There are many easy reasons to spend an afternoon and evening drinking beer and listening to free music with your neighbors, but Paul Nashak of Mountain Sun says the fourth annual Vine Street Uptown Neighborhood Block Party and Brewer’s Olympics is about more than that. “One thing that’s important to…
#56: Alvin Gregorio and Petra Sertic Petra Sertic is a curator with more than fifty exhibitions under her belt; Alvin Gregorio is an artist and CU professor whose own exhibitions have circled the globe. Together, they founded Launch Pad in 2012, a flexible forum bringing together artists and art-loving audiences…
This weekend’s gallery openings include works that reimagine inner and outer landscapes, inspire creativity in youngsters or just plain look good on a wall. Highbrow, lowbrow and everywhere in between, there’s something for everyone in Denver this weekend…. See also: Golden Opportunity: Jenny Morgan at Plus Gallery…
The fall theater season is in full swing. This weekend you can send off a local production as it takes to the road, re-view an old stage classic or catch the world premiere of a new play from a local playwright — and there’s an old-fashioned musical, too. Here’s a…
When Martin Moran’s The Tricky Part, an Obie-winning, autobiographical one-man show about his brush with sexual abuse as a boy, played at Curious Theatre ten years ago, it left Westword theater critic Juliet Wittman feeling uncomfortable — not because of the subject matter, but because there was no subterfuge or…
Director Maruca Salazar never really thought of the Museo de las Américas, her Latino-culture stronghold that holds everything from folk art to fine art, as a place for street art — at least not until a group of local graffiti artists met with her a couple of years ago. They’d…
When we think of Japanese prints, we tend to envision the “floating world” woodblock prints of nineteenth-century artists like Hokusai and Hiroshige, who influenced the composition style of Edgar Degas and other impressionist painters. But the print tradition still thrives today in Japan, where changing printmaking technology and updated environments…
During his 27 years working on the Uptown Sampler restaurant crawl (including fourteen as event director), Paul Weiss has seen Denver’s Uptown neighborhood blossom, becoming a real community instead of a transient wasteland. “When I first started doing this, Uptown was not a desirable neighborhood. No one walked there, not…
Beyond Pop Art: A Tom Wesselmann Retrospective is the closest thing to a blockbuster this summer at the Denver Art Museum, and it’s a sweet one: On tour from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the exhibition of nearly 100 works by Wesselmann, who died ten years ago, opens today…
“When you open the streets, you open minds,” says Hillary Griffith of Boulder Green Streets, and that’s the thinking behind the Boulder Green Streets Ciclovia, which will close down three miles of Boulder streets to traffic today for six hours of building community and just taking time out to play…
When Front Range communities washed away in last year’s torrential rains and subsequent floods, some folks who experienced the disaster firsthand did so with cameras in hand, documenting the stark power of nature as rivers jumped their banks to wreak havoc. A year later, the Dairy Center for the Arts…
#57: Dmitri Obergfell A Colorado native, Dmitri Obergfell graduated from the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design under the watch of Clark Richert in 2010. He’s since embarked on a career of international scale, making art that turns classicism on its head, sometimes quite literally, as in the case…
Colorado authors and poets will be in the spotlight this week at ceremonies, readings and head-to-head competitions, proving that diversity is alive and well in our state’s literary community. Take a look at what Colorado has to offer at these three very different events. See also: Bogged Down: Peter May…
Fall is unofficially here, and with it comes a busy First Friday with an eclectic slate of new shows, including everything from an exhibit of fresh work from a 91-year-old legend to a contemporary three-artist tribute to the beauty of the prairie West. Keep reading for more details about these…
#58: Ginger White Brunetti When you see a new mural beautifying urban greenway walls or walk into an exhibit at the McNichols Building in Civic Center Park, you do so under the watch of Ginger White Brunetti, who as deputy director of Denver Arts & Venues oversees city-owned cultural hot…
As summer segues into autumn, the Denver Center Attractions theater season is up and running with Pippin, a Tony Award-winning musical that’s proven itself timeless on Broadway, where the Brechtian ’70s hit resurfaced again last year to rave reviews. Bob Fosse’s involvement in the original show, featuring music and lyrics…
In The Lewis Man, set on the forbidding shores of Lewis Isle in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, Detective Inspector Fin Macleod, a native islander who’s come back, becomes engulfed in the mystery of a body found preserved in a peat bog, which turns out to be not 2,000 years…
Joseph Coniff, one of many talented graduates of the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design and a member of the Rule Gallery stable, typically creates deadpan sculptural works exploring the inner and perceived lives of readymade objects. But in his new show at Rule, (in parentheses), he takes a…
Though New Belgium Brewing’s Tour de Fat travels to several cities each year, it still feels especially Denver-centric in a town where cyclists of every ilk ride side by side every day on miles of city streets and greenway trails. And that’s what makes the crazy, costume-friendly festival — which…
Theater companies all along the Front Range are springing to life as fall seasons get under way. Catch a rocking musical or a taut dark comedy close to home, or venture north for a one-woman tour-de-force or an evening of colorful folklore, with awesome stage moves. See also: M. Butterfly,…
“National Velvet”: love it or leave it. Denver Public Art brought together art fans, everyday critics and passersby last week for the Big Red Street Fair, a happy-hour celebration of one of Denver’s more controversial works of public art. Artist John McEnroe’s bright-red light-up sausage-elisk was the focal point of…
#59: Yoshitomo Saito Tokyo-born Yoshitomo Saito came to the States as a glass-blower in 1983, before moving on to work in bronze sculpture as a graduate student at the California College of the Arts. After leaving his mark in the Bay Area, where he is still a member of the…
