Last week, Cydney Payton, curator and director of the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver, announced that she was stepping down, effective this fall. My reaction to the news, which she delivered to me in a phone call, was one of shock, even if I did have a little something more than…
Alternative spaces often feature the work of emerging artists, and that, of course, means their offerings are a mixed bag, and most often, the shows aren’t very good. But Spark, the oldest of the city’s artist-cooperatives is different with most of its members being artists with decades-long careers under their…
Director and curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver, Cydney Payton has scoured the world looking for exciting cutting edge art. Her latest pick is Israeli-born Berlin-based artist Omer Fast whose solo opens tonight in the New Media Gallery on level one. Fast is a conceptual artist who’s interested in…
As promised, I’m bringing you the popular teen “preppy” style and mixing it with this fall’s latest fashions. Shopping at stores like American Eagle, Hollister, and Abercrombie & Fitch will give you great tools to add a pop of color to the grunge styles that are in right now. Keep…
Just in time for the summer rush, Crocs is going to start warning customers about the dangers of riding an escalator while wearing their flimsy, colorful plastic footwear. Avid readers will recall that we issued an appropriately Cassandra-like alert on gruesome Croc-related escalator accidents more than a year ago. Crocs…
Vanessa Gochnour, our local designer this week, is a model of preparation, single-minded vision, and involvement in the Denver scene. Stills in Motion, the name of her line of bags, purses, and wallets, combines Vanessa’s personal photography with her hand-sewn fabric creations. She uses pre-cut fabrics with paper backings that…
There seems to be some sort of magnetic attraction between my soul and old clothes. From funky pieces that have clearly been pre-loved, but still have life in them, to immaculate relics that somehow remained unworn for decades, their faded and yellowed tags still attached, I am draw to seek…
There is an old and powerful saying that goes: “Judy, Liza, Barbara, Bette… These are names I shan’t forget.” These names belong to the crème de la crème de la gay icons of musicality. There are others… Cher, of course. Madonna goes without saying. Tina Turner, Rosemary Clooney, Bernadette Peters…
Click here for a slide show of the event. Photo by Jim J. Narcy The ominous rain clouds and wind couldn’t deter the crowd at last night’s Riverfront Fashion show. The theme of the event, Yellow Sun, was evident in the clothes worn by the guests. There was so much,…
My daughter is into animals. Especially the cute ones infesting the kingdom of YouTube (and in particular the ones found on the YouTube serial, Ultra Kawaii, which she robs off the Internet and e-mails to everyone she knows in the whole entire world. And why should I mention this, bringing…
Not ever having been pregnant and, likely, never having to worry about getting pregnant, I have to admit, the whole thing sort of weirds me out. My sister gave birth to the two cutest kids in the whole world. For real, though. Cutest kids in the whole, entire world. Hands…
What a brooding pleasure it is to return to Christopher Nolan’s Gotham City — if “pleasure” is the right word for a movie that gazes so deeply and sometimes despairingly into the souls of restless men. In The Dark Knight, the continuation of Nolan’s superb 2005 reboot of the Batman…
Spare yet tactile, a mysterious mixture of lightness and gravity, Alexander Sokurov’s Alexandra is founded on contradiction. Musing on war in general and the Russian occupation of Chechnya in particular, this is a movie in which combat is never shown. The star, octogenarian Galina Vishnevskaya, is an opera diva who…
I’ve always enjoyed ABBA — not in that post-hoc, so-bad-it’s-good hip way, but innocently, the way I like Phil Spector. To this day, howling along in my car to that echoing, cascading, multiply-overdubbed wall of sound makes me feel like a member of some dippy but joyous cathedral choir. So…
Honus and Me. Adapted by playwright Steven Dietz from a young adult novel by Dan Gutman, Honus and Me tells the story of Joey, a young boy who’s passionate about baseball but too insecure and distracted to succeed as a player. He’s particularly troubled by his parents’ divorce. At his…
Jack Balas has built a national reputation the hard way. He lives in a small town in northern Colorado, and his style is a very idiosyncratic version of post-pop that’s often messy and crammed with incongruous imagery and text. And if that’s not enough, his chief subject matter — the…
The Robischon Gallery (1740 Wazee Street, 303-298-7788, www.robischongallery.com) is currently featuring Tattoo Detour, one of two solos in town by Jack Balas (see review, page 45), but there’s a good deal more happening at the gallery as well. In the center space is William Lamson: Experiment, which is the East…
About Us… et al. In the West Gallery at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art is About Us…, put together by freelance curator Mark Addison, who brought in two dozen works of conceptual realism by a raft of internationally known artists in addition to pieces from his own collection. Addison…
Whether or not you think war is the answer, most people would agree that those individuals who join the military — many in search of a better education and future for themselves — deserve praise and respect. The sad truth is, many of our country’s enlisted try to make a…
Denver’s a pretty nifty place, full of killer views and happy people and slightly-lower-than-the-national-average gas prices, but it’s missing one thing: nautical miscellanea. No early-morning fog rolling in as unseen ship bells clank their solemn dirges. No ancient seafood shacks wafting aromatic promises of fried clams and chowder. No salty…
What do you believe about yourself? Jesse Jackson’s call-and-response poem “I Am — Somebody” has inspired the folks at Fresh City Life to ask Denverites that very question; their answers will be revealed in a short documentary, I Am a Library, and composed into lyrics by David Amram for a…
When Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” he knew those words spoke a truth about the human condition across the ages. Reading Walden today seems more relevant than ever with its prescription for living authentically and simply in harmony with nature. Thoreau didn’t…
