Meet the Curator

  • Josh Berkowitz

    Joshua Berkowitz currently serves as The Lab on Santa Fe's Founder and Artistic Director and has over 15 years experience creating performance art and experimental film. His launch into the avant-garde medium started with his role in the World Premiere of Jonesin’ at the Arthur Miller Theater. His portrayal of the stream-of-consciousness meth-addict poet Cheese earned him a full-ride scholarship for his final two years at University of Michigan Drama School. His most famous experimental film “Shame, Compassion and Defence” features Berkowitz playing all five characters on a baseball field in the dead of winter, including his mother and father. In 2016, Berkowitz started curating performance art at Electric Lodge in Venice Beach and became Co-Artistic Director, designing over 50 productions in less than 3 years. During this time, he would also drive up to Ventura, CA every month to work under his 83-year old mentor John M. White, a master of both abstract painting and a legend in the performance art world. In August 2022, he founded The Lab on Santa Fe, one of the only galleries generating live original performance in all of Denver. The newest and wildest work in this space occurred in March of 2024, entitled “Doubt and its Double” where he built an abstract tennis court and played tennis against his own inner neurotic landscape. Berkowitz is expanding these ideas into the 40 West Arts District, with a long-term residency at The Three Leaches Theater and has been asked to make all visual art decisions in this venue and will also be devising three original productions over the next year, officially coining this space The Lab off Colfax. The Lab on Santa Fe will continue running its space in the Santa Fe Arts District and has just hit its two-year anniversary.

The Laboratory on Santa Fe was founded in August of 2022 when Josh Berkowitz was asked by Apex Real Estate to take over running their gallery. With just a moment’s hesitation, he knew it would be worth it if he could build giant installations made of mostly yarn and other recyclable materials like Goldfish cartons hanging down from whimsical shrines of his Indian Guru Nisargadatta Maharaj. Beginning in March of 2023, a series of group exhibitions has brought hundreds of emerging artists through the space. The very first one, entitled “I Sing the Body Electric!” let the Denver Art community know that The Lab was going to use literary references ranging from Walt Whitman to F. Scott Fitzgerald to James Baldwin in order to elicit a completely different approach to visual art. Berkowitz’s feeling was that if he doubled down on his background in theater as he designed a gallery, there was no way his space would end up looking like anyone else’s. Getting into a show at The Lab on Santa Fe has become a pursuit for many artists wanting to show in the Santa Fe Arts District but this venue in particular allows for irreverence, attitude and total experimentation.