Denver show, African roots

There will be more than flowers blooming in Colorado’s Denver Botanic Gardens this summer. Eighty-four contemporary African stone sculptures, as tall as 11 feet and weighing up to 6,000 pounds, will go on display Monday.

The exhibition “Chapungu: Custom and Legend, A Culture in Stone” is on loan from the Chapungu Sculpture Park in Harare, Zimbabwe.

“There is an upsurge of contemporary artistic expression in Africa,” said Roy Guthrie, Chapungu Sculpture Park director and curator of the exhibition. The show is unusual, he said, because it focuses on modern, not traditional, African art.

The massive sculptures displayed in Denver were carved with hand tools from opal, verdite, cobalt, serpentine and other rock quarried in Zimbabwe, which means “stone houses” in the Shona people’s Bantu language.

The works, created by first- and second-generation Shona artists, are organized around eight themes of human emotion and experience, including family, village life, nature and the spirit world.

Works by artists such as Dominic Benhura display the joys and sorrows of African life. “Leapfrog” portrays children at play; “Our HIV Friend” illustrates the devastation of AIDS, as two friends hold up a third afflicted with the disease.

Shona artists will give demonstrations of their work during the exhibition’s run and teach visitors how to create their own sculpture from a 60-pound chunk of stone. The five-day sculpting workshops, held in alternating weeks beginning June 8, cost $625.

Throughout the summer, the Denver Botanic Gardens will offer lectures and classes for children and adults on African plants, traditional folk stories, music, dance and other subjects.

Some of these events are free; most cost $12 to $29. Free guided walking tours will be held twice daily, four days a week.

The exhibit, which has been traveling in the United States for four years, ends its Denver run Oct. 31. During the summer, the Denver gardens are open 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturdays through Tuesdays and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Fridays. Admission is $8.50 for adults, $5 for students and ages 4 to 15, free to children younger than 4. The exhibit costs $3 extra.

For more information, call (720) 865-3500 (for the gardens) or (720) 865-3700 (for the exhibition) or visit www.botanicgardens.org or www.chapungudenver.org.