NEW DISPLAY ON VIEW
BUSEKI Suishin 武関翠心, Flower Basket (hanakago 花籠), about 1920–40. Split smoked bamboo (susudake); 10⅞ × 18 × 17¾ in. Gift of Diane and Arthur Abbey, New York, 2024.727. Photo © and courtesy of Kagedo Japanese Art.
Grass Scripts
Bamboo Art from the Abbey Collection
Martin Building, Level 5
Grass Scripts: Bamboo Art from the Abbey Collection delves into how pioneers of modern bamboo in early 1900s Japan sought recognition for their millennia-long tradition as art rather than as craft.
Through modern innovations of form and technique, lyrical titles, and signatures, these masters of bamboo brought their own hands—wrote their own selves—into the bamboo work of art. This exhibition was made possible thanks to the generous gift of bamboo art from Arthur and Diane Abbey.
To learn more, click here.
Sarah Sze, Sleepers, 2024. Mixed media, paper, strings, video projectors, and aluminum; Dimensions variable. Denver Art Museum: Modern and Contemporary Art acquisition funds and support from David Gill, Nisha and Viraj Mehta, and Takeo Obayashi, 2024.897.1-3.
Fuse Box: Sarah Sze
On view through July 2026
Hamilton Building, Level 4
This summer, we are proud to debut Sleepers, a recently acquired new media installation by internationally acclaimed artist and 2003 MacArthur Fellow Sarah Sze.
In Sleepers, a six-channel video installation, moving images are projected onto over 300 hand-torn paper screens suspended from parallel lines of string. Sze’s visuals of landscapes, still-lifeism and portraits celebrate the mundane and the extraordinary, the personal and the universal, the eternal and the ephemeral, exploring our relationship with an ever-changing digital world.
Since the late 1990s, Sze has created expansive and idiosyncratic sculptures that begin with fractal-like compositions and explode into architectural space. Suffusing her dynamic constellations of everyday objects and materials with moving image projections, Sze conflates physical and digital environments to bring us closer to our current reality. To create Sleepers, the artist filmed and recorded using her iPhone and culled from various online stock footage libraries. Sleepers is Sze’s first artwork with recorded and edited sound, with everyday life serving as the primary focus of her work.
Fuse Box is a project space dedicated to the presentation of significant new media artworks created by artists recognized for their pioneering practices in film, video, sound, animation, and computer programming, including gaming, internet art, virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, machine learning, and other nascent technologies.
To learn more, click here.
Arts of Asia Collection
Shiva Holding a Trident, late 500s, Rajasthan, India, stone, height: 18.75 in, 47.6250 cm. Accession Number 1982.15. Credit Line: Funds from Ruth Luby, Dorothy Hietler, Fay Carter & Norman Degan in loving memory of their parents,Nellie & Jesse Shwayder,& acquisition challenge fund.
Ongoing
Originating with a major gift from Mr. Walter C. Mead in 1915, the Asian art collection is one of the earliest at the Denver Art Museum. It encompasses rare and important artworks from East Asia (China, Korea, and Japan), South and Southeast Asia, and Central and West Asia. Its holdings of some 7000 objects span nearly six millennia, from prehistoric to contemporary art. The collection boasts strengths in Chinese textiles from the Qing dynasty, South and Southeast Asian sculpture, ceramics from across the region, East Asian bamboo art, as well as Japanese Edo period painting and twentieth- century prints.
The reimagined Arts of Asia galleries showcase a breathtaking display of over 800 artworks collectively tracing visible and invisible links across time and space in the arts of Asia. Masterpieces include paintings by Edo master Itō Jakuchū, Northern Wei sarcophagus bearing animals of the cardinal directions, a ninth century BCE Assyrian bas-relief, and a Chola dynasty Dancing Śiva. Interweaved throughout are works by modern and contemporary artists such as Golnaz Fathi, Xu Bing, and Hamada Shoji.
The galleries also integrate exciting educational and interactive components, from immersive audiovisual assets to the well-loved touchable Ganesha sculpture, the remover of obstacles, and bringer of good fortune.
To learn about current works on view, click here.
