Past Exhibitions

Our first temporary exhibition of namesake Vance Kirkland’s work in 20 years is co-curated by Founding Director & Curator Hugh Grant and Deputy Curator Christopher Herron and features examples from eight series of the visions of Kirkland’s cosmos from 1954 to 1981.

JUNE 17, 2022–JANUARY 8, 2023

This exhibition explored the relationship between Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture and decorative art, through Kirkland Museum's permanent collection. Wright believed in the concept of “a total work of art,” with the accessories and furnishings of a building complementing the architecture to create a unified whole. Decorative art objects from around a dozen of Wright’s building projects, including the Imperial Hotel (Tokyo), Price Tower (Oklahoma) and Austin House (South Carolina), are part of the permanent collection of Kirkland Museum. Wright designs at Kirkland Museum reflect the range of his work in Arts & Crafts, Art Deco and Modern styles.

MARCH 3–APRIL 10, 2022

Kirkland Museum announces the repatriation of two original windows from the Museum’s collection to their original context in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Martin House (built 1903–1905) in Buffalo, New York. Currently on display near the east entrance of Kirkland Museum, the “light screens,” as the architect called them, will return to the Martin House in 2022.

JANUARY 21­–APRIL 3, 2022

Kirkland Museum invites you to early 1900s Austria to revel in the influence of architect and designer Josef Hoffmann (1870–1956) on the Vienna Secessionist movement and subsequent Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshops). Hoffmann was integral to the advancement of modern art, design and architecture. 

August 27, 2021–January 2, 2022

Learn more about this lesser-known design movement through an exploration of common motifs used in designs from the Aesthetic Movement (c. 1865–1900) and the influence of British designer Christopher Dresser (1834–1904).

January 22–February 14, 2021

Kirkland Museum’s collection of Colorado & regional artworks continues to grow. To celebrate moving into a new year, Kirkland Museum featured newly-acquired and never-before-seen works from the Colorado & Regional Art collection.

VIRTUAL EXHIBITION; In-person exhibition closed January 3, 2021

This exhibition is on view at Kirkland Museum through the end of 2020 in person or can be enjoyed as a virtual experience. The exhibition highlights and explains some of the processes and techniques used to create fine art prints, illustrated with examples by some of the great printmaking artists in Colorado history.

VIRTUAL EXHIBITION

See what Kirkland’s Colorado artists have been up to! Earlier this summer we reached out via email to artists with work currently on view at Kirkland Museum and asked these questions: Are you currently making art? Where are you working? Are you doing any work that is a direct response to the pandemic? We’ve gathered their replies and are happy to present them here.

VIRTUAL EXHIBITION

"More is more, less is a bore” —Hugh Grant and Robert Venturi
You’ve probably heard Mies van der Rohe’s quotable summary of the Modernism movement, “less is more.” Architect Robert Venturi, sometimes hailed as the father of Postmodern architecture (though he disliked the term), riffed on Mies’s statement, proclaiming “less is a bore.”

VIRTUAL EXHIBITION

In computers, a “byte” is a unit of data made of eight zeros and ones that represents a character such as a letter or number. As in the computer world of bits and bytes, Kirkland Museum groups smaller pieces together to create a larger, unified whole. For this virtual exhibition, we return to our earlier Art in Small Bytes concept and ...

Virtual Exhibition

With travel restricted due to COVID-19, kick off your summer with some armchair travel, vicariously exploring Vance Kirkland’s time in Italy. Vance Kirkland’s Travels Vance Kirkland (1904–1981) travelled widely throughout his artistic career, often with his wife Anne. He first travelled abroad to Europe in the summer of 1930. He took many trips to New York City, where he was ...

Virtual Exhibition

While social distancing at home, we are all hungry for glimpses of normalcy and things we miss from our previous experiences. We are spending more time with digital bytes of data to connect and learn virtually. In computers, a “byte” is a unit of data made of eight zeros and ones that represents a character such as a letter or ...

Virtual Exhibition

Pull Up a Chair: A Selection of Chairs from Kirkland Museum’s Permanent Collection Chairs have long been admired for both form and function. What some see as simply a place to sit, others imagine as a work of art or engineering marvel. Over the years, Kirkland Museum’s Founding Director & Curator Hugh Grant has amassed a stunning collection of chairs ...

July 19–August 25, 2019

Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art presents Pastime / Past Time, an interactive pop-up exhibition where visitors are invited to step back in time. Play architect by creating a structure with Lincoln Logs®, originally designed by John Lloyd Wright, son of famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright, while sitting at an original table and chairs all designed by husband and wife team Charles (1907–1978) and Ray Eames (1912–1988). The exhibition also includes midcentury modern clocks by Irving Harper and George Nelson & Associates, suggesting “past time.” Inspired by the Denver Art Museum’s summer exhibition, Serious Play: Design in Midcentury America, this pop-up exhibition at Kirkland Museum connects visitors to playful objects designed for the American home.

September 6, 2019–January 12, 2020

Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art and the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities present a collaborative exhibition titled Colorado Abstract +10: A History & A Survey at both locations to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the stunning book, Colorado Abstract: Paintings and Sculpture. Originally published in 2009 by Fresco Books with a foreword by Hugh Grant, notable art writers Michael Paglia and Mary Voelz Chandler highlight the history and continuing tradition of abstraction by artists in the state. The exhibition, Colorado Abstract +10: A History & A Survey, will be split with Kirkland Museum displaying works from the historical section of the book and the Arvada Center displaying a contemporary survey of the work in the book as well as additional artists working in abstraction that have greatly impacted Colorado’s art scene.

March 22–July 14, 2019

Kirkland Museum is pleased to feature a retrospective of Barbara Locketz (1927–2017), whose artworks include oil paintings, prints, paper and metal collage, metal and acrylic sculpture, jewelry and textiles. She was a student of Vance Kirkland while completing her MA at the University of Denver and later taught there from 1964 to 1971. She exhibited her work throughout Colorado and the American Southwest, New York and Mexico.

January 25 - December 31, 2019

2019 marks 100 years since the opening of the Bauhaus school in Weimar, Germany. To mark this anniversary, Kirkland Museum is highlighting objects from our permanent collection created by designers who were once teachers or students at the famous art and design school, including Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Marianne Brandt.  The collection includes work by eleven artists ...

August 24, 2018 - January 6, 2019

Co-curated by Hugh Grant, Founding Director, and Christopher Herron, Deputy Curator, with a catalog essay by Stan Cuba, Associate Consulting Curator Elizabeth Yanish Shwayder (1922–2022) has created hundreds of sculptures and executed a number of public art commissions in the Rocky Mountain region. She came to Colorado in 1945. Her sculptures have been shown widely in galleries in the United ...

March 10 - June 17, 2018

Near and Far presents 86 total prints comprised of a selection of 62 images from among the more than 1,000 in Kirkland Museum’s extensive collection focusing on Colorado and surrounding states, together with 24 of the canonical printmakers assembled by prominent Denver art collector-patrons, Jan Mayer and her late husband, Frederick Mayer. As part of the Kirkland’s mission of showcasing ...

Through May 1, 2016

Curated by Hugh Grant New Explorations in International Design 1878–2000 highlights our international design collection, recognized as one of the most important displays in North America, from the last quarter of the 19th century through the 20th century. Major, new acquisitions are integrated into the Kirkland’s salon settings. Since the opening of Phase 1 on November 23, 2012, 76 extraordinary ...

Through May 1, 2016

Co-curated by Hugh Grant and Christopher Herron Kirkland Museum showcases the nationally important art history of Colorado. For this exhibition, the two main level exhibition rooms have been displayed with works from the 1870s to 2000s in a timeline from realism to pure abstraction. The exhibition draws from the museum’s unparalleled and still growing collection of over 6,000 works of art by ...