A week ago Friday first thing we drove down the dirt and up to Pueblo, getting in line for Denver about 10:30;

by a little after noon we were orbiting Danny Libeskind’s “raw risky and radical” ** Denver Art Museum, the most ridiculous [and poorly executed] building of pretty much any purpose I am aware of, anywhere.

DAM is located in Denver’s “Revenge of Post-Modernism” District, so it fits, or doesn’t, right in…

We were there to see “Women of Abstract Expressionism” and although not in the show [iinside and only painters]  you couldn’t get a much more impressive woman artist of that era than Beverly Pepper [B. 1922 and still keeping the guys shit-scared];

After lunching on museum quality enchiladas we crossed the bridge from the old wing which, despite resembling a Norman castle crudely extruded from a sloppily programmed 3D printer, is rumored to have seven floors of reasonably rectilinear spaces for the collections…

whereas the Bridge, an elongate aerial lobby replete with interactive playpits where kids can  entertain themselves while parents check their email, leads directly to the funhouse of digital interactivities said to have doubled the available exhibition space, although how usable that doubling might be might be debatable.

Right off the bridge a beguiling alcove of western landscapes appeared, but the side effects of viewing canvases hung on chaotically careening surfaces forced us, in avoidance of further gratuitous vertiginousness, to flee to the fourth floor where the Women were installed in a Merzbau-like attic..

which despite having some actual vertical walls was still confusing to navigate.  Nonetheless each of the dozen tough, tenacious and ambitious participants*** was at least given an alcove [or corner] of her own for what were often some very powerful paintings.  The catalog profiled many others, known and unknown to us, with the aim of correcting the historical record seventy years after critics and curators had written them out of the AbEx story.  A major accomplishment, this, all the more remarkable for rising phoenix-like from the damage wrought a decade ago when this blatant, if inept, ripoff of Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall proved so expensive that after covering its “raw risky radicalism”, spendy specified titanium and complicated structural steel there was little left for finishing spaces already lamentably ill-suited for the installation or experiencing of most artworks, let alone for staff or programming ****

Done with all that we decamped to Wazee Street and retired to our quiet hotel until the day cooled…

…then hit the streets, overdressed among throngs sporting cargo shorts but under-equipped as many were mysteriously pulling wheeled carry-ons.

We walked to the Museum of Contemporary Art, which was opening three summer shows, and stayed long enough to sample both the exhibits and festivities before returning through the tourist crowds and Friday’s circus at the station [neither shown] to connect with the Hotel’s Escalade…

which dropped us somewhat south on Santa Fe where we plunged into even denser Denver crowds at the Center for Visual Arts’ debut of “Colorado Women in Abstraction”, a curious counterpoint in both context and content to those uptown “Women of Abstract Expressionism” from sixty years ago .

This was a much anticipated exhibit, local and vast, wherein Linda was one of only three contemporary sculptors among a crowded field of females working for the most part in the extremely crowded field of what might be delicately termed decorative abstraction.  The opening was enthusiastically and utterly mobbed with a predominantly feminine crowd of all ages, sizes and persuasions, admittedly obscuring any masterpieces that might have been present on the walls.

After a couple of circuits through the congenial multitudes  we called for extraction and waited in the dusk for the Escalade, which dropped us at The Kitchen for dinner, after which a short walk home brought us to CNN and confused news of the ‘coup’ in Turkey, live.

Come morning Fox had a medal-bedecked Negro in some sort of uniform pontificating as to how Obama has done nothing about Turkey, Nice, terrorism, or anything nice, ever…and if that’s about scary enough for you, Donnie’s your guy.

With that in mind we walked a block to the station for breakfast while farmers set up their Market and hunky paramedics carried in armloads of puppies hoping for homes [not shown].

Barely escaping the puppies, we were in line before nine for the grittier south; Coal Train Liquors in Colorado Springs being the first stop [actual reflection of actual coal train in window thereof]…

the rest were in…

Pueblo…

culminating at Jorge’s Sombrero; come for the colors,

stay for the food…

and then home to the [not much cooler] mountains at last

All those Abstract Women, Women in Abstraction, MCA and Daniel Liebeskind’s House of Horrors receding into memory…but not the puppies.

M

* I got so bogged down in nasty thoughts about the damn DAM that I finally shunted a few of them off to the side; if anyone has an appetite for more, just ask…

** HIS words; for all seventeen you can listen to the TED talk but for me 18 minutes of Totally Extraneous Discourse, particularly coming from a Certified International Narcissist, is simply too annoying to contemplate.

***Other traits common to their fiercely intellectual coterie included cultural sophistication, independent wealth and…drop-dead gorgeousness.

****The utterly lame execution of the exterior skin and interior are inexcusable; having perpetrated some pretty inept drywall in my time I know it’s possible to correct the latter [well, given the shoddy cost-cutting on materials, maybe not] but the mucked-up Titanium will live in infamous perpetuity as a most expensive mistake.