TROUBLE VOL 1 No. 3 DEC 2021 - Denver Street Talk

I was asked by artist publisher Matthew Rose to send a selection and essay on Denver's street art. My focus was on work near and dear in my orbit and eye-catching work with a strong message and fine craft. I sent several hundred images that they had to painfully trim down to a dozen or so. The editors were overwhelmed by the quality of the work sent, Cheers to the artists and the institutions that support us. This assignment inspired me to work on a larger and more far-reaching survey and documentation of our current state of street art. This small personal overview is just a tiny sample of Denver's multileveled street art community. I have hundreds of more artists to share.

For now ......

TROUBLE VOL 1 No. 3 DEC 2021

Fabric head - Tiana Graves @tea_ah_nuh at the @thetempledenver - @the_big_picture_colo

 Mendala bomb -  @Johnathan.Saltz and @plusdashplush at Crema Cafe @crema_dnvr -  @rinoartdistrict

Disability Rights -  Valerie Rose @hellovalerieros and blind artist Duplessis Art @duplessis.art - @rinoartdistrict

Snake head-  Casey Kawaguchi  @caseykawaguchi  @rinoartdistrict

HOPE - Koko Bayers @kokonofilter - @rinoartdistrict

Red Handshake - @theunpersonproject -  @susana_moyaho & @andreatejedak - @the_big_picture_colo

Spray painting - Thomas Evans - @detour303 - @rinoartdistrict

Crowd laying down protesting Denver - Jenna Rice - I Cant Breath - @redricephoto - @the_big_picture_colo

                                                

White cutout figures - @theunpersonproject -  @susana_moyaho & @andreatejedak

@the_big_picture_colo

Profile with notes - Sandra Klein - Inner Memories - @sandra_klein_photography - @the_big_picture_colo

Power and Equality - Shepard Fairey @obeygiant - @rinoartdistrict

LHOOQANON - Atomic Elroy @atomicelroy - @the_big_picture_colo

Gold Halo -Thomas Evans - @detour303 - @rinoartdistrict

Group wheat paste wall -  Marna Clarke Photography @marnaclarke Anissa Malady @lbryvxn @scrawledinthemargins - Ron Cooper- Kristen Hatgi kristenhatgisinkphoto - @the_big_picture_colo

Alley captures untitled various artists .. center photo image of back East Side Juan Fuentes @thewritejuan   @rinoartdistrict - @the_big_picture_colo

Last image: Alley captures of untitled various artists - @rinoartdistrict

TROUBLE VOL 1 No. 3 DEC 2021... The Merry Xmas Climate Change Disaster Issue with Obits & Cartoons! Free! 

Download here: http://concretewheels.com/trouble/trouble.htm 

 Enjoy! Be safe! Be kind to each other! Please share. 

trouble
trouble is a magazine
it appears three to four times a year
it's mostly about trouble
http://concretewheels.com/trouble/trouble.htm

Thank you, Matthew Rose 
@mistahcoughdrop

#Denverstreetart

More information on the artists and Denver's resources for street art support submission opportunities:

https://rinoartdistrict.org/art/murals

https://denverpublicart.org/public-arts/

https://www.instagram.com/the_big_picture_colo

https://www.redlineart.org/

https://www.instagram.com/thetempledenver

https://cpacphoto.org/

#wheatpaste

Denver: Street Talk

Denver is the no coast art city. Land-locked, a mile high, surrounded by mountains and inhabited by hippies, artists, hedge fund traders and snowboarders (among others), Denver might have more street art plastered and painted on its buildings and alleyways than other city in America (aside from New York, perhaps). I am sharing but a tiny sample.

Throughout the last fifty years, Denver’s vibrant visual culture has been born and reborn out of a hands-on free expression wild west independence. In this spirit, a true DIY underground culture emerged braced by dozens of art centers, galleries and museums across the city (and the state). Young people found a voice in art and music and performance fully

supported by the city. Rhinoceropolis was such an incubation venue that inspired countless young creatives more than any art or scholastic institution in the region.

Sadly Rhinoceropolis recently shuddered, a victim of gentrification. An age old story: Artists arrive first, followed  by real estate developers; mass exodus of artists who can no longer afford to live in their chosen neighborhoods. Rhinceropolis foreshadowed and inspired the art district named RINO (River North) where hundreds of street artists and the creative class now flourish; but many artists are now are in the retreat.

Currently, though, a wide range of street art is healthy in Denver, thanks to generous support by RINO Art District, RedLine Community Center, The Temple Artist Haven and The Big Picture wheat paste street art project.

In early December I took a long walk around the RINO Art District to explore and catch up on its current street art.  In one alley I smelled fresh spray paint in the air and I came upon one of our most celebrated street artists “Detour.” This spray can genius was just starting a new portrait and a crowd had formed to watch him unwind his magic.

Like most modern western cities, Denver is experiencing growing pains in all aspects of its economic and social and cultural bones. In that process, cultural incubation centers are typically the first to be pushed out. But some developers have begun to understand the importance of art and culture on the city walls – and even figured out how to profit by using artists and their talent in creating value in revitalizing neighborhoods, adding a hip and fresh take on buildings and generating a new atmosphere in developments, that ironically, artists could never afford.

Marrying a developer's interests and income with an artist’s nature for tattooing social consciousness on the city’s skin, has made for an uncomfortable but compelling visual – and reality. Street art in Denver is living that fine line.

The future for all this marvelous visual poetry remains a question mark. Will developers change their minds and whitewash it all? Will the city suddenly turn on its artists and pass an ordinance outlawing such artwork? We hope not. I passionately believe we do need to nurture culture and let DIY spaces incubate emerging talent. 

– Mark Sink, Denver, Colorado. December 2021

@marksink   www.gallerysink.com

Aspen Times - In Aspen with Andy Warhol

 Aspen Times December 3rd, 2021

In Aspen with Andy Warhol

Denver photographer Mark Sink discusses his local adventures with Andy Warhol

Andrew Travers    atravers@aspentimes.com

Photographer Mark Sink calls this portrait “Andy Warhol, Mountain Man.” Shot during a visit to celebrate New Year’s 1982-83. (Mark Sink)

Pop artist Andy Warhol’s many visits to Aspen will get a lot of attention this winter, as the Aspen Art Museum hosts the massive, museum-wide survey “Andy Warhol: Lifetimes” (opening Friday, Dec. 3).

“Andy Warhol: Lifetimes”

Aspen Art Museum

Opening Friday, Dec. 3 (through March 27, 2022)

aspenartmuseum.org

Warhol was here as early as 1956, at the outset of his exhibiting career, when he hung what is believed to be his first show outside of New York City at the Four Seasons in Aspen. He kept coming back through the 1980s, including a run of New Year’s Eve visits from 1981 to 1984 — snowbound and celebrity-studded adventures, which he documented meticulously in his diaries.

Denver-based photographer Mark Sink was a frequent companion to Warhol on his Aspen visits and worked with Warhol in New York and at Interview magazine for about seven years after a charmed meeting during Warhol’s summer 1981 Colorado visit.

In anticipation of Aspen’s winter of Warhol, I recently drove to Denver to meet Sink and talk about his Warhol days in Aspen and beyond. Seated in a nook of the home he bought shortly after Warhol’s 1987 death when Sink return to Colorado, with an afternoon breeze blowing in, he browsed a photo album of images from the Warhol years.

Sink, now 62, may be one of the great conversationalists in the Rockies, sharing stories and asides, occasional barbs and frequent creative insights. He’s enjoying looking back these days, sorting through his own journals and photos for an ongoing book project about his years at the red hot center of contemporary art and Warhol’s scene.

“I’m in legacy mode,” he said. “I’d just like the proof that I was there.”

Sink had unique insight into the mix of glam and genius that was Warhol’s ‘80s milieu, photographing Warhol at work, assisting him on projects and accompanying him on some legendary nights (he had his camera along for a dinner with Warhol, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards at the Odeon in Manhattan during its 80s heyday).

It all started four decades ago on the campus of Colorado State University in Fort Collins.

Sink, 22, was putting himself through school at Metro State University in Denver, developing a photography practice and racing bikes while soaking up what he could of the art scene from Denver (including going to see Warhol movies at the indie cinemas on Broadway, he recalled). When a friend told him Andy Warhol was coming to talk at Colorado State in late summer 1981, Sink knew he had to be there.

Warhol had come to Carbondale and Aspen to visit collectors and friends John and Kimiko Powers before heading to the school for a talk and the opening of a solo exhibition there. (Warhol also visited The Aspen Times newsroom on that visit, a story for another day.)

Emboldened by his youth, Sink poked around campus hoping to find Warhol and, by chance, he did: the iconic visage, in sunglasses and wig, seated all alone in a classroom signing posters of his famed society portrait of Kimiko Powers, his handlers having run out to get coffee or food.

Warhol after digging out from the New Year’s Day 1983 snowmobile crash. “He was so happy to be there,” photographer Mark Sink recalled. (Mark Sink)

Sink simply sat down and started helping Warhol sign them and they got to talking about Sink’s photography and life in Colorado. A sleekly built and muscular mountain kid, Sink tantalizingly pulled down his shorts to show off a gnarly road rash from a bike crash that ran down the length of his right side-body and hip. Warhol was intrigued.

“He said, ‘Oh, you do photography? Interview is my greatest magazine,’” Sink recalled. “I said, ‘I wish it was more in color’ and he said, ‘Oh! You should work for Interview!’ I was on the masthead the next month.”

Warhol would soon invite Sink to New York to work in The Factory and shoot for Interview.

Sink also served as a sort of mountain ambassador for Warhol, joining on multiple trips to Aspen. The trips included skiing Panda Peak — where Warhol spotted baseball star Reggie Jackson — and shopping and party-hopping.

Sink was among the Warhol Aspen entourage who rang in 1983 at Jimmy Buffett’s “all country-western” New Year’s Eve party that included Jack Nicholson with Anjelica Huston, Barry Diller and Diana Ross.

But Sink’s memories include more modest evenings, like TV dinners and heated glazed donuts at Baby Jane Holzer’s place on Castle Creek Road or going out for Mexican at La Cocina.

On New Year’s Day 1983, the group went snowmobiling in the Maroon Creek Valley, with Warhol and boyfriend Jon Gould at one point crashing off a cliff (there were no major injuries).

Jon Gould and Andy Warhol on their snowmobile outing from T-Lazy-7 Ranch up the Maroon Creek Valley on Jan. 1, 1983. (Mark Sink)

“I thought Jon was trying to kill me,” Warhol wrote in his diary.

The incident is memorably documented in Sink’s photos of a giddily smiling Warhol digging out from the crash. (Sink is proud that so many of his photos show Warhol smiling and “unguarded.”)

“I had zoomed past Andy and Jon dragging my hand in the snow,” Sink wrote of the snowmobile incident. “This caused snow to cover Jon’s goggles; he lost control crashing off a cliff with Andy falling off the back.”

Warhol was often baffled by the mountain lifestyle Sink embodied. During one Aspen trip, Sink and a friend did an overnight ski mountaineering trip to East Maroon Pass. When they returned from the winter camping trip, Warhol insisted they were playing a joke on him.

“Andy just wouldn’t believe it,” Sink recalled. “He insisted, ‘You weren’t sleeping out there. It’s like zero degrees out there.’”

Warhol attempting to get back to the trail after a New Year’s Day snowmobile crash with boyfriend Jon Gould. (Mark Sink)

Some of the decadence of the Aspen trips rung empty, though: “Andy was kind of bored. I saw him as, like, a bored wealthy housewife looking for glamorous things to do.”

Young and brash and interested in his own path as an artist, Sink resisted the pull to give over his whole life to Warhol even after he went to New York.

“I didn’t want to be one of the hanger-on Factory kids,” Sink said.

He kept his independent photography practice and found success in photographing artwork and artists of the day (Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Rene Ricard were among his subjects). He shot for Interview and Circus magazine and took on projects under Warhol. He wonders now how much more he might have learned had he gone full-bore at the Factory.

“If I could do it all again, I think I’d just go be a Factory kid,” he said. “I’d park there like, ‘Whatever you need, I’m here.’”

The more time he spent in Warhol’s orbit, the more depth he found in the man and artist.

“After a while I started to see the genius in Andy,” he said. “His brilliance in his art knowledge, in art history, the genius in the Factory and mass production and our new culture — so far ahead of our era of reality TV shows with Andy Warhol TV. Eventually it came over me, like, ‘Holy shit, this guy is really so far ahead of the curve on everything.’”

Settling back in Denver in the grim aftermath of Warhol’s death, Sink would become one of Denver’s most prominent portrait photographers and arts leaders. He co-founded the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver in 1996, helped spearhead the RedLine Contemporary Art Center in 2008 and is now growing into an elder statesman of a booming Denver art scene.

If Warhol hadn’t gotten behind him, he’s unsure how his life might have gone.

“I learned from Andy to believe in myself,” Sink said. “He championed me. I was just this Denver, Metro State kid. To have those doors opened up was so important, it showed me it was a big world out there.”

https://www.aspentimes.com/news/in-aspen-with-andy-warhol/

atravers@aspentimes.com