This weekend’s art events get down to the nitty-gritty of the gallery world, with fundraisers, Halloween themes, new ideas and solid exhibits, not to mention an opportunity to poke your toe into the water and be an artist yourself. Here are eight ways to kneel at the altar of art.
Steven Frost crosses disciplines as an artist, often mining pop culture and archives to tell modern stories. Installation, performance, objects and fiber art all play parts in those changing narratives, but the needle and thread driving Frost’s personal warp and weft goes a bit farther in telling his own story.
If you happen to be walking past the Colorado Convention Center this week, there’s a good chance you’ve seen art being made — humongous art following a continuous lines through a pattern of words, shapes and faces across a black-and-white urban canvas, rendered by a lone women in knee pads, brandishing a spray can.
Denver fiction author Kali Fajardo-Anstine draws from her centuries-old Colorado heritage, breathing life into her Chicana characters with the assurance of someone who’s lived it.
Experience old favorites, new horizons and an opportunity to get your hands dirty this weekend at Denver galleries. Here are five hot spots.
A former journalist and magazine editor on the interior design, architecture and lifestyle beats, Kate Bailey now helms her own Denver public relations firm, Annabel Media. But since 2014, she’s also turned her entrepreneurial expertise toward giving back through TARRA, Bailey’s own nurturing platform for the promotion of women makers and creative thinkers.
While lively punk scenes thrived in many cities across the U.S. in the late ’70s and early ’80s, San Francisco’s had something the others did not. “It feels like the San Francisco scene is so overlooked, because it was more intellectual and more art-based,” says Colorado-based photographer Richard Alden Peterson.
The Denver Handmade Homemade Market, aka the HaHo, started out loosey-goosey in 2011, as little more than a lemonade stand and good-faith swap for things like cottage-industry handcrafts, backyard produce and home-kitchen goods, as well as an experiment in shopping with alternative currency.
Elise VanDyne, who gave up a successful corporate career to become executive director of the Colorado Maker Hub, is a true believer in all creative industries, from independent crafters to adventurers in robotics and under-the-radar techies and Burners blending science and art in humongous desert installations.
Oh, the variety: Metro Denver galleries are set to celebrate book artists from across the U.S., honor the Colorado art dynasty of Charles and Collin Parson, throw open houses with affordable merch for the holidays (or not) and host a DIY art session with a community-building fiber artist.
To know Mona Lucero is to love her: The veteran Denver fashion designer not only works wonders molding fabric to form, but she’s also created her own style milieu, an intelligent, perceptive and pampering platform that imbues simple garments with empowering qualities.
The Chicano art community runs deep in Denver, and Arlette Lucero has been on the front line for decades, quietly educating children in the arts and illustrating storybooks, while also painting powerful women, using imagery rooted in mestizo culture with modernized focal points.
The way Lynne Collins, artistic director for the Arvada Center’s Black Box Theater, has transformed the venue’s second stage is genius: Flying in the face of theatrical cutbacks at a time when even the Denver Center for the Performing Arts Theatre Company no longer supports an in-house repertory company, she’s done just that — brought back the idea of the old-school ensemble, using local talent and a collaborative ethic.
Pop art or political art? Pick your poison: The October 2017 First Friday in Denver is rife with big art, identity politics, fun and games, and a whole lot of eye candy. Here are six places to wander, near and far, through art shows of all sizes.
A whole person with innumerable grassroots interests, Genevieve Waller dips her focus head-on into several scenes at once: as an analog cameraless photographer, a queer historian, a DJ for Radio 1190’s “The Violet Hour,” a silent-film aficionado with the Denver Silent Film Festival, and an installation and performance artist with the Secret Love art collective (and on her own).
Mysticism, nature and personal politics mingle freely in Denver artist Katy Zimmerman’s organic work, rendered in a constellation of mediums while hurtling through a dimensional space-time continuum.
Fall is here, and so are a host of new shows going in new directions in Denver and Boulder. Be adventurous and try all five of these.
A native New Yorker now living in Denver, Vincent Comparetto walks the planet at street level, but with a global view fired by a love for traveling. When he’s not doing that, Comparetto teaches, makes films and music videos, does motion graphics design work, photographs sights seen in places near and far and, as an artist with an elegant modernist design sense, stencils designs over collaged backgrounds in limited editions.
Jacob Barreras is the ultimate projectionist who exercises his eye for new and the historical avant-garde film while plying his trade for the University of Colorado Film Studies Program, and Libi Striegl, a doctoral candidate in intermedia art, writing and performance at CU, bounces around between disciplines with special interests in robotics, software design to textiles and filmmaking.
Discover new art spaces and firmly established faces this weekend at gallery openings on every level of the spectrum. Here are three new shows to tide you over for a week.
Digital animator Faiyaz Jafri has been on top of his game for as long as the medium has even been around, beginning thirty years ago on an Apple computer with the most basic of programming tools available. It was a painstakingly different onscreen world back then, but Jafri, now an internationally known animation pioneer who produces his own cutting-edge, award-winning work while also co-directing Hong Kong’s Third Culture Film Festival, still represents the gold standard in his trade.
“I think I’m very black, very cool and very dope — those three things. If I had niche or had to choose one, it’d be cool, black and awesome — and fun.” That’s how Amir George, a Chicago filmmaker, describes his own Afrofuturist alternative film work, though he admits a lot of it is really dead serious, if portrayed in a playful way.
