According to Pirate gallery founder Phil Bender’s records, it’s the thirtieth anniversary of the co-op’s annual Day of the Dead Show and Celebration, which, in its earliest incarnations, was really the only DOD game in town. In the present, such art-driven celebrations have spread from community stalwarts like CHAC and…
Think of Denver Arts Week as a celebration of all our city has to offer culturally, with the added incentive of sweet deals, from discounted memberships, restaurant meals and original artworks to a free Night at the Museums. But as a trip online to Denver Arts Week central reveals, there’s…
#36: Samuel Schimek Artist, designer and entrepreneur Samuel Schimek bridges the gap between art and business in his Denver Pavilions shop, I Heart Denver, which serves as a working incubator and showcase for dozens of Colorado artists and independent companies. In the process, he’s perfected the art of local branding…
Don’t expect a grand pastiche of Impressionists when you walk through the three exhibits that comprise Passport to Paris — while the Denver Art Museum’s fall blockbuster does have its share of Impressionist works, that’s only part of the exhibition suite’s story, which deftly provides the narrative of three centuries…
Hey, Denver: We’ve got game. For the last 35 years, we’ve been able to boast a world-class film festival, and this year’s 36th Starz Denver Film Festival only ups the ante. The full schedule, released on Monday and tucked into today’s issue of Westword (and also available online), proves the…
A new kind of studio/gallery space will rise out of the shell of an old family business tonight when Helikon Gallery & Studios officially opens its doors at 3675 Wynkoop Street with an inaugural exhibit and community reception. Illustrator Cayce Goldberg, whose family once ran a limo service out of…
Walk into TANK Studios, and you’ll find a raw but ordered space where one artist’s studio segues into another’s, and big windows, high ceilings and skylights unfold in a panoramic, circular pathway. Built out in a South Acoma Street warehouse in the Overland neighborhood early this year by a group…
#37: Terry Dodd Terry Dodd has been entrenched in local theater as a director and playwright for more than thirty years, garnering dozens of awards and other kudos for his thoughtfully crafted work. These days, he shares the wealth as a teacher, too, and as a dedicated lover of a…
Oakland-based artist Desirée Holman is admittedly a bit of a geek when it comes to otherworldly things, from auras to aliens, and that’s the subject matter she taps visually in her ongoing project, Sophont. Begun in 2012, Sophont is a multimedia mixture of light, video, sound and physical paintings that…
Philip Dawkins’s Edward Gorey-esque musical fable Failure: A Love Story tells you right off the bat that three central characters — the Fail sisters — will all be dead by the end of the show. In a new production by Boulder’s Catamounts, this news is delivered by a chorus of…
Though its creations can make or break the look of a production, the costume shop at the Denver Center Theatre Company might go unsung most of the year, cranking out fancy duds for characters both Shakespearean and contemporarily urban: kings and clowns, beggars and bellhops, showgirls and sad old men…
Former — and infamously outed — CIA agent Valerie Plame is through looking back. With past events and her memoir about them (How a Top CIA Agent Was Betrayed by Her Own Government) behind her, she’s now forging into fiction with help from best-selling thriller author Sarah Lovett, who helped…
One thing we’ve all learned from the success of Fifty Shades of Grey: Readers do like a little literary spice in their lives. And there’s a whole new market of soft-porn aficionados out there hungering for a little naughty in their novels. That’s the market targeted by A Night of…
The central character in Theresa Rebeck’s satirical comedy of wordplay, Seminar, is Leonard, an above-it-all literary figure so revered from beneath his cloud nine that he can’t be brought down for anyone or anything. Four hopeful writers, each of whom has paid $5,000 for the opportunity, sit at his feet…
Brian Corrigan and the Denver Theatre District have big plans to turn Champa Street between 14th Street and the 16th Street Mall into a life-sized video game arcade next summer, combining a number of media platforms to bring people together through gaming in the streets. Called OhHeckYeah, it’s a big…
#38: donnie l. betts donnie l. betts quietly gets things done, while wearing every hat in the store: actor, director, filmmaker, African-American historian and radio-play producer. In his spare time — if you can believe he has any — he even markets a sculptural dog-waste receptacle called Paws Here. See…
Many a Monopoly game has been upended over an accusation of cheating — but what would happen if cheating was a predetermined part of the game? Tonight’s Warm Cookies of the Revolution session, “Realistic Monopoly and Other Games,” is based on the findings of a study conducted by psychologist Paul…
#39: Amanda Berg Wilson. Amanda Berg Wilson is a juggler of roles, who came to Boulder from Chicago, where she helped found the interdisciplinary performance group Striding Lion. And when she moved to Colorado, she brought with her an adventurously playful breath of creative fresh air. Once here, she founded…
The connection between the black-and-white of words and the physical verve of dance might not seem obvious at first, but with Dance & Text, a site-specific collaborative performance hosted by Counterpath, a small press, bookstore and performance/event venue at 613 22nd Street, choreographers Aynsley Vandenbroucke and Lauren Bakst and poet…
Everyone’s got one lurking inside, but not many folks discover the secret to unleashing a successful creative life. Still, an impressive lineup of people have mastered that art, and they’ll be profiled in the Creative Life Series, which begins today with an exploration of spiritual guru Joseph Campbell and continues…
#40: Brian Corrigan. Brian Corrigan dreams big — in 3D — and his latest project means to recreate cyberspace live on the streets of downtown Denver next summer as a way of bringing people and ideas together through life-sized gaming. If all goes according to plan, OhHeckYeah: An Immersive Street…
For this year’s Now Showing, Westword’s fall arts guide, we asked artistic movers and shakers to answer a few questions about the state of the arts, both locally and around the world. We’ll be rolling out their answers over the next few weeks in pairs that combine both veterans and…
