Denver theater patriarch Henry Lowenstein — a painter and set designer in his own right, as well as a foundational pillar at the old Bonfils Theatre and the Denver Civic Theatre — came into his own creative panache and arts-supporting spirit by way of his Estonian mother, Maria. As an…
When Westword chatted with Boulder photographer James Balog many years ago, he was making waves with his bold, staged portraits of endangered species, photographs that seemed to expose their inner animal souls. By then, though, Balog had already started another chapter, photographing polar bears in their natural habitat with a…
When’s the last time you went to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science just to contemplate the dioramas or wander among the fossils and bones of Prehistoric Journey? Once you’ve been through one of the big super-shows — such as the current one, A Day in Pompeii — it…
Tucked away in the Park Hill neighborhood is Share Denver, a project from Becky Hensley of the Denver Craft Ninjas and the Colorado Bead Company’s Anne Davidson. The two craft-conscious women teamed up to open a studio space where work could be made and techniques taught by and for Denver’s…
For close to twenty years, the LIDA Project, Brian Freeland’s experimental theater group, has been both a deliberately collaborative effort and the spawn of Freeland’s own unique vision, and the model has worked well for the company. Even when Freeland took a sabbatical in 2010, LIDA continued to take Freeland-style…
#29: Chris Loffelmacher Chris Loffelmacher is a guy who makes things happen and a man of grand passions; somehow, the two traits meld perfectly in his programming for the Denver Public Library’s Fresh City Life series. Loffelmacher’s obsessions — everything from old movies and knitting to high fashion and everything…
As the world goes more and more paperless, so does the art world, too: It’s easy to post imagery online, and while coffee-table books are becoming expensive dinosaurs, exhibit catalogs are forever on the Internet. It was appropriate, then, for Philip J. Steele Gallery curator Cortney Lane Stell to document…
The holiday shopping season begins in earnest on this nasty day after Thanksgiving, and though Small Business Saturday is tomorrow, it doesn’t mean you can’t keep right on shopping local and handmade — now and all year long. And how can you resist, anyway, with all of these alternatives still…
Whatever happened to the days when someone said, “Hey, gang, let’s put on a show!” — and things happened overnight, just like that, to rave reviews? Outside of a few summer-break escapades in the rec room, it’s not so common an occurrence these days, at least not until now. Boulder-area…
RedLine Gallery has a reputation for housing exhibitions with a global stretch, but once annually, it shines the spotlight on its greatest asset: its own diverse group of resident artists, who paint, sculpt, install and create on the premises in studios awarded for two-year terms. For this year’s resident-artist exhibition,…
It’s that time of year when every stage in town begins to haul out its treacly family-friendly holiday fare, which is nice…but maybe redundant. Fa la la la la, ho-humbug. If yet another round of A Christmas Carol or It’s a Wonderful Life doesn’t put the schnapps in your hot…
The pairing of clay artists Gayla Lemke and Marie EvB Gibbons goes back more than twenty years; friends and colleagues, they met at the old Off-Center co-op in Arvada and have since shown work side by side many times, in various settings. Now the two ceramic wizards will again get…
When the Red Ball fashion show started out in 2009, it was a much smaller affair, recalls Jeff Trujillo of the Denver branch of the Colorado AIDS Project. But its intent remains the same. “This year’s show, being the fifth anniversary, happens to fall on World AIDS Day,” he notes…
If you ask Denver milliner Susan Dillon, it’s okay to want to get a good price on a new TV — but is it really worth camping out in front of Best Buy for two days? Dillon’s all about thinking small, local and handmade this holiday season, and she’s put…
We usually see finished artwork in gallery exhibits: pieces that tie up the loose ends of a process to make a visual — or visceral — statement. But the process is also interesting, and that’s what fascinated Emily Moore of Love Gallery as curator of a new invitational show, Origins,…
#30: Jaime Kopke Jaime Kopke hails from Massachusetts, but ended up in Colorado, bringing cultural gold in her pocket. She’s helped spark more than a few creative projects here, from the city’s ongoing Pecha Kucha series to the Denver Community Museum, a short-lived but brilliant pop-up people’s reliquary that threw…
Whovians are desperately loyal, and they have been for fifty years, ever since William Hartnell first hit the BBC as the original Doctor Who. Ten doctors later, with British actor Peter Capaldi set to become the twelfth Doctor beginning with this year’s Christmas special, the push to the future began…
It was a hairy morning for runners at Stapleton Central Park on Saturday, but not because of the cold: The crowds who showed up at the Mustache Dache to raise funds and awareness for the men’s-health charity known as Movember donned facial hair both real and fake, and a good…
Dance concerts might not be the hottest tickets in town, but the metro area has plenty of companies with stamina, including the long-lived Kim Robards Dance, which is experiencing a growth spurt since relocating to the Aurora Cultural Art District on East Colfax Avenue. And Robards will demonstrate what leaps…
#31: Christina Battle Video and multimedia installation artist Christina Battle hails from Edmonton, but now calls Denver her home. During her time in Colorado, she’s taught for the Film Studies department at the University of Colorado at Boulder and more recently at Metro State University of Denver, but primarily she…
Artist and local arts champion Tracy Weil loves Halloween and painting and the circle of life, and in his new show, Los Esqueletos (The Skeletons), he ties all three together with a theme that straddles the spooky season with a nod to the Day of the Dead. Initially inspired by…
The first thing you notice about Broken Shovels Farm is its human touch: The tiny Adams County goat farm is family-run, and the goats and chickens and dogs wandering through its pens are clearly more than livestock — they’re part of the family, too. A champion of everything natural, hands-on…
