Michael Paglia

Michael Paglia is a professional writer working as an art critic. During his over twenty-year-long writing career, he has focused on the art and architecture of the American West, and has gained specialized knowledge of the art scene in Colorado. His columns have appeared in Westword, a Denver weekly, since 1995. In that capacity, he covered the art boom in the area that occurred over the last fifteen years. In addition to the landmark events that occurred during this very significant period for art in the area, notably the museum-building boom, Paglia also reviewed the work of hundreds of artists, many from Colorado, and he continues to do so.

Paglia’s reviews, reports, essays and features on the visual arts and the built environment have also been published in regional and national periodicals including Art News, Architecture, Modernism, Art & Auctionand Sculpture Magazine. Since 2009, he has been the Denver correspondent and a contributing editor for Art Ltd., a Los Angeles-based art magazine.
In addition he is the author or co-author of more than a dozen monographs and books on art, artists and architecture. Paglia has also worked as a script writer and voice-over narrator for documentaries about art and artists including Museum/Museum: Vance Kirkland; Allen True’s West; Birger Sandzén: Ecstasy of Color; and; Edgar Payne: The Scenic Journey. All were done with CPT-12, a PBS affiliate. His most recent film is Frei Otto: Spanning the Future, also done for CPT 12 examining the work of this visionary architect.

In 2016, Paglia curated the exhibition Colorado Women in Abstraction presented at the MSU Center for Visual Art.

Paglia was born in Philadelphia but has lived in Colorado since he was a child, attending the University of Colorado at Boulder where he earned both a B.A. and an M.A. Paglia taught at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design and is currently a lecturer in art history at the University of Colorado Denver.