Here's what the "exciting," "unpredictable" Black Cube is up to in 2017

By Ray Mark Rinaldi, One Good Eye

Black Cube is doing some of the most exciting — and surely unpredictable — visual arts work in Colorado and beyond these days. The nomadic museum, which curates pop-up exhibitions at galleries, retail spaces, sidewalks and places like Red Rocks park, takes chances on both the people it presents and its locations. The organization has made serious art fun, watchable, follow-able, entertaining, social and accessible (though you do have to find it each time around).

It’s risky work — not everything resonates with audiences when you’re starting each show from scratch with a new site and an artist who may not be familiar to the local scene. Black Cube has had some wild hits and some well-intended misses. But its moves have been bold, including the amazingly-detailed fake archeological dig set up by the Mexico City duo SANGREE in September, and the four-story-tall, inflatable, blue “Prospector” monument, by Chad Person, that appeared beside the State Capitol in late 2015.

Keep an eye on Black Cube by checking into its website. You can also follow it on Facebook here and it has a super pretty Instagram effort.

Black Cube’s list of 2017 artist fellows is out and it has some familiar names, plus a few imports who promise to make it a very interesting year.

The lineup, direct from Black Cube:

Institute for New Feeling

The Institute for New Feeling (IfNF) is a collective founded by Scott Andrew (Pittsburgh), Agnes Bolt (Los Angeles), and Nina Sarnelle (Los Angeles), committed to the development of new ways of feeling, and ways of feeling new. The Institute assumes an authoritative voice, borrowing elements from the health and beauty industries, and mainstream and alternative medicine, to create their treatments, therapies, retreats and wellness products. They place their work at this shifting intersection of capitalism, technological innovation and the body.

Lauren Halsey

Lauren Halsey was born in Los Angeles, California in 1987. She builds sculptures and environments that remix vernacular culture and ephemera from urban communities. Acting both as an archivist and an architect she creates fantasy kingdoms that combine elements of nature, technicolor, outer space and funk. The works exist as spatial metaphors for optimism, self-determination and love.

Joel Swanson

Joel Swanson lives in Denver and works in Boulder. Swanson explores the structure and technology of language, its materiality, modes of classification and glitches in linguistic systems. His work ranges from digital art and sculpture to interactive installations that playfully and powerfully merge words with meanings.

Laura Shill

Laura Shill is an artist based in Denver whose work is a collision of sculpture, installation, performance and photography. Her work addresses ideas of the viewer and the subject, disclosure and concealment, absence and intimacy. Often working with early and experimental forms of image making her works are simultaneously sinister and beautiful, exploring the transformative potential of people and objects.

Adriana Corral

Adriana Corral is based in San Antonio, Texas. Her installations, performances and sculptures embody universal themes of loss, human rights violations, concealment, and memory. Corral employs a rigorous researched-based practice where anthropologists, writers, journalists, gender scholars, human rights attorneys and victims provide her with the foundation for her works.