Denver, Colorado offers scenic landscapes, beautiful skies, outdoors adventures, microbrews and art. Throughout March and April, Denver and neighboring areas celebrate their annual Month of Photography (MOP) with hundreds of gallery shows, talks, workshops and collaborative public events.
Inspired by his colleagues (and friends) Fred Baldwin and Wendy Watriss (co-founders of Houston’s biennial FotoFest), Mark Sink, a Denver-based fine art photographer, developed MOP Denver in 2004. “I do most of it on my laptop” Sink told PDN via email. “My wife, Kristen, does the graphics. The model is that each gallery and museum does there part and I gather everything together into one big storm.” With support from RedLine and Colorado Photographic Art Center (CPAC) MOP Denver takes over 180 venues, and produces big projects like “The Big Picture” where work from over 50 cities around the world is pasted on the streets of Denver as well as the cities from which they originated.
The idea to cover the streets of Denver [Slide 10] in photographs was born when artist Tamara Gallegos pasted her images on Sink’s studio door. Shortly thereafter, Sink says, he became aware of street artists Shepard Fairey and JR, who, at the time, weren’t well-known.
“I was introduced to the Xerox plotter machine prints (electrostactic carbon process) and wheat paste glue. I looked up the simple and cheap recipes of flour water and sugar. I made some low cost Kinkos prints, and then we turned a gross abandoned alley into a beautiful gallery space.” Images collected for “The Big Picture” [Slides 3-10] were blown up as large Xerox prints, and displayed inside galleries and posted in (approved) outdoor locations.
In addition to a slew of gallery openings, of particular interest this weekend is Family Saturday Workshop, designed for people of all ages to learn about contemporary art and creative processes, hosted by Dutch artist Sebastiaan Bremer [Slides 1-2] at Dikeou Collection. The Dikeo Collection is a private art collection owned by Denver native Devon Dikeou, along with her brother Pany, who has collected art for almost 20 years. The California Street location features contemporary photographic work by Vik Muniz, Dan Asher, Giasco Bertoli, Luis Macias, Paul Ramirez Jonas and many more.
For more on MOP Denver, please visit their (visually appealing) website.
Related: Smaller Markets Photographers Are Big On: Denver and Boulder, CO (For PDN Subscribers only; login required)
