Two-Headed Monsters

Four strong shows drive full throttle into 2014 at the Rocky Mountain College of Arts + Design’s Philip J. Steele, Rude and Alumni galleries today with receptions honoring a quartet of artists both national and homegrown. In particular, Denver’s Donald Fodness kicks off the year with another of his confoundingly…

Ain’t It a Drag

Plays that get life pumped into them early on through public readings at the Denver Center Theatre Company’s annual New Play Summit tend to pop a little louder when they finally make it to the stage, and this transformation to full realization has been especially challenging for director Mike Donahue…

Restoration Blues

In what might be one of the most unlikely scenarios in modern theater, a Jewish plantation owner returns to his ravaged property after the Civil War ends, only to sit down for a Passover seder with two of his former slaves in Matthew Lopez’s The Whipping Man, which opens tonight…

Love Is a Drag

What’s Valentine’s Day without a good drag show? Nuclia Waste and her Demented Divas — Marion McKuzins, Portia Potty and Gabbriella Butts’in — will provide the answer to that question tonight at Lannie’s Clocktower Cabaret…neon costumes, platform shoes, flouncy skirts, green wigs, glittery beards and all. The veteran troupe returns…

Share the Wealth

Musician and ethnomusicologist Stephen Wade first listened to the Library of Congress Field Recordings — gathered by John and Alan Lomax, starting in the 1930s — at the urging of an instructor who was teaching him to play the five-string banjo. Curious about the songs on the recordings and how…

Into the Ordinary

Throughout its nearly three-year run, GroundSwell Gallery has encouraged artists to embark on solo projects that might not otherwise grace gallery walls. Starting tonight, it’s design-oriented creative Andrew Hoffman’s chance to stretch with Watershed, the result of a year-long experiment for which he painted all of the included works simultaneously,…

Share the Wealth

Musician and ethnomusicologist Stephen Wade first listened to the Library of Congress Field Recordings — gathered by John and Alan Lomax, starting in the 1930s — at the urging of an instructor who was teaching him to play the five-string banjo. Curious about the songs on the recordings and how…

Fatherly Love

Two orphaned brothers lead a dreary, grimy existence together in a Philadelphia slum, uneducated in societal rules and living off the most basic of provisions — and whatever the older brother can steal. When they decided to kidnap a Chicago mobster who is, coincidentally, also an orphan, things start to…

Sweet Soiree

Shopping for your Valentine can be a cliché-ridden task, but there’s a way to do it without browsing through the ugly ties or skimpy lingerie that your partner — of either gender — will never wear. At the Perfect Petal’s Love Me Sweet Soiree — a swanky two-part shopping evening…

Return of the Natives

As Center for Visual Arts director and curator Cecily Cullen notes, today’s Native American artists don’t live in the past. And in pulling work together for Cross Currents, the second half of a two-part exhibition series Cullen started in 2009, she specifically looked for artists who respectfully nod to the…

100 Colorado Creatives: Penney Bidwell

#14: Penney Bidwell The work of ceramic artist Penney Bidwell has gained a high level of sophistication in a very short time. After earning a masters degree in psychology, Bidwell turned to clay less than ten years ago, and made immediate strides. Her art, especially her busts, melds whimsicality with…

100 Colorado Creatives: Julie Carr

#15: Julie Carr Julie Carr started out a dancer before turning to poetry in a long traversal from the raw artistic life in New York to the more structured worlds of academia, business and family. The award-winning author of four books of poetry, with more on the way, Carr now…

Monkey Town 4 will bring a highbrow slice of Brooklyn to RiNo

We might live in a town where dining out with an eye-feast of visual media means heading to the latest sing-along screening at the Alamo Drafthouse, but in a few weeks, that will all change — at least for a while. Former Denverite Montgomery Knott just announced the arrival here…

Alphabet Denver finds letters in the most unusual places

We live in a world of letters — letters in books and on billboards and TV screens, and appearing clickety-clackety as our fingertips conjure them out of keyboards. But author Kitty Migaki found characters lurking in more unusual places — among the angles and curves and cornices of buildings –…

100 Colorado Creatives: Paul Moschell

#16: Paul Moschell Artist Paul Moschell doubles as a sweet-hearted animal-lover and an eccentric-about-town who, when he’s not painting whimsical characters on paper and matchboxes or building disturbing pieces out of doll parts and other objects (some of them sharp and pointy), shoots video selfies of himself dancing with his…

Town and Country

You never know what you’re going to get at the Museum of Outdoor Arts. This time around, it’s Urban Abstract/Rural Grid, a shape-shifting showcase of work by two veterans of the local scene, featuring encaustic paintings by Patricia Aaron and Chandler Romeo’s ceramic earthworks. It’s no accident that these two…

Dark Ages

Volker Schlöndorff, filmmaker and proponent of the New German Cinema, might be best remembered for his Oscar-winning turn as director of The Tin Drum in 1979, but 1976’s Coup de Grâce, filmed in black and white and set amid post-revolutionary turmoil in the Baltics, avoids that film’s crazy bombast for…

Intelligent Design

Since it’s served up some of the best-looking parties and shiniest silent auctions in town for nearly a decade, you’d expect the Design Council of the Denver Art Museum’s tenth annual Design After Dark fundraising gala to follow suit. And the feel, if not the exact look, of parties past…

Have a heart at CHAC’s Milagros del Corazón silent auction

The Chicano Humanities and Arts Council invites you to to show some Valentine’s love for its cultural outreach programs at the fifteenth annual Milagros del Corazón benefit on Friday, January 31. This is CHAC’s biggest fundraiser of the year; artists and friends of the group decorate hundreds of blank wooden…

100 Colorado Creatives: Lonnie Hanzon

#17: Lonnie Hanzon Lonnie Hanzon is a bit of a wizard; in fact, he once held the title of Wizard-in-Residence at the Museum of Outdoor Arts. His artistic oeuvre is a cabinet of curiosities (an exhibit he staged while at MOA bore the same name), a baroque mixture of whimsical…