Arts & Entertainment

2007 MasterMind Awards

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And the community's fortunate to have him.

Fashion/Design: The Fabric Lab
The Fabric Lab and its owners, Tran and Josh Wills, are walking inspirations, proof that you can live your artistic dream -- even when you have no money and three kids to feed.

They started their local-designers-only boutique three years ago in the basement of Babooshka, a hair salon next to the Bluebird Theater on East Colfax Avenue. Since then, they've expanded from eight artists to fifty, moved into their own storefront just down the block at 3105 East Colfax, and even joined a collective that opened the A++ Boutique de Force store in Belmar.

"I always wanted to do this, but when you're a young mom, people look at you like you have no worth," Tran Wills told Westword when she first opened the Fabric Lab and was working in a medical office to pay the bills. "We wanted to prove to everyone we weren't going to be like that. I'm doing this for my kids. If it weren't for them, I'd probably be working a job that I hate."

Instead, she's got a job she loves, and the kids -- ages eight, four and one and a half -- help out at the store. That's where you'll usually find Tran, juggling the local merchandise that overflows the space, planning fashion shows that use Colfax as a gritty catwalk, and creating art with the Yummies, the performance-art group that shares space with the Fabric Lab.

In her spare time, Tran is also teaching "Tee Party" classes for the Denver Art Museum, showing members how to cut out their own stencils and screenprint them on T-shirts. "The last class, we had pretty young people to people in their fifties," she says. "It was cool, because they got to go through the museum and take pictures and then come back and cut out a design from the image and make it into a stencil. People did not want to leave."

Just like people don't want to leave the Fabric Lab, which is filled with one-of-a-kind couture -- some of it created by Josh -- as well as handbags, accessories and great limited-run T-shirts, including the infamous Colfax version. "I'm getting a new designer a week," Tran says. "People are becoming more eco-friendly and more conscious of what they're making.

"We really want to keep showcasing all of our artists and pushing local design," she continues. "I think we're finally getting somewhere, and we want to help them get to where they want to be in their careers."

In doing so -- in recognizing new designers and encouraging them to realize their potential -- Tran and Josh Wills make the Fabric Lab live up to its promise: "We keep it realer."

And real local, which is sheer genius.

Literary Arts: Vox Feminista
The Last Supper. Nutricide: The Last Supper. Nutricide: The Last Buffet. Just over a month before their annual spring performance, the eight women at the core of Vox Feminista are still debating the name of the show. They've set the bar high, having come up with many literary delights since their first show at the original Penny Lane in Boulder just over seventeen years ago. There's been White Noise: Asleep in the American Dream; Shooting Stars in Retrograde, Alienated on Earth and even Y2K-Y Jellymamas Dancin' the Apocalpyso. And the politics of food deserves no less a title than any of the other modern-day issues that they've tackled together.

"Food is something for me -- we've done shows on great existential issues and the war, and people feel helpless -- but every day I eat three meals," says Oak Chezar, one of Vox's original members. "That's three chances to make a difference. We can choose to make a difference."

As passionate people out to raise the collective consciousness, that's what Vox chose to do years ago. But over the years, their voice -- like their standards -- has gotten higher. "It started with a mixed group," says Vox producer and original member Joy Boston. "And after the show, the guys -- as typically happens would leave to go party, and the women were left to clean up."

So she and Chezar and some of the other women decided to regroup without the benefit of Y chromosomes. Since then, Vox Feminista has continued to challenge audiences with a mix of poetry and performances at twice-annual shows. The members write all of the material, either as a collective or individually; they also enlist guest performers, whom they cull from open auditions. To make it all come together, they meet twice a week for three to four hours a shot, then put in additional hours writing and practicing. And they take only two months off a year from this labor of love.

But none of them can imagine life any other way. They thrive on informing people -- "We're here to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable," says Chezar and on challenging themselves, often adapting their own lives to conform with knowledge they've gained from researching show topics. On a meta level, the Fall 2003 show on white power was particularly uncomfortable; on a micro level, they quit printing Vox T-shirts after learning that the garments were produced with sweatshop labor. Now they hunt through thrift stores and put their logo on recycled tees.

What they've learned about the politics of food will be revealed when their Spring show opens on March 31. But they've already come to a consensus on the name: The Last Supper - To Go.

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