Eight Arty Things to Do This Weekend in Denver

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.

100 Colorado Creatives 4.0: Steven Frost

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.

100 Colorado Creatives 4.0: Kate Bailey

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.

Denver HaHo Market and Spindle Incubator Open at Forge970

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.

100 Colorado Creatives 4.0: Elise VanDyne

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.

Six Arty Things to Do This Weekend in Denver

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.

100 Colorado Creatives 4.0: Arlette Lucero

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.

100 Colorado Creatives 4.0: Lynne Collins

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.

Six Arty Things to Do on First Friday in Denver

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.

100 Colorado Creatives 4.0: Genevieve Waller

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).

100 Colorado Creatives 4.0: Katy Zimmerman

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.

100 Colorado Creatives 4.0: Vincent Comparetto

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.

100 Colorado Creatives 4.0: Jacob Barreras and Libi Rose Striegl

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.

Faiyaz Jafri on the Evolution of Digital Animation

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.

Afrofuturist Filmmaker Amir George Screens at Unseen Festival

“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.