100 Colorado Creatives: Gamma Acosta

#47: Street artist Gamma Acosta Gamma Acosta grew up in Longmont, another poor kid on the street, but he had a gift. The world was his painting surface, he discovered, and he had a way with a spray can that took him beyond the hardened parameters of street writing. Today,…

100 Colorado Creatives: Andy O’Leary

#48: Andy O’Leary Andy O’Leary, a Denverite since childhood, is a poet, a DJ at KUVO and a general man of the people. But music is his mistress. Ever since he was a kid in the ’60s whose brain was split open by the Beatles and then picked up a…

The Scheme of Things

Donald Fodness might be the last great original: His whole seemingly chaotic shtick as an artist is really quite ordered — in some secret schematic laid out in his own head — and every line of every drawing and each element of every sculpture or installation is part of the…

All-Around Fun

When you walk into Buntport Theater for Some Kind of Fun — the first show in the first season of Adam Stone’s Screw Tooth multimedia theater ensemble — you will see the bare warehouse as you’ve never seen it before, free of curtains and all pretense of being a normal…

Market Day at Night

Farmers’ markets come in all sizes, shapes and vibes, but the atmosphere of the new Broadway Farmers’ Market is definitively urban, with a nice measure of hipster thrown in. Right off the bat, it turns the tables on the usual early-morning affairs we’re used to by hosting its vendors in…

Bad Religion

Ordained Lutheran minister Nadia Bolz-Weber took a rare path when she created the House for All Sinners and Saints, an ELCA mission church that truly opens its door to anyone, regardless of gender, race, beliefs, philosophy or choices in body art. “I wanted to start a church that I would…

Spirits of the West

“One of the great things about having thirty-plus distilleries in this state is that there’s something for everyone,” says Josh Mishell, co-organizer of the Colorado Distillers Festival. And with a couple dozen of those distilleries representing at the festival, attendees will be able to find spirits to their tastes. “I…

Two-Wheel Circus

For those not familiar with New Belgium Brewing’s annual touring Tour de Fat celebration, the sight of local bicyclists parading down 17th Avenue from City Park in an array of costumes both silly and inspired might seem a little peculiar. But that’s how it is at the Tour de Fat,…

Star Power

Local actor and theater educator Jose Antonio Mercado met Hollywood couple Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman the same way they met each other: acting in a production of The Berlin Circle in Los Angeles back in 2000. They all became fast friends — and in the case of Mullally and…

Getting Off the Street

Anthony Garcia lived in Globeville for 25 years before recently moving on, but as director of the Birdseed Collective, a grassroots group promoting neighborhood unity through the arts, he hasn’t left the community behind. And for the last three years, one of his favorite Globeville projects has been Street Kidz…

World Pieces

In a world where we are assailed with images and information on the Internet, collage is making a comeback. Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art curator Petra Sertic noticed the trend and decided to address it, amassing eight modern collage artists from Colorado and beyond for BMoCA’s summer show, Cut and…

New Kid on the Stage

When Joey McIntyre joined New Kids on the Block on the cusp of turning thirteen, he used the music to get him through the difficult process of fitting in with the rest of the group — childhood friends who could probably finish each other’s sentences. He came back to the…

Gathering of the Tribe

It’s been thirty years since a group of Denver artists desperate for affordable studio space found shelter in the vacant Sherman Elementary School and renamed it the Grant Street Art Center. In a move spearheaded by Pat Cronin, who was looking for a place to relocate her printmaking studio, they…

100 Colorado Creatives: John Moore

#49: John Moore There is no greater friend of Denver theater than John Moore, a self-described storyteller given to telling its stories in great — and loving — detail. On his CultureWest.org website, the former Denver Post critic has laboriously followed the work of his friends in theater, of which…

Aurora Cultural Arts District wants you for Poetry@Play in September

Know any poets? Got a thing yourself for putting words together in beautiful collages? There’s a place for every poet at the Aurora Cultural Arts District’s first-ever Poetry@Play weekend, where verses by featured poets and all comers will ring out both indoors and out in downtown Aurora on September 20…

What’s Old Is New

Ironton Studios and Gallery pioneered what is now RiNo, back before the thriving arts district had a name or designation. Based on a model of building community among working artists, it served as a blueprint for many such ventures to come, and fifteen years later, Ironton still stands as an…

Park Yourself Here

Some folks will head for the hills today, others for the backyard grill. Some will be found feeding their faces in Civic Center Park at Taste of Colorado. And a hardy few will spend at least part of their Labor Day stretching their legs on a run through three to…

Get in the Overflow

The art collective Pangloss Gravitron — a group of like-minded creatives who came together over a theme of the invested hope in art-making — made a splash last December with their first show at Vertigo Art Space. The group’s second exhibition, Corpus Exuberis, currently on view at Emmanuel Gallery on…

Let SAN sooth your soul tonight at Hinterland

Even the hardest-willed Type A sometimes needs to slow down. And naturally, so do the rest of us. Tonight in the garden behind Hinterland, everyone’s welcome to sample three loosely interrelated mind-loosening disciplines designed to slow down your pulse and amp up your chakras during SAN, an evening of “music,…

100 Colorado Creatives: Adam Stone

#50: Adam Stone UPDATE: Adam Stone is raising money for his 2015 projects with a campaign on Indiegogo. The artist hopes to bring in $9,000, which would help pay for both his own works as well as collaborations with Buntport Theater and others. It’s not out of line to think…

Repertory Cinema Wishlist: Atlantic City

Some movies are all about place, and Louis Malle’s Atlantic City, a story set on the cusp of change in the resort town, during an in-between time when in real-time the boardwalk’s grand old buildings were giving away to modern casinos, is one of them. Against this no man’s land…

You don’t have to be mid-century to love the Denver Modernism Show

In the new millennium, modernism is something of a conundrum. As immediate as it is retro, the mid-century ethos of streamlined design and space-age concerns is enjoying something of a style renaissance. Blame Mad Men if you must, but mid-century is cool again. That explains why Dana Cain’s Denver Modernism…