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Best Museum Exhibit

Becoming van Gogh

Courtesy Denver Art Museum

The Denver Art Museum has really stepped up its game since the Hamilton Building came on line, giving the facility more space and allowing director Christoph Heinrich to turn the place into an exhibition-driven destination. The homegrown blockbuster Becoming van Gogh was a perfect example: The museum stayed open around the clock at the end of its run to accommodate the crowds. For this show, the DAM's Gates Foundation Curator of Painting and Sculpture, Timothy Standring, compellingly recast van Gogh as an artist who was at one with his times rather than a madman who stood alone, a common perception. Standring did this by presenting rarely seen pieces showing van Gogh following the same stylistic arc as other artists of the period — first creating dark realist works, then sunny impressionistic ones before he got around to his signature post-impressionism.

Best Museum Shop

History Colorado Center

The History Colorado Center has courted controversy with its exhibits, but the powers-that-be at the institution did get a few things right. They commissioned David Tryba to design a spectacular new building — a winner, even before it opened, of a Best of Denver award last year. They also stocked a spacious and handsome gift shop on the main floor, just steps from the front door. The space is filled with books, handmade jewelry and pottery, T-shirts and more, and together this inventory (some of it actually made in Colorado) reflects the cultural, ethnic and racial characteristics of the Centennial State. Best of all, you don't have to pay museum admission to just go inside and shop.

Best Music Blog

ThisSongIsSick.com

Nick Guarino, founder and owner of ThisSongIsSick.com, didn't expect his obsession with music to take off the way that it did. After attending the University of Colorado at Boulder for a couple of years, Guarino found himself at a crossroads: continue higher education, or press on with the blog. Like any smart entrepreneur, he followed his passion, and as a result, his humble blog has become a multimillion-hits-per-month juggernaut, paving the way for the creation of a record label and a handful of successful productions, including a debut sell-out event with Big Gigantic, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, Dillon Francis, GRiZ and Raw Russ that closes out the 2012 season at Red Rocks. With regular posts featuring new-music submissions from all over the world, ThisSongIsSick is the go-to source for EDM-philes in search of a new artist, a new beat, or just an influx of fresh dance tunes for the playlist.

Best Musical

42nd Street

When a small dinner theater decides to take on a huge, glitzy Broadway show featuring dozens of tapping feet, it's asking for trouble. Where will the director find all those triple-threat performers, the people who can sing, dance and act equally well? For 42nd Street, Michael J. Duran enlisted the help of talented Boulder's Dinner Theatre regulars, mixed in a slew of young people — including one who'd performed for the company as a child — and found Johnny Stewart, a business student at CU who can tap along with the best of them. Combine this cast with the theater's usual first-rate tech and Neal Dunfee's excellent small orchestra, and you've got all the glitter and glam of a Broadway show — but with a lot more intimacy and heart.

Best Musical Variety Show — Internet

Late Night Denver

A weird mix of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and The Tonight Show, the Denver-centric variety show Late Night Denver has a bit of an intentionally awkward, surrealistic vibe. But that just adds a bizarre classiness to a program that, in another era, would merely have been a well-produced cable-access show. Hosted by John Rumley, of Urban Leash and Slim Cessna's Auto Club fame, and Heather Dalton, familiar from her stints on Teletunes and in the punk band the Pin Downs, this long-overdue show includes interviews with local underground music celebrities like Richard Groskopf (Boss 302, The Agency), Lisa Cook (The Emmas) and Magic Cyclops. The connecting sketches are as irreverently and darkly self-effacing as an inside joke. Visually rich, smart and clever without being smug, this series is an affectionate peek into Denver's underground music scene.

Best New Band

The Dirty Few

With the constant influx of great new bands that flood the scene every year, it's tough to pick the best of them. But the Dirty Few made that task infinitely easier this year. The trio makes the kind of fun, no-frills, boisterous, beer-can-foisting rock that you thought didn't exist anymore. The bouncy bombast could inspire even the most bashful of wallflowers to spring up and raise their fists without a moment's hesitation. And while the music itself is 100 percent pure exuberance, the group's live shows are even more energetic and engaging. Get Loose Have Fun is the act's debut album title — and motto — but it also describes the attitude adjustment you'll experience after a dose of the Dirty Few.

See also: A look at the last decade of Best New Band winners

Best New Book by a Colorado Author

The Drowned Cities, by Paolo Bacigalupi

After racking up awards — Nebula and Hugo honors for Best Novel — for his debut book, The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi followed up with Ship Breaker, set in an equally dismal, dystopian future, and won another round of awards, including a National Book Award nomination and a Printz Award for Best Young Adult Novel. The latest from the Paonia-based writer, The Drowned Cities, hit bookshelves last May. It was originally supposed to be a direct sequel to Ship Breaker, following its lead character, Nailer, but instead turned into a "companion" to that book. "I started really thinking about what it was that was important to me to be writing about," he told us last spring. "There was a single line from the original draft of that book that still resonated with me: Nailer and his compatriots had been sailing past this wrecked place of perpetual war called the Drowned Cities, and Nailer asks, 'How did the Drowned Cities get this way?' The captain of the ship says something like, 'A nation as strong as this one doesn't just fall apart. It has to be deliberately destroyed.... The demagogues just whipped up the people and the people bit on their own tails, and they chewed and they chewed until there was nothing left but the snapping of teeth.'" Bacigalupi bit off plenty with this book, but he delivered.

Best New Building Downtown

Denver Police Crime Laboratory

During the twentieth century in Denver, typically only one building was constructed each decade in the greater Civic Center area. That's changed, though, and since 2000, we've seen no fewer than eight new landmarks. Add to this exalted group the Denver Police Crime Laboratory, designed by the Durant Smith Group. Though relatively small in size, it's big in visual appeal, with folded plate walls zigzagging and cantilevering out above the ground, all carried out in mirrored glass, masonry and panels. And although the designers showed a clever disregard for symmetry, they gave the building a spectacular sense of balance. Only employees can get inside the crime laboratory, which is too bad, because a pair of impressive suspension sculptures, "Suspect" (which can be seen through the windows on West 14th Avenue) and "Bullet," both by Cliff Garten, have been hung above the main floor.

  • 1371 Cherokee St., Denver, 80204 Map

Best New Club

NORAD

Following a stretch as the third incarnation of the venerable Muddy's coffeehouse, the triangular building at 22nd and Champa was home to quite a few dance clubs, including Club Evolution, the Loft, Club Ra, Gallery 22 and 2200. No one seemed to be able to make the venue work — until NORAD moved in. Owner Preston Douglas, who formerly wore multiple hats at Beta, clearly knows what he's doing, and he's hosted some of the biggest names in underground music since opening NORAD. With a sound system comparable to that of some of the biggest local dance clubs, this place keeps things pumping big time.

Best New Curator

William Morrow

Courtesy Denver Art Museum

Last fall, William Morrow was named the Denver Art Museum's Polly and Mark Addison Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, joining Gwen Chanzit, the department's senior curator, who was named Curator of Modern Art. The distinction is that art from the early to mid-twentieth century is called modern, while work by artists active from the '60s to the present is referred to as contemporary. Morrow teethed on contemporary art as the founding director of 21c, a combination hotel and museum in Louisville, Kentucky (with branches elsewhere), that became the first place in the country to specialize exclusively in 21st-century art. He's currently putting the finishing touches on Nick Cave: Sojourn, a multimedia extravaganza opening in June that will focus on the Chicago-based artist, who pushes together dance, fashion and visual art.

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