Denver’s techno-marching band Itchy-O has decided to honor filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky on his 89th birthday with a shower of handmade tarot cards depicting his numerical birth card, The Emperor. Here’s how you can pitch in.
Artists Jonathan Saiz and Wes Magyar are exploring the new frontier of direct-marketing for artists with 7000 Reasons, a collaborative portrait-painting project designed not only to be a money-maker, but to also just make people happy.
Have paintbrush, will travel — over his career, Kevin Sloan moved around. A lot. But for now, he’s settled in Denver, spinning elegant canvases drenched in allegory and magical popsurrealism, many of them based in a natural world changed by human history.
Native Denverite Josiah Lee Lopez, aka the muralist ZEPOL, grew up on the streets and and in the back alleys, with roots as a talented graffiti writer whose work — still executed on walls, though now more often with permission — has evolved with the times.
January gallery openings continue to go full-bore as venues wake up after the holiday season. This month is swarming with new shows on every level in Denver, but you can also welcome — and play with — a new interactive public-art sculpture in the heart of the city.
Painter Craig Marshall Smith was born in Flint, Michigan during the Truman administration. He attended UCLA, and then taught drawing at three universities in three states for over thirty years. His opinion columns appear in a number of metro-Denver weekly newspapers.
Denver artists caught in the crosshairs of gentrification and rampant redevelopment do have alternatives to that predicament, thinks Cortney Stell of the Black Cube Nomadic Museum. Stell is all for seeing artists who feel marginalized in the here and now stop complaining and start changing, by devising new models to replace the old-school ones that aren’t working anymore.
When Pope Francis derogatorily took on the culture of modern gender-reassignment technologies and deemed them a part of a “utopia of the neutral” in a 2017 speech, Denver artist and Cabal Gallery member Mar Williams decided to strike back.
Denver native and artist Carlos Frésquez’s people came from the centuries-old Mexican borderland culture of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, but he experienced his roots from a city boy’s cross-cultural perspective.
Exhibits opening this week run the gamut in subject matter, from works by tattoo artists to an installation of mind-blowing light sculptures by nonegenarian Dorothy Tanner.
Known for his color-coordinated mosaics of fashion photos taken impromptu on the street, New York Times fashion columnist Bill Cunningham had a blithe eye for style and a knack for being in the right place at the right time.
The best choreographers are pioneers in space, intellectually binding movement and ideas in a singular sweep through time. It takes a dynamic, malleable mind to do that, while staying just ahead of trends in the outer reaches of the dance universe. Kate Speer — a consummate collaborationist, recent PlatteForum resident and a member of RedLine’s newest class of artist/residents — has got that down
Musa Bailey galvanized an old-school spirit in rapidly gentrifying RiNo with music, style, spins and street art as the creative wing and artist liaison of the Cold Crush ownership — and hopes to continue that work when the legendary hip-hop club safely lands in a new location.
January is traditionally a time to take a fresh look at Denver’s co-op galleries, where open shows and member shows — and just about any kind of show — all cast an eye on the power of community among artists struggling for a foothold. But that’s not all on the horizon for the first First Friday of 2018.
Propelled by punk yet inspired by the Beats, Zack Kopp is no stranger to Denver’s underground spoken-word scene, having participated as a host and performer throughout the ’90s. He’s gone on to write and publish his own works in more recent years, including a local-history tome on Beat icon Neal Cassady’s Denver roots.
SupaStore, British artist Sarah Staton’s response to the overarching rise of online commerce in the new millennium and how retail is losing its human touch, has come to Denver, in the guise of SupaStore Human—We are the Product, a singular iteration of Staton’s artist road show.
Steve Legg’s not the type of artist who makes art to draw attention to himself; instead, he electrifies viewers with conceptual ideas that take jagged shape using manmade materials.
Take in some art before the year is over at these shows and more.
Rick Griffith, the design maven and letterpress wizard of MATTER Studio, has a whole different way of approaching commerce as a community-based social action. In his world, every person — rich or poor, black or white, unschooled or highly overeducated — is a cog in the wheel of fair and equal commerce, and no one gets left out.
Think you can get through the next few weeks without hitting the mall or setting foot inside a big box store? It isn’t necessary to empty your pockets soullessly on plastic junk and electronics just to make that space under the ChristmaHanuKwanzaa bush look as good as the one over at the Joneses. You’ve got this, and we’re here to help.
Idris Goodwin—poet, writer, playwright, director and educator— arrived in Colorado Springs after a series of lives spent in various American cities five years ago, bringing a big, facile, culturally divergent voice to the Front Range. Now he’s making inroads down the I-25 corridor into Denver’s theater scene, with his director’s cap on at Curious Theatre and as a playwright at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts this spring.
Group and small-works shows abound at co-ops, studio enclaves and commercial galleries, too, making December an opportunity to scope out the breadth of Denver’s many-faceted art scene. Have a holiday-season lark and get to know every kind of artist better at these ten events.
