and award it honor. “Survivors?” “Heroes?” Anyone ever affected “by loss?” Were there really heroes on that night or was that just the way the media steered the story? Isn’t everyone everywhere sad that this happened?

The Aurora shootings were a tragedy and, despite the selfish lawsuits that attempted to say otherwise, they were no one’s fault except the gunman’s. They happened to 12 unfortunate souls who had no choice.

But we do have a collective choice in how we respond and in capturing the power of what that response could be. It should recognize randomness, not valor. It should call out violence for what it is: senseless. It should question easy-to-get rifles and condemn movie horrors for the enablers they are. It should not avoid politics or neutralize madmen or pretend evil doesn’t exist. It shouldn’t erase the facts with a sanitized name; it should name exactly what happened. What does that look like in physical form? What should the design committee look for as the entries come in? How do artists or architects take the long view, and separate out our immediate responses and help us cope?

Maybe they can’t. Maybe our immediate responses are still unfolding. The 9/11 Memorial opened a full a decade after the planes hit their targets. The Lincoln Memorial took three generations to complete. Both events were easier to define than the Aurora shootings.

They got it right by allowing meaning to emerge over time, not by avoiding meaning altogether, and not for the sake of getting the job done because we are all aching to move on. They waited, and if no convincing design emerges by the Feb. 6 deadline of this present call, then maybe this memorial should wait, too.

Why the trashing of “Steve Jobs” is good for opera

“The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs” was meant to make the tech mogul immortal with music

Ken Howard, Provided by the Santa Fe Opera

By RAY MARK RINALDI August 11, 2017

Cancer didn’t kill “Steve Jobs.” Anne Midgette of The Washington Post did it with one bad opera review earlier this summer. Zachary Woolfe of The New York Times buried him shortly after in 16 quickly dispatched paragraphs, 12 of which could fairly be categorized as mud.

The Santa Fe Opera meant to make the tech mogul immortal with the musical biography it premiered July 22, or at least to resurrect him in the flesh-and-blood form of a baritone who could make audiences feel his vitality for years to come. The work, by hot-right-now composer Mason Bates and super librettist Mark Campbell, was deemed a smash before it even hit the stage, with so much advance hype that Santa Fe actually added an extra performance to its summer schedule. That never happens.

But then Midgette dropped into New Mexico for the premiere, leaving behind her a very public note that described the piece as “tedious,” “canned” and “more constructed than genuinely involving.” Woolfe only took issue with the singing, the scenery, the premise, the lyrics, the title, the tone and the music, which he described as “alternating modes of dogged propulsion and layer-cake grandiosity.” No opera should survive such a trashing by two of the country’s most-respected music critics.

And yet.

The Santa Fe production, which continues through Aug. 25, is thrilling audiences that appreciate its energy, its modernity, its relevance, and the fact that it is only 90 minutes long. The crowds flocking to the open-air opera house are giddy before it starts and rapturous as it ends. I talked some of them before and after a performance last week, including several folks under 40, and all were grateful to have an opera that spoke directly to their own history — and incredulous that the thing could get such bad reviews.

Ken Howard, Provided by the Santa Fe Opera At this point, the world doesn’t need another critique of the piece; plenty has already been written, both good and bad, so I’m skipping a formal review. Yet I will say that I don’t disagree with a lot of the things Midgette or Woolfe had to say.

The story, which paints Jobs as a cold-hearted inventor, mean boss and super bad dad — before the love of a good woman reminds him to be human — is a tad convenient. The dramatic structure, which jumps back and forth through time, is distracting. Little things, like giving the show’s only Asian character an expanded leitmotif that sounds Asian-y, are troubling. Oh, and I’m with Woolfe: The official title, “The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs,” is cloying.

Ken Howard, Provided by the Santa Fe Opera

But I’m more in tune with reviews that fell in the reasonable middle. Like Mark Swed’s in the Los Angeles Times, which acknowledged a few problems but deemed the work “winning” and, similar to Jobs’ famous Apple computer products, “full of complex inner workings but simple on the surface, totally user-friendly.” Joining with other critics, I found the opera’s high-tech, projection-based sets dazzling and appropriate for the subject matter; the music fast, furious and forward-looking; the lyrics touching and hilarious both; the acting punchy and the vocals moving, despite the fact that the singers were mic’d to compete with the electronic shadings Bates is known for. That’s unusual in the pure opera world, and it was hard to swallow — until I relaxed about it and just listened. Things sounded fine, and this production, to me, deserves its standing ovations.

In the end, it’s swell when a new piece of art challenges us, gives us things to admire and others to groan over. Unfamiliar objects, by nature, make us uncomfortable, force us to adjust, resist, explore, explode. With “Jobs,” I found this critical disagreement especially welcome. I didn’t love the negative reviews, but I see them as them revealing. They may have said unflattering things about this particular opera, but they said terrific things about opera, in general, circa, 2017.

Such as:

1 Going forward, the drama matters as much as the music. Remember, this is the art form in which over-the-top story lines have been perfectly acceptable for four centuries. Plots turn when lovers put on silly masks, when the gods get a little angry, when heroines suddenly fall on their own knives. Consider: The night before “Jobs,” I attended Santa Fe’s production of the 107-year-old “The Golden Cockerel,” which ends when a giant bird kills a selfish king by pecking him to death — and even that didn’t seem too weird in an opera house.The fact that critics were so concerned about the arc of “Jobs,” maybe even more than the music, shows how much better Ken Howard, Provided by the Santa Fe Opera opera is than it used to be. We’ve come to expect the gritty narratives, genuine character growth and clever lines of such recent opera house winners as “Silent Night,” “The Shining” and “As One.” (All of those, not coincidentally, were written by Mark Campbell. If he took a hit on this outing, it’s because he himself has raised the bar so high.) 2 Opera just might have its first critic-proof hit. Hollywood makes them all the time; badly reviewed products that go on to break box office records, critics be damned. In the classical world, as with Broadway, pans are more likely to keep crowds away and discourage future productions.”Jobs” is so topical, likable and relevant to everyone carrying the miracle of a smartphone in their pockets that bad reviews may not matter. They haven’t crushed the enthusiasm in Santa Fe, and that bodes well for San Francisco Opera and Seattle Opera, which co-commissioned this work and now have to sell it to hometown crowds in coming seasons. If they succeed, new productions will rain down.

3 Criticism is alive and well. The media business is ailing thanks in large part to a growing disinterest in thoughtful reading on the part of the broad public. The result: professional critics are disappearing. There used to be dozens of full-time classical music critics in the U.S.; now there are a handful. Part-timers do what they can, but there are too few professional critics with enough institutional sponsorship to do their homework, take the time to listen, and cover the plane tickets and hotel rooms that are necessary to hear important work in far-off cities. An opera fan might rightly worry that a critic, desperate for more readers as they all are, will hedge opinions or be reluctant to anger esteemed companies or tick off ticket-buyers with deep allegiance to their local opera nonprofits. But Midgette and Woolfe wrote from their heads and their hearts, and reminded us that good critics are still true to the task. Going negative on a crowd favorite makes a critic a target; it takes bravery. Sure, Woolfe may have gone a little overboard (it happens to all critics; Google my name and “mean review” and a few things will come up) but he backed up what he said.

6 Opera keeps producing new stars. In this case, bass Wei Wu, who sang the part of Kobun, Steve Jobs’ cheeky spiritual adviser. Nearly every review singled him out as a show-stealer. Looking good in a bad situation is hard. It’s also career-making. Wu, by the way, studied at the University of Colorado Boulder and has had unrelenting support from the Front Range opera community since he came to this country from China in 2007.

7 Mason Bates may be the missing link. This is a golden age for American opera with so many new commissions debuting and many of them entirely listenable and worthy of future stagings. But they don’t have a contemporary pulse that speaks to the masses.Bates is able to write meaningful music for orchestras and classical voices that also appeals to the pop music fringes. Not dumb pop, the fluff you hear on radio or trite show tunes, but smart, edgy music that uses modern technology and an inclusive world-view of instrumentation to make people listen deeply and think. It’s easy to make fun of his trippy electronics, or dismiss him because he sits in the pit during the show, among the violinists and oboe players, offering digital tricks from a laptop to widen the sound profile. But he’s bringing young people to an aging form, with skill and dignity offered across the divide.

8 The possibilities suddenly feel endless. Contemporary composers, like John Cage and George Crumb, have integrated off-beat noises into classical music for decades now, but there were always physical limits. Digital opens up endless opportunities to remix familiar traditions and, if we are amenable to that, things could get very interesting in the next decade. Or this: Why not a “Steve Jobs” run on Broadway? It’s short, poppy and already amplified. It could actually make a profit, set a precedent. Or this: More nationally ranked opera companies, like Santa Fe, Seattle and San Francisco, taking risks on youthful, experimental outings. There’s plenty of new, not enough weird, on big opera stages. There are many more “Steve Jobs” ripe for music and, yes, sometimes for murder.

For Christo, “Over the River” process was more important than completion

Karl Gehring, Denver Post file

By RAY MARK RINALDI January 26, 2017 A tidal wave of irony washed over Colorado Wednesday when the artist Christo canceled his long-delayed plan to drape fabric over the Arkansas River, saying he didn’t want to complete the project on federal land during a Donald Trump administration.

Christo spent 20 years trying to get the thing done, only to be thwarted again and again by environmentalists who believed installing the 42-mile-long art piece would be bad for both water and wildlife in the region. It’s not unrealistic to think that Trump — who one day earlier approved thousands of miles of oil pipelines across vast tracts of open land — would actually favor the project, as long as there was profit involved, and there would be plenty of that in terms of construction jobs and a multimillion-dollar boost to the local tourist economy.

To quit, out of the blue, and blame politics is pure Christo, another genius move by the international art world’s most revered genius.

For two decades, Christo proclaimed he wanted to make “Over the River” a reality, despite its emotional headaches, its opposition from otherwise very nice and pro- art people and his claim that it had personally cost him maybe $10 million in planning, design, engineering, travel, legal fees and public relations.

But I never really believed finishing the job was all that important to him. What he and his late wife Jeanne-Claude truly wanted when they dreamed up the project long ago was to simply propose it, to begin the action of making it and to see where it ended up. Christo has always valued process over product, means over ends, and the means for “Over the River” went on for two decades. What temporary, public art project can claim such longevity?

! Jens Koehler, AFP/Getty Images It may not have manifested itself in billowy fabric hanging above a rolling river during two summer weeks, but “Over the River” existed in equally valid forms in Christo’s process-first thinking — in sketches by the artist, in permit requests and public hearings, in scores of lectures on the topic, in newspaper accounts and letters to the editor objecting to them, in the 1,686-page environmental impact study he funded, in arguments around countless dinner tables over the merits of an art work that would, no doubt, be beautiful, but would also require 9,000 holes be drilled in the river bank to hold it up.

In 2012, Christo told me his real aim for the project was “to make people think” about art, and it surely did. The work gave Christo countless opportunities to explain his ideas around space, place and material. You can’t actually cancel a project where the goal has already been accomplished.

Helen H. Richardson, Denver Post file

The tidal wave recedes, carrying another bit of irony: That anyone, especially Christo himself, would pretend “Over the River” didn’t succeed. It was one of the most successful public art projects in the last 25 years, more impactful in terms of creating dialogue than his famous “The Gates” project in New York’s Central Park in 2005 or his wrapping of ’ Pont Neuf in 1985. And that goes doubly now that Christo has thrust it into the national conversation about art just as a new round of culture wars is starting.

The move was quickly categorized, by The New York Times no less, as a political act, when just as likely, it had something to do with the fact that he is now 81 years old and understands his time is limited and he has other things to focus on. But he far from abandoned the project Wednesday. With one off-hand comment about Trump, he actually sent it soaring and guaranteed its presence in the cultural dialogue for years to come.

Congratulations, Christo, the cancellation actually prolongs the project in its purest form — as an object of talk — and no fish or frogs, trees or bighorn sheep had to be displaced to get that done.

In fact, with its cancellation, the thing gets even bigger — it becomes “the Art World’s Biggest Protest,” as The Times’ headline declared. It grows into a movement. People who never even heard of the project will likely cite it as evidence of the Trump administration’s incompatibility with culture in America. Christo was always open about his belief in process, though he did not stress it as his major point in presentations. It would not have been smart strategy to let on that he believed the thing was already a success before it was built. But, if you put the question to him directly, as I did in interviews, he would tell you. I once asked him how he described the project to people who are unfamiliar with it. He didn’t talk about fabric. He simply said “our project is the things.” By that he meant the meetings and court filings, the studies and debates, the photo books he made, the insults people slung at him.

And he also meant the very interview we were doing in that moment. It was part of the “Over the River” process and, believe me, it felt that way. Usually, when you interviewed Christo about this piece, it was documented on video or audio or with other people in the room. It was the project happening and you could envision your actions compiled into the record of a historic art event.

It always seemed funny in that way. The journalist being the story. The critic helping to create the thing he eventually hoped to critique. But it all went to understanding the project; it was weird but it helped.

And I don’t believe the story is over. The project had made its way through many hurdles. There were just a few legal decisions remaining and he had the upper hand. But the construction would still take another two or three years to complete after final approval and that’s tough for an octogenarian. Christo may be miffed at the moment. He may not build the project himself. But he is and will be a legend and you can bet others will pick up the idea. Artists make their things though they have no control over them once they are finished — or, in this case, once they are begun, which is equal to being finished — and “Over the River” will live on.

“Mi Tierra” is the most important contemporary art exhibit DAM has produced in years

Joe Amon, The Denver Post

By RAY MARK RINALDI March 4, 2017 For Mexican-Americans, the idea of a border wall between the two countries can be soul-splitting. Instead of encouraging you to be this and that, it wants you be one or the other, to consider which side you stand on.

Personal geography matters, especially for two cultures where nationalism is wound so tightly with identity. Who you are depends on where you are, and a wall dams off the natural fluidity of dual allegiances. “Mi Tierra,” the remarkable show that just opened at the Denver Art Museum, asks 13 Mexican-American artists to confront this notion head-on, and in public. How Mexican are you, it wants to know, and how American? You may live in Texas, or New Mexico or Colorado, but where does your heart place your homeland on a map?

It’s a highly charged question in the current political climate that has an actual wall on its way up, but “Mi Tierra” is not a polemical exercise, even though the artists invited to set up installations in DAM’s Hamilton building lean heavily to the pro- immigration, anti-isolationist left. The works avoid direct protest and instead offer symbolic narratives that tell wide-ranging existentialist stories. And because the pieces are all big enough that you can walk through them, they are powerfully involving — seeing “Mi Tierra” is like watching a movie and being in the movie at the same time.

That is exactly the case with Justin Favela’s “Fridalandia,” which can be fairly described as the world’s biggest, walk-through piñata. Favela has recreated, in human scale, the courtyard of the late artist Frida Kahlo’s house in Mexico City using thousands and thousands of tiny pieces of multicolored paper. There’s a cactus here, a peacock over there, a Virgin of Guadalupe shrine in the middle of it all.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post The scene is not based on her actual courtyard, however, but the one he saw while watching the 2002 American biopic “Frida.” And for background scenery he has reinterpreted the sprawling, overly romanticized landscapes of the revered, 19th century Mexican painter José María Velasco.

With his frilly tableau, Favela backs up the question of identity. What is authentically Mexican, anyway? Or Mexican through the eyes of American pop culture? Or tourists, art collectors or politicians stirring up jingoist sentiments? You want to take a stick to the work and find out what’s really inside.

Jaime Carrejo’s “One-Way Mirror” is less like a movie and more like a dream — even though it uses actual video that is projected directly on two large and opposing museum walls to make its point. One wall has landscape footage of the U.S.; the other has footage of rural Mexico. Down the middle he has constructed a third, artificial wall, covered in acrylic that is sometimes reflective, sometimes transparent — you can only see through it to the other country’s landscape when the lighting hits just right.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post How does all this fuss over borders and cultural divisions prevent us from seeing one another? And how does it shape the egotistical ways we see ourselves? The story continues. Those two pieces offer expressions of identity as different as the two artists who made them — and that turns out to be “Mi Tierra’s” strength. Curator Rebecca Hart, working closely with her contributors, has put together a show with a cohesive theme but a variable tone, and that keeps it on topic without being repetitive.

Just the opposite, really. Every artist here has something unique to say, and some of it is surprising. How Mexican or American is Ana Teresa Fernández? Well, she lives in the U.S. and has for decades, since her family migrated from Tampico. But her piece is concerned almost totally with the interior politics of Mexico.

“Erasure” is centered around a video that has Fernández decked out in a little black dress and stilettos and standing before a black background. Slowly, and with a fat brush, she covers every inch of her body in goopy, black paint — her bare legs and shoulders, her hair, hands and face. She eventually disappears into the scenery, drawing attention to the 43 students who were kidnapped and murdered in Iguala, Mexico, in September 2014.

Most Americans never heard of the tragedy for which many hold the local government responsible. But in Mexico, it remains an open wound. People still protest, maintain memorials and demand accountability.

Joe Amon, The Denver Post Fernández’s “tierra” — at least, the one she presents here — dwells on the southern side of the border. But it’s not a physical place as much as a relentless state of cross-cultural concern. It’s in her head.

Dmitri Obergfell’s place is more tangible and a lot closer to home. He lives just a few miles from the museum and his “Federal Fashion Mart” is the re-creation of a small market, catering mostly to the Latinos in his West Denver neighborhood. The shop sells iconic goods that serve its demographic: religious statues, fancy fake nails, the shiny, chrome bumpers you see on low-rider cars. There is also a shrine to Santa Muerte, the skeletal deity of death whose worship is forbidden by the Catholic Church in Mexico.

Obergfell is exploring his own identity here — his father is Mexican but he grew up without him, connecting only to the family of his Euro-American mother. His search for Mexican-ness lead to places like this, and he has come to understand the physical evidence that sums up the contemporary Mexican-American experience. Retail doesn’t lie: You are what you buy.

The piece works because it is impeccably installed. The linoleum tile squares on the floor look like they’ve been there for years. The glaring fluorescent lights are left unshielded, casting unflattering shadows on everyone who enters — just as it happens in the real stores he mimics.

That says a lot, since installation proves to be the real challenge for “Mi Tierra,” and mostly because of the architect Daniel Libeskind’s angular design for the decade-old Hamilton Building, which is unfriendly to most art and a particular problem here. Walls lean and bend at awkward angles and come together to create corners and shapes that defy the logical placement of art.

“Mi Tierra” seems to be in a constant wrestling match with the building that houses it. Sometimes it wins. For example, Xochi Solis’ multi-colored collages take on unexpected dimensions when placed, as they are, on the uncomfortably canted wall inside DAM’s main stairway.

But just as often it loses. One example: John Jota Leaños’ mesmerizing, animated movie, “Destinies Manifest,” which offers a revised telling of Westward Expansion, has to be morphed into something like a parallelogram to fit the unnatural walls in the room where it is screened. Another: Gabriel Dawe’s “Plexus no. 36” — a marvel, made miraculously with 65 miles of rainbow-hued thread — is crammed into an uncomfortable corner so that it is able to capture natural light from a random window. Joe Amon, The Denver Post The placement has nothing to do with Dawe’s art (which is about taking back his identity as a male while working in fiber, a traditionally female medium in Mexico, where he grew up) and leaves a sense that DAM is trying too hard to right an institutional misstep — to prove its building is not a flub — at the expense of its artists’ authentic visions.

The artists, however, prevail. Every one of them: Claudio Dicochea, with his update of 18th century “caste paintings,” which show how the restrictions of class never really change. Daniela Edburg’s romantic portraits, which link Colorado’s naturally evolving geology — lichen, rocks, cheatgrass — to the evolving ethnicity of the people who migrate here; Daisy Quezada’s porcelain casts of the clothing of actual immigrant children, which makes their stories so personal.

And because all of this work deserves to be mentioned: Carmen Argote’s wonderfully complicated blurring of the lines between art, work and daily life; Ruben Ochoa’s sculptural exploration of infrastructure and place; Ramiro Gomez’s potent tribute to overlooked, Mexican laborers. These pieces, in their own language, answer those original questions — who are you, what are you — with the complex answers they deserve. Identity is in constant motion; it’s not easy to freeze it just because a museum asked you to. But the question is crucial now, as our country aims to separate itself from its neighbor. We may be able to back up trade deals, define citizenship more clearly, prevent families from sneaking into places they’re not allowed, but we cannot seal off the duality of millions of people who can’t help but to be this and that, people for whom choosing a side is undesirable, as well as impossible.

Not everyone’s going to like Dáreece Walker’s in-your-face drawings on display in Colorado Springs

“Force/Resistance” a provocative move in the right direction

Ray Mark Rinaldi

By RAY MARK RINALDI March 23, 2017 “Force/Resistance” is the kind of audacious art exhibit that can get a museum in hot water. It doesn’t hold back for a second on its depiction of police brutality in America, with graphic images of cops pointing guns at kids’ heads, aiming bullets at innocent mothers, pummeling and pulling the hair of suspects who have already been restrained.

The exhibit’s centerpiece, Dáreece Walker’s in-your-face drawings, impart a bold heroism on those who strike back at law enforcement. In one work, a man sits in a lawn chair casually smoking a cigarette. Behind him a police van is a wreck in flames.

The scenes, covering the walls of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, will feel familiar to anyone who watches the news on cable television. The cops are faceless warriors and their victims, all of them, are black. They’re drawn loosely from recent stories of race-related violence that have played out in cities across the country in the wake of deadly police actions against African-Americans.

It’s a one-sided story for sure, the unbridled presentation of a single artist’s personal truth, and a young artist at that. Walker, who is from Colorado Springs, got his masters in fine arts just last year. But the work is raw, powerful and provocative in meaningful ways. It’s also something museum curators tend to avoid — unless they want to anger half their visitors, donors, board members and the people who give out public funding. Oh, and maybe the local riot squad. But the arts center plunges bravely ahead and does what museums do best with this kind of material: It adds context. In this case, Walker’s drawings are paired with paintings by Floyd Tunson, one of the most established and respected artists in the Springs these Provided by the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center days.

Tunson, who is a few generations older than Walker, has been working for years on pieces that touch on the same themes. His multimedia creations cover a lot of subject areas — by no means is all of his work about race — but he’s not afraid to connect skin color and violence in his visceral and often disturbing art. Tunson works in a variety of media — paint, photography, sculpture and installation, though he is well-known for a series of portraits he did in the 1990s that feature, most notably, hyper-close-up faces of young black males, some of them innocent, wide-eyed adolescents. The title of the series, “Endangered,” says a lot about the predicament of this particular demographic in the present-day United States. Several of the portraits are included in “Force/Resistance.”

That fact that Tunson made his pictures decades ago lends extra credence to the work of Walker. It’s a smart curatorial move that keeps viewers from dismissing the younger artist as reactionary or alarmist, or as a simple chronicler of current events. Tunson’s work lays both a historical and art-historical groundwork that places Walker in a line of serious artists who have something to say about the subject.

Provided by the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center

Walker benefits in multiple ways from the pairing. He is a newcomer, and his work is the kind that critics and curators sometimes (wrongly) fail to see. His acrylic-on- vinyl drawings here are straight-forward, comic-influenced, and dripping in blood. They are direct and representational in an era when abstract art rules the game. Unframed and simply tacked to the wall as they are at the arts center, they lack the polish that would get Walker representation at most galleries. But they tell compelling stories in the way many public murals do, using line and shadow rather than detail and color. They appear simple, but can be complicated in ways that are both sly and direct. One piece in the exhibit is a Diego Rivera-style narrative titled “Ferguson to Baltimore” that melds together scenes of violence across both time and geography. It is a whopping 25 feet long; in the center is a black male laid out in a casket.

As for the museum’s bold move, it comes at an interesting time. Last year, the fine arts center — a gem of an institution that served its community as an independent, nonprofit for 80 years — handed itself over to its next-door neighbor Colorado College, which has its own art program. It was a desperate move brought on by the fact that the center was deeply in debt. The merger saved it from ruin.

The change of ownership was trumpeted as good management, though it was suspect from the beginning. Colorado Springs suffers a severe shortage of visual arts outlets — it needs more curatorial visions and voices, not fewer — and this really meant one was going away.

But this exhibit shows the upside of letting an academic institution take the reigns. Colleges are shielded from the ups and downs that cultural nonprofits face and can push boundaries. They don’t have to deal with the same kind of pressures from benefactors. They have a history of sheltering provocative ideas.

The fine arts center has always been top-notch, scholarly, excellent in nearly every way. But it was not a place known for this kind of artistic fearlessness. Who could blame it, down there in conservative Colorado Springs?

The hand-over isn’t quite complete, but Rebecca Tucker, who teaches at Colorado College, assumed the role of museum director in September, and Jessica Hunter- Larsen, who curated “Force/Resistance,” came on board “to develop innovative approaches to curating, and to build educational connections between the museum, the community and the campus,” as a press release promised at the time. So, essentially, the new guard is in charge and, apparently, it means business. “Force/Resistance” works toward all those ambitious goals, and fast. That’s good news for the museum, for Colorado Springs, and for art in all of Colorado.

For photography, a new way forward at RedLine art center exhibit

RedLine’s “Between the Medium” is a fun trip through an art form turned upside down by technology

Provided by Denver Month of Photography By RAY MARK RINALDI March 25, 2017

Photography used to be such a serious act; now, no one takes it seriously. It’s gone from an exclusive enterprise, requiring expensive equipment, hazardous chemicals and the real estate of dark rooms, to a basic part of everyone’s daily existence.

Technology has made photography so easy and pervasive that it is actually replacing language as our primary means of communication. We don’t tell people what we had for dinner; we show them a picture. And the transformation has just begun; there’s a reason the photo-only cellphone app known as Snapchat is currently valued at $25 billion, even though the company that owns it lost $500 million in 2016.

For people who consider photography an art form, the offspring of Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus and Gordon Parks, the revolution has been good and bad. The struggle to set themselves apart from the selfie masses has been humbling, but it’s also generated a new era of self-examination and experimentation.

That becomes clear as you wander through “Between the Medium: Seeing Photographically” at the RedLine art center. The exhibit attempts to capture photography at the height of its 21st century disruption and goes to great lengths in its efforts. Curator Mark Sink has included 29 artists, and he’s only scratching the surface.

But here, you can see the new divisions of photography forming, and that makes the show a fascinating journey for visitors.

The most interesting photographers of the bunch turn out to be a heartwarming surprise — let’s call them the hangers-on, the ones who resist digital manipulation in favor of good, old-fashioned, scene-capturing. They see something interesting, they take a picture. Provided by Denver Month of Photography Only in this exhibit, they’re not stuck in some traditional act. Sink shows us shooters who actually do exist “between the medium.” They’re not engaged in pixel foolery, but they’re certainly influenced by it. A lot of the photos in this show appear to be Photoshopped, but they’re actually just pictures.

Michael’s Borek’s “Treachery of Images” series, for example, looks like he took shots of famous monuments in Washington, D.C., and layered bits of urban architecture on top using a computer. Turns out they are actually just photos of photos of those monuments that have been reproduced on tour buses. He’s a street photographer, not a programmer.

Same with Lars Anderson. At first glance, you think he took photos of factories and industrial sites and afterward, using a mouse and keypad, applied a top layer of something the looks like a fence. But no, he Provided by Denver Month of Photography actually shot his scenes through fences he encountered during his everyday travels.

These photographers are daring us, really, to see real life with the excitement of visuals we’ve gotten used to making artificially. It’s a fun game to play. Are Margeaux Walter’s eyeball-rattling scenes of babies crawling and moms cooking digital constructions or real scenes? They are, unbelievably, real. And what are Catherine Fairchild’s elusive images of loopy yellow and white bits of light and shadow? They are just enlarged shots of fold-up Post-it notes, to be honest.

Sink doesn’t limit his offerings to traditionalists, of course. He acknowledges numerous expansions of the form, including its continued incorporation with painting. That leaves room for the works of Stephen Batura, who makes paintings of photos, and for Andrew Huffman, who paints and draws on top of photos, and for Sabine Pigalle, who makes contemporary photos that look like formal, Flemish paintings from five centuries ago.

There is a bit of wasted wall space in “Between the Medium” — some things that look digitally manipulated just because such acts are possible, and, for some reason, an Andy Warhol, which turns back the clock in a way that threatens to make all this new stuff look like old news. Sink has a generous eye; he can’t really help himself. But that also leaves room for the unexpected, including objects that look back in innovative ways, like Lisa McCarty’s experiments in darkroom drawing and Anne Arden McDonald’s photograms, made without the use of a camera.

It’s also broad enough to allow photography to be a minor player. Jane Hammond’s prints use found photos as part of an imaginary board game. Janice McDonald’s collages are primarily cardboard boxes with paper and bits of shredded photos attached.

Is that even photography? It’s a stretch. But that’s exactly how it goes when an art form is in flux.

The nice thing about this show is that it allows us to see a path forward for photography. Should it resist the new world and stick to its formalist origins of freezing crucial moments — the reason we fell in love with it in the first place? Or should it embrace the democratic revolution sparked by technology, drop its official definitions, and be everything to every one?

Here, the answer is neither. Technology and tradition do a play a part, but it’s the artist’s intellect that counts the most. Photography will live, like painting and sculpture always have, by showing us new ways to see those things that are familiar, not by stopping things but by projecting them in all directions and simply seeing where they land.

In a male-dominated art world, women can still be showcased without being segregated

The exhibit “Her Paris: Women Artists in the Age of ” showcases unfamiliar names from art’s most revered age

Provided by the Denver Art Museum

By RAY MARK RINALDI October 27, 2017 On the surface, “Her Paris” plays out like a bit of nostalgia for the bad old days when women were denied opportunities to study, make and exhibit art solely on the basis of gender. The works on display at the Denver Art Museum, mostly by overlooked female painters from the Impressionist era, are skillfully executed and a joy to behold and evoke a corresponding pity for those poor femmes from the late 19th century who just couldn’t get a break. If only they lived in our own enlightened age of equality for all. Oh, well, let’s just savor them now. But have things really gotten better? The work of men still rules at the auction houses and far outnumbers the work of women held in the country’s largest museums where, published surveys reveal, male directors are paid considerably better then female directors.

And there are these little reminders, sharp jabs that come along not infrequently, that women still get a raw deal. Just down the street, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, there is current group show of 25 artists, just three of them female. Math like that is hard to reconcile.

Still, today’s female artists don’t suffer the same outward discrimination that “Her Paris” painters like , Anna Ancher and Marie Petiet endured in varying degrees — barred from major painting academies, omitted from exhibitions, ignored by critics, even prevented from drawing nude male models.

Nor do they face the same sort of societal pressures that the show’s Louise Abbéma, and others had to work around, like the expectation that they would focus their efforts on domestic scenes and images of children and young women.

And certainly more female artists succeed today, following the path of the few women who emerged as stars from the Impressionist age and whose work is routinely featured in the many exhibitions that revive the period for today’s audiences — and which are frequently blockbusters for the museums that present them.

They make up the limited names visitors to “Her Paris” are likely to recognize. , the best-known of all female Impressionists, is represented with several works, including the popular “Children Playing on the Beach” from 1884, which brings a candid, naturalist feel to a scene of two toddlers having their fun in the sand. Provided by the Denver Art There’s also Berthe Morisot’s 1892 “Lucie Léon at the Piano,” a straightforward depiction of a young, upper-class female honing the skills expected of those in her social station. Louise Catherine Breslau, who carved out serious respect in her day, shows us why with “Tea at Five o’Clock,” which brings an emotional feel to a daily ritual that painters of the time captured regularly.

After that, the recognition factor drops sharply, though that’s what makes the exhibit interesting, in fact, a lot more interesting than most Impressionism shows. It’s not that Claude Monet or Pierre-Auguste Renoir or Camille Pissarro are something to sneeze at, but we’ve seen an awful lot of them in these hyped retrospectives.

We haven’t seen Fanny Churberg and her thundering “Waterfall” from 1877. The talented Finnish painter never got her due and, as the exhibit tells us, gave up her brush just a few years after creating the work.

Nor do we recognize Annie Hopf’s 1889 “Autopsy (Professor Poirier, Paris)” in which the unknown Swiss painter captures a scientist just as his blade cuts into the chest of a corpse.

There are numerous unexpected encounters like this in “Her Paris.” The level of talent is high and the pieces fully represent the interests and methods of painters of the time period who worked mostly in oil on canvas.

The exhibit — a traveling attraction organized by the American Federation of Arts and curated by Laurence Madeline — can be overly positive at times, stressing not the adversity women faced, but their triumph over it in simply getting the work done. It starts out strong with a series of paintings by female artists of female artists. These painters were recording their own history, putting it down on canvas and the work is significant on several levels.

But “Her Paris” is ultimately forced to dwell in the realities of exclusion and discrimination. There are a few notable exceptions, though for the most part we see women painting the things women were supposed to paint: their clothes, their kids, their houses, and all sorts of pretty things, like “The Pink Slippers” that Eva Gonzalès captured in 1879. There’s plenty of triumph in technique, but don’t be fooled; these women had their place.

Exhibits like “Her Paris” try to make up for history’s unfairness by showing evidence that the way we remember things isn’t the way they really were. It is a futile effort in many ways. Men are the historic figures of this particular art age because the times would not have had it any other way. Women were a sideshow, a novelty. This exhibit doesn’t break them free from that. Rather, it reinforces the notion by doing the same thing Paris did a century-plus ago: separate them from men. They remain here, in Denver in 2017, a novelty act. If you want to end segregation, stop segregating. Curate shows that — finally — show women painters alongside men, integrated fully into the checklist of works on display.

That’s probably a good rule, as well, for curators of contemporary art right now. Gatekeepers are more fair to women today because they are sensitive to issues of equity (and because so many of them are women). But exclusion isn’t quite nostalgia yet. Those sharp jabs from galleries and museums do keep coming.

RedLine arts center misses a chance to be relevant

Ray Mark Rinaldi

By RAY MARK RINALDI February 13, 2017 Maybe it’s the national political climate right now, and the fact that a caustic federal government has people marching in the streets. Or maybe it’s a Denver thing, with the recent scenes of artists descending on public meetings to protest their exclusion from the city’s economic boom.

Or maybe I’m just radicalized like everyone else seems to be these days. But walking through the current showcase of up-and-coming residents at RedLine arts center, I found myself wishing for just two things: a key to the gallery and an angry mother elephant. Then I could sneak back in at night, let her do her thing, and hope that the exhibit ends up more like something you’d need to see, in January 2017, from the region’s most promising new talents. As it is, the effort is missing something important.

Not skill; there are more then few thought-provoking offerings from the dozens of artists in the mix. But opportunity.

This city, this country, is riled up, hot, thinking, acting and, most important, reacting, and that is when artists have their opening. So many of the pieces in this exhibit hint that they have something to say about what is going on, about uncertainty, confusion, bravery. But they speak softly at a time when only shouting can be heard. They are wise owls when what we really need is a pissed-off elephant.

This show gets close sometimes to seizing the moment. Like with a work by Sandra Fettingis, one of Denver’s most recognized artists due to her striking and massive, public works in places like the Colorado Convention Center, on the towering Denizen apartments and along the new A Line train to DIA. Her abstract, interconnected, diamond patterns are emerging as a genuine trademark for the city.

At RedLine she challenges her own status quo. Painting her familiar lines directly to the wall and then smashing at the thing with an axe, leaving gaping holes in what ought to be a perfect plane.

But then you see someone has swept up the dusty debris from her hammering into a nice, unobtrusive pile of waste on the floor in front of it. Neat and clean so no one might step through, or feel threatened by the destruction. Her abandon is controlled, more like an inside joke than an actual breakthrough.

It happens again. Stephanie Kantor smashes her own early-career ceramic pots into pieces and remakes them as wall-mounted. mosaic landscapes. Another self- sacrifice that explores collapse and impermanence, and again a neat little pile on the floor. The piece is meant as a mutation, but it is simply muted.

This feeling of reserve permeates the exhibit, titled “Nice Work If You Can Get It.” It is orderly at every turn and in that way a disservice to the work. Ashley Frazier’s shards of broken, recycled glass, remade into something along the lines of tiny stalactites and stalagmites fixed into a series of foot-long concrete forms, might actually be edgy, but it looks tame here. And the things that are tamed on purpose — like Andrew Huffman’s yards and yards of sherbet-colored string woven into a large-scale, corner-mounted sculpture — feel absolutely precious. With its wide aisles, polished floors and impeccable lighting, RedLine looks more like a retail space than an art gallery during a culture war. That’s certainly not a help to Jennifer Ghormley, who has installed an actual pop-up retail space that sells shirts and other textiles printed with the cutest little logo spelling out the word “NASTY.” It’s a Trump reference, of course, and in a toothier show in would bite. Here, the sentiment appears genuinely commercialized for RedLine itself.

Ray Mark Rinaldi

In a sense, curator Daisy McGowan had her hands tied. The annual residents exhibit is what it is: every artist in RedLine’s program — which provides promising young minds with free-ish studio space and a lot of fellowship — gets to show off one piece. It’s curated but, for the most part, the participants and their work are pre-ordained. It’s not so easy putting them together into cohesive statement. Not even for McGowen, who is among the best and brightest in Colorado now. (Her 2016 drawing show at RedLine was so right on that it made my annual Top 10 list).

But here’s the thing: Duty calls in January 2017 and a statement was in order. Things really are that tense right here, right now, and RedLine is in the epicenter, directly in the Curtis Park neighborhood where artists are being shoved out and galleries are closing because of tasteless, heartless gentrification; on the street where the city has rooted out homeless people and confiscated their tents and sleeping bags; in the heart of a city where 100,000 women just stomped and chanted for basic rights; and in a nation where many who identify as minority are suddenly scared of what happens next.

Since 2008, RedLine has made itself an important cultural institution by embracing marginalized communities. It has served poor kids and homeless adults as well as socialites and academics. It has given space for outsiders to come together and find their voice. It was radical when radical wasn’t cool.

RedLine did ask the artists early on to address their economic struggles, but current events got unknowingly out of hand by the time the show opened. Ultimately, it might have got the artists all in a room, apologized for wrecking their annual showcase, and immediately invited every artist who is a “resident” of Denver to hang something on the wall with just a staple gun. Or it might have asked them to burn their best work and create the world’s biggest ash pile. Or hung the stuff backwards or upside down, or sprayed the whole thing with cement or black paint, or just set off the building’s blasted fire sprinklers as soon as the show went up and let it all rot. No doubt, the combined thinking of this brilliant group of artists could have come up with something more creative than that list.

Instead, they took things up most directly in their artist statements. Each of them takes a few paragraphs to tell the story of how hard it is to be an artist, of the difficulty balancing jobs and kids and low salaries and making a life. It’s calculated to humanize their lot and build sympathy for the dreadful pattern of displacement of their peers. And it is true, I believe, that art is one of the most challenging jobs possible. It is a relentless, 24/7, mostly unrewarding and ultra-important pursuit. Being an artist is very, very hard, and about half the people on this planet hate you for even trying.

But honestly, artists are not always effective writers, and none of the tales they tell seem all that different then the struggles most middle-class Americans face every day.

There are good moments in this show, and it remains an important event. RedLine’s program is competitive, and this yearly outing is always a report card on where we are in Colorado and a predictor of the near future. See it. It’s free. The center’s magic is fully on display in the way it coaches artists to push foward. It’s great to see that bold move from Fettingis, and labor-intensive knock-outs from Sarah Rockett, Chris Ulrich, Mario Zoots, Molly Bounds, Ester Hernandez and F.E. Toan.

As far as the statement the show makes, or doesn’t make, I say it’s not too late. RedLine is a brave place with a history of activism. It just needs to activate this effort before it’s down. A few dozen eggs, a case of spray paint and a certain, large mammal might do the trick.