Colorful and lively, “Made in Colorado” includes many of the state’s most successful artists working today

Sweeping group exhibitions like “Made in Colorado,” the variety show currently headquartered at Denver’s Emmanuel Gallery, can offer artful benefits all around — especially when they are executed with a good strategy.

Like this show, they can give the public an easy and attractive way to engage with a large number of local artists on a single outing. “Made in Colorado” is colorful and lively, and its lineup includes many of the most successful artists working in the state today. If you have any doubts about the quality of work being created here, this show will provide ample relief, and a good afternoon’s entertainment.

These exhibitions — which gather their fare by sending out wide-open calls for entry — are also good for the museums and galleries that support them, in this case, the University of Colorado Denver.

Not only does the school get to host a show with built-in popular appeal, it also positions itself as a regional leader in the field. These exhibits pay back the public for supporting the institution’s work while setting it up as an attractive place for new students to enroll. It is good marketing.

Ultimately, though, they can best serve artists. For the fortunate ones that get selected for inclusion, the exhibitions provide exposure at a high level, and in the reputation-enhancing company of skilled peers. For emerging artists, they can be confidence-builders and career starters. For established artists, they offer a chance to get work before potential collectors and to be seen by whoever is jurying the exhibition, whether that is a curator, a critic or a dealer.

That last part is where strategy comes in, and Emmanuel played it right, hiring two esteemed out-of-town curators to winnow the show down to the 45 artists who made the final cut.

One is Nora Halpern, a curator and educator admired widely for both her work assembling accessible art shows and as a national advocate for the arts overall in the United States. The other is Kerry Brougher, a writer and curator who has worked prestigious gigs at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles.

Each brings a solid reputation, and both are the sort of professionals artists want to get noticed by. When Emmanuel put out its invitation to artists across the state, the jurors were featured prominently on the cover page with headshots and thorough bios that promoted their credentials. No doubt, that inspired the large number of entries — a whopping 1,400 — that were submitted. From that, and some keen decision-making by the out-of-town judges, came a show that is a cut above the usual open-call effort.

These shows — built around geography rather than a strong curatorial concept — can be ordinary, even boring, but “Made in Colorado” is enlivened by quality.

There are strong regional names on the walls and floors of Emmanuel, a former church that is now the visual arts headquarters of Auraria Campus on the edge of downtown. There is also a small sampling of spillover work installed at Emmanuel’s satellite space, the CU Denver Experience Gallery, on the grounds of the Denver Performing Arts Complex.

On the roster: paintings and drawings by Gregg Deal, Melissa Furness, Margaret Kasahara and Trine Bumiller; photos from Gretchen Marie Schaffer and Eric Hagemann; three-dimensional pieces from Floyd Tunson, Amber Cobb, Jennifer Pettus, Lauri Lynnxe Murphy and Matthew Harris; and video by Christopher Coleman and Noah Phillips.

That is, for sure, a long list of mentions, but these are the artists, teachers and trouble-makers who regularly fill galleries here; “Made in Colorado” holds prime examples of their signature moves.

There are also some pleasant surprises, from artists whose names are likely less familiar to audiences.

• Newcomer Chelsea James contributes an abstract, and surreal, mixed-media painting that the gallery is featuring prominently near the show’s entrance.
• Paul Kenneth offers a complicated, graphite drawing of horses, dozens of them at varying shapes and sizes, that took 300 hours to complete.
• JayCee Beyale and Porfidia Beuke worked together on a showpiece called “Ha’ahóni (Perseverance),” which features long strands of fiber suspended over a Navajo sand painting that was installed directly on the gallery floor.
• Katelyn Odenheimer strung together dozens of porcelain pieces, all shaped like hearts, into a mobile that hangs along a stairway.
• And Laura Merage is showing a piece called “Nausy Nauzy,” made from dozens of hand-sewn plush cushions. The work has been displayed before, but it looks fresh and fun installed over the entire back wall of a loft space at the rear of the main gallery.

Things come together nicely, or as nicely as they might considering the circumstances. By nature, exhibitions like this lack intellectual heft. The individual works here say plenty, but the effort is not guided by any far-reaching exploration of a single idea. It’s all about geography. If a viewer has no connection to Colorado, they might wonder why all this art, in different media and with varied emotional weight, is pushed together in the same rooms.

It also could be edited down a bit more. Placing works in two locations mightily interrupts the experience of consuming this show, and the display at the Experience Gallery will feel to some like an anti-climactic afterthought — even if it does have some of the best pieces on the checklist.

When jurors are faced with so many entries to sort through, they want to let in as many objects as possible, and galleries usually set a number for them, but that almost always leads to excess and detracts from the overall quality. It is difficult though to fault anyone in the highly competitive and often cutthroat art world for showing generosity.