Denver Art Museum unveils 2025 collection

Mori Tetsuzan (1775-1841) was born in Osaka and was adopted by the famous animal painter Mori Muneizumi, continuing Muneizumi’s artistic lineage. Perhaps at the urging of his uncle, Mori later studied with Maruyama Ōkyo, founder of the naturalistic school that bears his name. Mori Tetsuzan was appointed as the official painter of the Kumamoto Domain and brought the Maruyama style to the Kanto region. Mr. Sen is known for combining realism with the decorative, such as this set of four sliding doors with two tigers painted on one side and birds on the other.

Despite her talent, sculptor Camille Claudel’s artistic achievements have long been overshadowed by her tragic life story: her relationship with her teacher and lover Auguste Rodin, and her confinement to a mental hospital in the final decades of her life. This intimate sculpture, conceived after her breakup with Rodin, represents her determination to differentiate her own work from that of Rodin and is one of Claudel’s few commercially successful works. It eventually came in 65 different versions, some of which, like this one, doubled as lamps.

The subject of the Denver Art Museum’s 2025 survey is Tokio Ueyama (1889-1954), who immigrated to the United States at the age of 19 and studied art in San Francisco, Southern California, and Philadelphia. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he and his wife, Suye, were incarcerated at the Granada Relocation Center (known to internees as Camp Amache), a concentration camp for Japanese Americans in Colorado. Prior to the release of the work in 1945, Ueyama taught adult art classes to 150 students and continued to create paintings, including this sensitive portrait of a woman.

After being exposed to European geometric abstraction, the Venezuelan-born painter and sculptor Jesús Rafael Soto (1923-2005) moved to Paris in 1950, where he lived and worked until his death. In France he became a leading practitioner of kinetic art (art that moves or appears to move), inviting viewers to enter and move around his sculptural works. Soto’s paintings are closely related to his kinetic artworks, which also rely on the participation of the viewer for effect. For example, when one observes it, it appears to pulsate and vibrate.

In this wall painting, Guatemalan-born, Los Angeles-based artist Jackie Amézquita explores the long-term devastating effects of banana plantations on the people and ecology of Central America. To accomplish the task, Amezquita placed the bananas on copper bars and covered the fruit with a plastic dome. Rotting bananas corroded the metal, leaving marks on its surface, while fruit flies shuttled between domes through plastic straws.

Since he began using emerging software such as Photoshop in his screen printing works in the 1990s, American artist Xu Tishan has begun to imagine how digital technology will change our visual world, our consciousness, and even our bodies. Since then, rapid advances in computer imaging and 3D printing have given artists the tools needed to create hybrid pieces like this one, which combines silicone protrusions with an enveloping digital “skin.”

Dyani White Hawk, who is of Sicangu Lakota, German and Welsh ancestry, is known for beaded sculptures and paintings that highlight the role Native American art has played in a history of abstraction that until recently was considered the domain of white artists. Her use of beadwork particularly emphasizes the artistic talents of indigenous women, which are often undervalued in the Western canon. her ten-foot-tall column sculptures visitComposed of beaded strips, it pays homage to the vertical sculptures of George Morrison (Grand Portage Ojibwe, 1919-2000) and Jim Denomie (Ojibwe, Lac Courte Oreilles Band, 1955-2022).