Restaurateur Jesse Morreale has always gone all-out dolling up his eateries for the holidays, but since he nabbed the vintage First Avenue Hotel and opened El Diablo there, the corner of First and Broadway has become a real star, with more than 24,000 twinkling bulbs inside and out…
The reasons why shopping local is a good idea have been floating around so much lately that anyone who cares about their community, or shopping, or both, knows the basic tenets by heart. Still, it never hurts to repeat them: Shopping for local merchandise at small businesses close to home…
If you’ve been around Denver a while, you might know that septuagenarian songstress Judy Collins grew up here and attended East High. The daughter of blind bandleader Charles Collins, Judy’s first official performance as a singer was at the age of 17 seventeen, when she won the local Kiwanis Club’s…
The buy-local, DIY holiday craft market season is on: Get your foot in the door this weekend when the Sugar Plum Bazaar, featuring about forty spot-on, homegrown vendors, opens for business from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. tomorrow and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday at the elegant Parkside Mansion…
Everyone has a story to tell, including Matthew Taylor. Once one-third of the local comedy trio A.C.E. (shorthand for American, Canadian and Englishman — you do the math), he lost his job when ensemble partners Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein hit it big with their performance piece, Girls Only. Which…
Denver Art Museum design curator Darrin Alfred relished the opportunity to reinstall the museum’s architecture and design galleries: It represented a changing of the guard for him and a chance to cast a fresh spotlight on all the collection had to offer. The resulting spread, What Is Modern?, currently on…
Music is often the way we mark out milestones, and it’s no different when it comes to revolutions. In fact, as becomes evident in the documentary Soundtrack for a Revolution, maybe even more so. A poignant history lesson and voyage through the events of the American civil-rights movement, the film,…
Denver handmade queen Sam Robinson broke many hearts when she put her annual Gifts for Yule holiday market to pasture last year. But in the midst of Denver’s DIY boom, many other marketplaces touting handcrafted work by local artists have stepped in to fill the void. One of this year’s…
British food writer Nigel Slater started cooking at a young age as a way of fighting his stepmother tooth and nail for the attention of his father — namely, by conniving in myriad ways to steal her secret recipe for lemon meringue pie. He didn’t much like either one of…
We never get tired of showering the love on I ♥ Denver, the progressive all-Colorado gift shop run by community-minded entrepreneur Samuel Schimek at the Denver Pavilions…
The best thing about the holidays? It brings families together. The worst thing about the holidays? Right: It brings families together. But here’s something enlightening to remember when that dark moment comes down and you fear you are going to do something horrible to your children the next time they…
Denver photographer Anna Newell Jones began to realize a couple of years ago that she was much too obsessed with things. For her, the need to consume manifested itself into a big pile of debt. That’s when Newell Jones put her well-shod foot down, foregoing her need to feed on…
Nederland’s Corvo Brothers, a collaborative duo who co-create complex and surreal, carefully staged narrative photographs, take the art of Photoshopping to a whole new level. For their shared show with sculptor Jonathan Hils, Metamophosis, which opens tomorrow at Walker Fine Art, the brothers transform the strange territory of saponification, a…
The Destination Freedom radio-theater project overseen for many years by Denver actor/director/producer donnie l. betts started out as a revival of the 1940s radio dramas of Richard Durham, which explored the lives and contributions of great names in African-American history. In recent years, though, betts has sought to contemporize the…
You know the rule of the closet: If you haven’t worn it in over a year, out it goes to make room for new favorites. But few people have the wherewithal to stick with the edict unless there’s the promise of some kind of return. That’s why Anna Newell Jones…
Denver Arts Week and the grand opening of H&M will collide today at the Denver Pavilions in what’s definitely a big day for Denver’s legion of fashionistas. As the line grows in anticipation of H&M’s doors swinging open at noon, the waiting ranks will be treated to a live fashion…
By the terms of my profession, I’m privy to just about everything happening culturally in this town. But I do sometimes long for a bigger city: to walk Manhattan from end to end to end, climb the hills of San Francisco, cruise Sunset Boulevard and kneel to Chicago, the hog…
As founder of the Shakespeare & Company theater (a tradition in Lenox, Massachusetts for more than thirty years), Tina Packer knows her Shakespeare — frontwards, backwards and any which way you want. She’s also determined over time that the Bard created, by her estimate, only 177 major women characters, as…
Word came down yesterday from the Bureau of Land Management in favor of large-scale installation artist Christo’s Over the River project slated to cover areas over a 42-mile stretch of the Arkansas River in southern Colorado with fabric canopies. Though further approvals are still needed from the Colorado Department of…
Beverly McIver, whose work was displayed in a solo show last year at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, is the kind of painter who pulls no punches. She paints bold, expressionistic statements based on her experience as an African-American woman, touching unflinchingly on issues of race and class. And…
It was always kinda, sorta meant to be, but late last week, the official announcement was made: The LIDA Project theater troupe led by Brian Freeland (a member of Westword’s Mastermind class of 2009) and the Control Group Productions avant-garde dance ensemble led by Patrick Mueller are forming a partnership…
You like beer, right? How about bottomless beer? Or even better, bottomless beer for charity — complete with a beer glass you can take home to commemorate your do-good, bottomless-beer escapade. It’s all yours for the slurping at tonight’s Kegs for a Kause, which starts at 6 p.m. at Renegade…
