The theme of this year’s Denver County Fair, which begins in only a few weeks, is “The Year of the Win,” and that means blue ribbons, lots of them, in what seems like every possible category under the sun. And the theme will definitely carry over to the fair’s Art…
Not everyone knows that just thirty miles up the road from Denver, in Keenesburg, sits the 720-acre Wild Animal Sanctuary, a refuge serving more than 300 rescued lions, tigers, bears, wolves and other large carnivores. But the tourist-friendly sanctuary – which has a raised walkway system for safe viewing, as…
How a young painter from mainland China became a local treasure is a story unto itself, but Xi Zhang seems to have settled in Denver, along with a stunning portfolio of mature, explosive work that he’s created here. Some of that work has been seen over the last few years…
The Vail International Dance festival starts next Sunday, with its highbrow brand of dance programming of ballet, ballroom and modern styles and ensembles. But today’s grittier 8150 Urban Dance Challenge serves as its unofficial kickoff. With a title that nods to Vail’s mountain altitude, the dance-off features some of the…
When Adam Lerner, MCA Denver’s director and Chief Animator in the Department of Fabrications, took on the task of curating Denver Night, the culminating blowout party for the Biennial of the Americas in Civic Center Park, he hoped to sculpt an event that both met the challenge of an international…
Alongside tonight’s flurry of Biennial-sponsored events — a 5:30 p.m. symposium led by Arianna Huffington at the Buell Theatre and a Canada Night shindig at Sustainability Park from 7 to 11 p.m. — MCA Denver will jump into the middle of the action at 5 p.m. with a celebration of…
The curatorial team behind the Biennial’s Draft Urbanism exhibitions wanted to turn the city into an international showcase so people-friendly that it’s accessible by simply walking down the street. In turn, Draft Urbanism’s indoor element, First Draft, was conceived as a welcoming gesture from the local art community to the…
Architecture provides our daily backdrop of the city, and we tend to take it for granted as we walk each day through brick, glass, metal and concrete canyons and along orderly avenues lined with dwellings old and new. But Carson Chan, executive curator for Denver’s Biennial of the Americas 2013…
Putting together an exquisite corpse exhibit would be no easy task for a gallerist in any case, but Rebecca Peebles and Danette Montoya of the adventurous Groundswell Gallery made their mission even more challenging: For Exquisite Corpse: Stamped and Mailed, they tapped a whopping 44 local artists to choose partners…
#58: Cortney Lane Stell Cortney Lane Stell quietly goes about her work as gallery director at the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design, but her work has real impact: Stell consistently mounts exhibits at RMCAD that display global ideas and cutting-edge trends in art, bringing work by international artists…
Editor’s note: Longtime Denver fashion designer Francis Roces, whose brand name is KimonoDragons, is half of the inaugural pair of PAIR residents at Denver’s Powerhaüs Studio. As part of his three-month residency, he and his fine-art counterpart, Charlie Boots, will be reporting from the real world via Show and Tell,…
The 2013 Biennial of the Americas is finally here, one year late and ready to blow through Denver in four short days with a kaleidoscopic concentration of programming both political and cultural. BotA will kick off with a couple of high-profile events tonight: “Unleashing Human Potential: Reinventing Communities, Business, and…
Denver Digerati’s Friday Flash series of experimental digital media and animation displays in the Denver Theatre District continues tonight with The World Is !Flati>, a nod to the female perspective. The short program, which begins screening outdoors at 6:30 p.m. on the district’s giant LED screen at 14th and Champa…
Next Tuesday, the second Biennial of the Americas will kick off a crammed four days of programming — July 16 through 19 — that promises to run fast and hard, giving you little time to catch your breath. To help you plot your course, we’ve compiled this list of the…
#59: Pangloss Gravitron Pangloss Gravitron: Not a person. Rather, it’s a diverse six-person collective of local artists who share a certain speculative, surreal and fantasmic scope in their works. “Pangloss” references Voltaire’s optimist Dr. Pangloss from Candide; “Gravitron” is a spinning, flying-saucer-like amusement park ride using centrifugal force to elicit…
Guitarist/songwriter Robbie Robertson of The Band turned seventy this month, and that milestone got me thinkng about The Last Waltz. Some folks call it the “best concert movie ever made,” and it has a lot going for it in that respect: Martin Scorcese, who has a deep feel for the…
Last month Create Denver invited residents to Come Play in the Park, an informal BYO-picnic celebration designed to raise awareness of the sights and amenities of Civic Center Park and its newest cultural jewel: the refurbished McNichols Building, the one-time Carnegie Library reborn as a gallery and event space. It…
Thornton Wilder’s Our Town might be a quiet story on paper, but when composer Ned Rorem turned it into an opera, he must have relied on the characters’ inner fireworks to turn it into something big — because everyone knows that opera is neither quiet nor softspoken. And the modern…
Dutch textile artist Claudy Jongstra creates from the earth up. Rather than working alone in a studio, she heads a fiber-art atelier in the Netherlands that’s also a farm for keeping bees, growing plants for dyes, and raising a flock of long-locked Drenthe Heath sheep. Following a strict DIY ethic,…
How does an event as esteemed as the Cherry Creek Arts Festival manage to stay fresh and continue to grow year after year? Through common sense and teamwork, says spokeswoman Stephanie Blake. “The festival has become a cultural institution in Denver, and people have come to expect it to continue…
You get a lot for your buck at Gorinto, the occasional Wednesday-night, outside-the-box performance series at the Mercury Cafe. And tonight’s edition, the first Gorinto in 2013, will be pouring it on and turning your ears and eyes inside-out with a program called Piano Mutations Live! See also: – Best…
#60: Collin Parson Collin Parson grew up among artists, helping his father, the prominent Colorado sculptor Charles Parson, in the studio and experiencing the milieu as a firsthand observer and eventual participant. But as an adult, the younger Parson stands in nobody’s shadow, working as a light-installation artist and the…
