Understudy Art Incubator

"Through Our Eyes", celebrates the 40th anniversary of the Colorado Black Arts Festival. Selected from an open call, six artists bring powerful and distinct perspectives to this milestone exhibition.

Taste Test is back for its third year! This rotating winter exhibition at Understudy presents diorama-style window box installations that offer a snapshot of what’s happening in the art scene right now. For 2026, we’re partnering with six Englewood-based galleries representing a dynamic group of emerging artists. Taste Test features work from over 35 artists offering a survey of the ideas, voices, and experimentation shaping the region right now. The participating galleries are: Blue Tile Gallery, Los Fantasmas Artist Collective, NKollectiv, Rising Gallery, SeeSaw Gallery and SP_CE13. This exhibition runs January 15 - March 15 and is viewable from outside the gallery.

"Unfamiliar, Familiar Faces" presents Blake Ritenour’s exploration of deeply felt and universally shared human emotions through charcoal and graphite. Drawing inspiration from people in his life as well as artists he admires, Ritenour reflects on personal experiences to convey the intensity, vulnerability, and complexity held within each portrait. Throughout the exhibition, Ritenour turns to the familiar faces around him to illuminate the emotional highs and lows that shape every human life. His meticulously rendered charcoal drawings capture pores, shadows, reflections, and subtle imperfections, details that transform an “unfamiliar” subject into a mirror of our own interior worlds. The result is an environment that feels both intimate and communal, reminding viewers that these emotions belong to all of us. This body of work continues Ritenour’s ongoing interest in self-acceptance and in the quiet power of preserving a moment. It also reflects his drive to grow, challenge himself, and embrace new mediums and modes of expression. Ultimately, "Unfamiliar, Familiar Faces" invites viewers to recognize themselves in the work and to leave with the quiet assurance that they are not alone.

"Unattended Grief" transforms the gallery into the childhood bedroom Joseph Martinez never had. Shaped by memories of instability and growing up as the third of eight siblings without personal space, the artist reimagines a room of solace, curiosity, and self-expression.

What is your heart’s deepest desire for the future of the Earth? In this, the dawning of the Symbiocene, we seek to heal wounds our ancestors left upon the Earth in their pursuit of greed and material comfort. The death drive of extractive individualism brought life itself to the brink. This is a new age of regeneration where each of us plays a role in the planet’s great web of interdependence.