All communication relies on a code of sorts, a combination of symbols, sounds or gestures that — once there is a common understanding of them — form a language where stories and ideas can be shared and recorded.

Human cultures around the globe have developed them for millennia, of course, and used written versions of these codes as systems for exchanging information about laws, commerce, literature and, importantly, for capturing history. Contemporary researchers rely on these objects — sometimes etched in stone, sometimes written in ink on paper or bark — to learn about ancient civilizations.

They were particularly important in Mesoamerica, the region that includes Mexico and several countries to its south. Much of what we know about the early days of Mayan and Aztec practices comes from interpretations of these preserved documents, inscribed with colorful drawings and characters that report on earlier eras.

So, that’s the history lesson. What is happening now — and how it relates to a thought-provoking new exhibit at Denver’s Vicki Myhren Gallery — is contemporary artists are tapping the format of the codex (that’s what they are called; codices is the plural) to create work that speaks to the present. They are making books and etchings, and decorating them with new images and marks, to relate their own versions of both history and the present as they see it.

Two things make this trend just right for the times. We are in an era of rethinking history, particularly the history of colonial times in the Western Hemisphere as it has been understood and taught over the past five centuries. Today’s storytellers are including the perspectives of the Indigenous people whose lands were conquered by European settlers and whose narratives have been slanted.

Using these updated codices allows that retelling to happen in a language that mimics, and honors, the way Indigenous people communicated back in the day.

We are also living in a time where the word “code” has taken on a greater meaning, because it is how we describe the language of ones and zeroes that computers use to think. Digital codes run the world now, and coders have great amounts of power over society.

Let’s just add a third thing, because it is too obvious to leave out and it connects directly to the exhibit’s title: the popular adoption of the letter Z as a replacement for the typical A or O letters that often end — and add a feminine or masculine designation — Spanish words.

Gender is fluid these days — despite what you might be reading in the political press — and the X is a bold attempt to reduce the association of things like sex and power in language.

All of these ideas are brought together by curator Rafael Fajardo for the show, “Code-X: Contemporary Chicanx Codices,” at the Myhren Gallery on the University for Denver campus.

Fajardo has assembled a group show of 15 artists who are using some form of code in their works, and produced a compelling display that explains the many ways this trend is playing out. Much of the work is deeply involving and sometimes mesmerizing. Often, it is humorous. Frequently, it is interactive. Visitors are invited to read, watch video, test out innovative technology and play video games.

What is most striking about the show overall is the amount of human labor that went into creating the work. There are so many miniature drawings and scribblings, covering pages and pages of surface, that it is hard to imagine just how long they took to make. Looking at them through a 2025 lens, they appear as comic books that authors spent countless hours developing.

And they come in various formats. Enrique Chagoya is showing color lithographs, including the striking “Illegal Alien’s Guide to Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” The piece resembles an old-time map of the world, all of its continents, though Chagoya substitutes hand-drawn images for the text most commonly found on such maps.

If, for example, a migrant was looking for a place to work in industry or agriculture, he might consider a place that Chagoya designates with tractors, or oil wells, or automotive plants. If he were looking for places to avoid, he might steer clear of the bodies of water that Chagoya marks with hungry sharks, or dangerous borders, like the one between the U.S. and Mexico that he draws in barbed wire.

The amount of images can be extreme at the show, as it is with Anthony Aleman’s untitled journals that he has kept for years, with hundreds and hundreds of pages bound together in book form, and covered edge-to-edge with small ink drawings and long bits of text that he uses to relate tales old and new.

The show has other journal works, including by Alma López, who opts out of the bound book format and adopts the folded paper technique that was used by scribes in early Mayan culture. Her “Slashed, Tagged, and Almost Censored” is a sketch book in the form of long pieces of paper, folded accordion style, that include images covering centuries. There are Mesoamerican deities in the mix, but also the Virgin of Guadalupe.

The exhibition has high-tech elements that give it both depth and edge. Francisco Ortega-Grimaldo’s “Titans: Analogies on a City” is a virtual reality piece that visitors access by putting a pair of goggles. Once they do, the room around them opens up wildly and a video plays telling the animated story of corruption and violence in Juarez, Mexico, where Ortega-Grimaldo is from.

The show also includes a rack of paper zines, small-ish hand-drawn magazines that are popular forms of expression these days, and it includes several videos and installations, including Dulce Soledad Ibarra’s “I Wanna Sleep Forever,” which features a floor scattered with ceramic animals, each outfitted with audio that recounts the same story, using the voices of various people who interpret it through their own memories.

The most interactive objects in the show are the handful of video games, which are there for the playing. They come in various forms, too, from Cherish Marquez’s “Hey, Barrel,” which examines ground pollution in Southwest deserts; to Michael A. DeAnda’s “Queso for Kevin,” which allows players to help a character order Mexican cuisine at a fast-food restaurant; to Leo Sailas’ “Barrio Bros,” which resets the popular Mario Brothers video game in the current Latino — or maybe it is Latinx — community.

Curator Fajardo dug deep for this exhibit. The work spans more than a decade and offers a solid journey through how this current of art has flowed. It is comprehensive, and much of that has to do with the fact that Fajardo himself is an artist who works successfully in this area. He has been making video games for two decades and has been a pioneer in getting them accepted as a legit art form worthy of museum shows.

But visitors need to dig a bit deep, too. This is not the kind of exhibit that makes its impact through a few casual glances. The work demands to be looked at, for a while, so its intricacies and complicated messages can be understood. It needs you to play its games until you understand their idiosyncrasies and ironies.

So go, play, stay a while. The are rewards for those who do.

Ray Mark Rinaldi is a Denver-based freelance writer specializing in fine arts.