Tours

Online Tours

Explore our sculpture field and gallery exhibitions in these audio tours! Hear from artists to learn about their inspiration, process and intention behind the artwork.

Current Exhibitions

Jeremy Grant: Through Lines

Jeremy Grant’s work explores “emotional landscapes” through layered collage that reflects mental rhythms shaped by experiences, memories, and healing practices such as meditation and mantras. His work explores visual poems and repeated, meditative gestures, inviting the viewer to reflect on the world around them. Grant’s work embodies how memories gain meaning through repetition, forging new neural pathways each time they are accessed. This process mirrors how we reinterpret experiences over time, reshaping their significance. His collages hold space for presence and absence, silence and structure, serving as quiet acts of transformation and growth, visual maps of change, memory, and resilience.

Deborah Jang: Sum of the Parts

Her largest solo exhibition to date, Deborah Jang’s assemblage sculptures breathe new life into discarded objects, transforming junk and cast-off materials into dynamic compositions where each element interacts and energizes the next. Her work evokes a sense of visual poetry—an unexpected harmony born from the union of unrelated, often overlooked parts. Rooted in the spirit of radical inclusion, the pieces embrace “everything, everywhere, all at once,” celebrating abundance and diversity. The worn and weathered surfaces of some components echo the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, finding beauty in imperfection, impermanence, and decay.

COllage

The dynamic world of collage and assemblage comes to life in this exhibition through bold patterns, unexpected materials, and striking visual narratives. Far from random layering, each work reveals a careful design of elements—scraps, textures, sounds, and objects—brought together with deliberate intention. These artists use the act of layering to explore memory, identity, passion, and place, transforming everyday materials into powerful statements. Whether stitched, glued, painted, or constructed, each piece invites you to look closer, to uncover hidden meanings, and to rethink what collage can be. Step into a world where fragments become stories, and where the familiar is made new; this is collage as you’ve never seen it before.

Past is Present

History is not static. It is a living force, shaping and reshaping our present while being continuously reinterpreted through contemporary perspectives. Past is Present is Past is Present brings together a diverse group of Colorado artists who engage with history, ancestry, cultural and religious iconography, mythology, and traditional artistic practices. Their work reveals the fluid relationship between past and present—how history informs identity, how cultural memory is preserved and transformed, and how contemporary creativity reimagines inherited traditions.

Haley Hasler: Origin Stories

Since the beginning of her career, the self-portrait has been central to Fort Collin’s artist Haley Hasler’s work. Presenting herself in a wide variety of guises and settings, she has presented herself as a wife, mother, mythological creature, Biblical figure, western pioneer, athlete, and much more.

Melissa Furness: Embedded

Conceptual artist and painter Melissa Furness explores a mistranslated past as embedded within the present, drawing from experiences of place and site, and on the tradition of painting and narrative. Treating painting as a conceptual object, her work examines distortions of history, questioning what is revered versus what is discarded and forgotten. Her work highlights both narratives shaped by power structures and the individual, what is presented as truth versus the realities of personal and local histories. Amongst all of this is a depiction of struggle affected by history as expressed in ways that are responsive to a contemporary present.

Tracy Weil: UNABASHED

A natural collaborator, Weil brings people and art together — with the tenacity of an advocate, the ease of a leader, and the heart of an artist. A lifelong painter and street artist, Weil’s work is distinctive for its bold use of color and expressive, playful nature. Unabashed and expressive, Weil’s zest for people and life emerges clearly in bright works thick with paint. Known for his savvy in building community through the arts, Weil has fostered vibrant art districts throughout Colorado. He currently works from his studio in Pine, Colorado, with his tomatoes and bloodhound.

Thomas Scharfenberg: Organic Geometry

Thomas Scharfenberg, graduated from Arvada West High School in 2003, is an artist and plant enthusiast known for his experimental practices, murals, use of color, and geometry. Growing up in West Arvada, he spent his days exploring local landscapes by bike and skateboard, from open fields and abandoned farms to greenways and construction zones. Inspired by childhood memories of helping his parents care for houseplants and backyard gardens, Thomas has worked with several Arvada and Alma greenhouse operations since the early 2000s. Now based in North Denver, he works in garden maintenance, finding creative parallels between plant care and art installation.

Art of the State 2025

As you roam through the gallery, each sculpture captures the distinct vision of its artist. A story unfolds with every sculpture–a narrative derived from the interplay of material, methods, and meaning. Together, this forest of sculptures showcases the richness and diversity of how these Colorado artists can activate four square feet.

Every three years, all 10,000 square feet of the Arvada Center Galleries are filled with a celebratory survey of Colorado Artists' incredible diversity, quality, and depth of work. After its start in 2013 and iterations every three years, Art of the State 2025 continues its legacy as a juried exhibition showing off the powerful scope of contemporary art across the state. This open call open to all Colorado artists garnered 2503 submissions by 911 artists. The jurors worked diligently to select a comprehensive overview of work that strives to capture a wide scope of art from across the state. From those entries, 148 artworks by 145 artists were selected.

I Regret to Inform You: Rejected Public Art

Explore the art that could’ve been. “I regret to inform you…” is commonly used in rejection letters sent to artists after submitting to exhibitions, calls, and public art opportunities. This exhibition highlights rejected public art proposals that were dreamed up by artists but were not selected to move forward. For every public art piece that you pass by, there were probably two to four others that never came to fruition. This exhibition is about those pieces–the art that never happened.

inFORMed Space: perspectives in sculpture

In 2014, the Arvada Center Galleries installed seventeen sculptures in eight hours in its previously unoccupied field, transforming the space into a vast outdoor exhibition of regional artists. Sculpture in the Field changed the landscape of Arvada and the Denver metro area and brought renewed focus to sculptors of our state. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Sculpture in the Field, thirty artists fill the Main Gallery in a demonstration of the limitless possibilities of inFORMed space.

Robin Cole: Genesis

Columbine High School graduate Robin Cole is an oil painter working in the tradition of realism. Though related to the familiar genres of landscape painting and portraiture, her work explores a slightly unusual, more nuanced, and closely experienced relationship with nature that is at once otherworldly and scientific.

Cole’s solo exhibition Genesis treats the natural world as a mirror reflecting the inner terrain of the human condition. Through the lenses of nature and magical realism, Robin's new work expresses how motherhood has shaped her artistic journey. It explores the primal events of germination, gestation, birth, and revelation, as well as the simple beauty and joy of seeing the world anew through the eyes of a child.

Cole is represented by Gallery 1261 in Denver, Colorado

Matt Christie: Between Then and Now

Lakewood-based painter Matt Christie has contributed to the Colorado art scene as both artist and education for over 40 years. His work combines a dynamic array of nature-based references along with a saturated color palette to produce a body of work both striking and personal.

Christie roots his work in experiences of nature, capturing the profound impact fields, forests, streams, and ponds have had on him since a young age.

In his work, landscape is a form that connects inner nature with outer nature, serving as a metaphor to explore his own psychological nature and development. Opposing themes of death and renewal, threat and safety, loneliness, and relationship are explored via the landscape image.

Christie is represented by Walker Fine Art in Denver, CO.

528.0: Regional Juried Printmaking Exhibition

Join us for a massive showcase of all things PRINT! This juried call for artwork was open to artists living in a 528-mile radius of Denver, Colorado. The number 528.0 refers to Denver’s altitude and status as the Mile High City (5,280 feet).

Printers from across the region submitted 553 artworks across all forms of printmaking. Jurors Emily Grace King (Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, Arvada, CO), Jennifer Lynch (Lynch Pin Press, Santa Fe, NM), and Howard Paine (University of Nebraska, Omaha) selected 83 works to celebrate the expansive diversity of contemporary printmaking found within the Western Region. This exhibition is in partnership with Denver’s Month of Printmaking (March 2024).

Artist Proof: Print Process at Oehme Graphics

Explore selections of processes and final prints from the Oehme Graphics archives. Follow sixteen artists as they work with Master Printer Sue Oehme, tracking their unique concepts and techniques to create their artistic prints. Founded by Susan Hover Oehme in 2010, Oehme Graphics is a fine print publisher that collaborates with internationally recognized artists in a state-of-the-art printmaking facility. Nestled high in the Rockies in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, Oehme Graphics is one of the country’s leading fine art print publishers.

Sue Oehme Inclusions

This solo exhibition features Master Printer Sue Oehme’s own creative print-based work. Featuring her signature colorful large installations and monoprints, Oehme utilizes everyday recycled objects within her print process to create complex, multi-layered images that are strangely and vaguely reminiscent of hints of life in our super-charged, consumer-based, politicized culture.

Latitude 37°
Art of Southern Colorado

Southern Colorado's unique history, scenery, and culture has been a source of imagery and introspection for centuries. This group exhibition features contemporary artists living within the 37th parallel, capturing a wide swath of Colorado's Southernmost cities. Works are in a variety of medium and type, all celebrating the impact this region has on artists.

Ramón Bonilla: The boundary lines have fallen in pleasant places for me

Denver-based artist Ramón Bonilla explores the limits of spatial memory through a blend of traditional drawing mediums (graphite, ink, paper) with unique materials and techniques (specialty Japanese tape installed directly onto the gallery wall) to create abstracted renderings of space.

Drawn: From the Source

Pulling from real-world references like the landscape, still lifes, nature, and the human figure, Drawn: from the Source features the work of seven Colorado artists who use drawing mediums and techniques to capture and interpret the interconnected beauty of the objects, environments, and relationships around us.

Big Draw Colorado

What is a drawing? In this juried group exhibition, the Arvada Center Galleries invited contemporary Colorado artists to submit works that celebrate the traditional roots of drawing and challenge preconceived definitions of drawing through explorations in rendering, mark-making, gesture, abstraction, realism, form, medium, and beyond.

Wendy Kowynia: Following the Thread

Wheat Ridge High School graduate Wendy Kowynia explores line and form through the use of thread and a loom, weaving intricate fiber works that are uniquely folded and manipulated. Kowynia’s textiles are created using specialized Japanese yarns of linen, paper, and silk, and are colored using natural dyes like indigo, sumi ink, walnut ink, and soymilk. After carefully laying each thread in delicate lines, Kowzyina bends the textile into gossamery structures that are both strong and elegant.

Art + Science

Explore the ways that fourteen contemporary artists use scientific concepts, datasets, research, and development to inform their creative work. Art + Science portrays both artistic practice and scientific discovery in new ways, broadening the understanding of both as they experience concepts in science through the unique voice of regional artists.

One Sheet: Music

A blank page, a blank canvas, a blank slate–widely-used idioms for limitless possibilities. Listen to an audio tour with artists working in music for One Sheet.

One Sheet: Paper

A blank page, a blank canvas, a blank slate–widely-used idioms for limitless possibilities. Listen to an audio tour with artists working in paper for One Sheet.

One Sheet: Wood

A blank page, a blank canvas, a blank slate–widely-used idioms for limitless possibilities. Listen to an audio tour with artists working in wood for One Sheet.

Floyd D. Tunson: Ascent

This expansive survey exhibition features work from the past five decades by Colorado artist Floyd D. Tunson.

Lola Montejo: After Another After

Inspired by the material means of destruction and transformation, these three series of works relate to memory, time, and the clashes that are found in the contrasting interlace of matter in the world.

Lauri Lynnxe Murphy: Seeing the Trees For the Forest

In the thirty years since her artistic debut, Lauri Lynnxe Murphy has developed an impressive career as an artist known for collaborating with creatures like snails, bees, and beetles in her work.

Pamela Webb: HAND + HAMMER

Dakota Ridge High School teacher and Pomona High School alumni Pamela Webb uses a variety of ancient metallurgical and hand-fabrication techniques to create organic wearable art and large sculptural instruments.

Sculpture in the Field

This rotating exhibition of ourdoor artwork features works large and small in a natural setting, and is always free and open to the public.

Past Exhibitions

Art of the State 2022

Every three years, all 10,000 square feet of the Arvada Center Galleries is filled with a celebratory survey of the incredible diversity, quality, and depth of work from Colorado Artists.

Word Play

Word Play showcases a selection of works that use text, language, and symbols to make a statement, express emotion, and celebrate the written word.

Brady Smith: (Don't be embarrassed by) your trouble with living

Brady Smith’s thoughtful collection of works exploring struggles with suicide from individual and societal perspectives aims to make a space where healthy dialogue can happen.