Artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles doesn’t like to see waste go to waste. And for three decades, the Denver native has found ways to celebrate refuse and the people who handle it. The sometimes controversial Ukeles has done everything from documenting herself washing the steps of a theater in Hartford, Connecticut,…
Thursday, February 3 Few mid-twentieth-century figures could boast excellence in as many disciplines as African-American icon Paul Robeson, an All-American athlete, Columbia Law School graduate, actor and singer with a deep, resounding voice as big as the universe. But Robeson was also an activist whose outspoken international trailblazing in the…
Afeni Shakur is still giddy from the call she received last week: Tupac: Resurrection, a documentary film about her famous son, had been nominated for an Academy Award. “We’re still screaming,” Afeni says via telephone. “All we ever wanted was for Tupac to have the opportunity to tell his story…
FRI, 2/4 When Josh Levy was studying music and art at the California Institute of the Arts and the Art Institute of Chicago, he noticed that his creativity and focus heightened when he worked around other people. Years later, while teaching at a summer arts school for children in New…
SAT, 2/5 Take a trip through the West — and the past — today when Mark Klett and Kyle Bajakian, two of the people responsible for Third Views, Second Sights: A Rephotographic Survey of the American West, discuss the project that resulted in their stunning book. Klett, who’s on the…
French aniumaFRI, 2/4 Artists have long labored to capture the sublime through sensual stimuli evoked by visual imagery. Spend a few hours before a Bierstadt landscape or a depthless Rothko color block, and you’ll start to get it. It’s a romantic notion that survives even in our technological age. The…
WED, 2/9 A lot of visitors to Aspen are lured by the snowcapped mountains, ripe for skiing, that surround the town. Others flock to the hills to gaze upon the city’s namesake trees as they change from green to brilliant gold in a celebration of autumn’s arrival. And once a…
Many art forms, such as literature and drama, have long used narrative to convey their stories, but the visual arts, for the most part, don’t have to: Paintings and sculptures only need to look good — or at least be interesting. It’s easy to understand the appeal of the purely…
A lot of hype has been thrown around about the creation of an arts district in old downtown Aurora, an area that’s been seriously declining for the past couple of decades. So far, though, all the talk has been little more than a lot of hot air. True, quite a…
Andy Miller. One of the most thoughtful artists around, Andy Miller is the subject of a self-titled solo at Pirate. Miller is known for his postmodern sculptures and installations in which oversized and simplified figures play key dramatic roles. For this installation, Miller has built two monumental figures, one representing…
Going to the theater alone is depressing, so part of my job as a reviewer involves coaxing, bribing and seducing friends and family members into accompanying me. Over the years, I’ve come to rely on these companions — wise and perspicacious people all — even when their opinions clash with…
Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen is a play of ideas; I see them as white balls zigzagging through a bright white sky in a constant and dizzying display. The protagonists are Niels Bohr and his onetime student Werner Heisenberg — leaders among the group of scientists who transformed the world’s concept of…
Always…Patsy Cline. Always Patsy Cline is a light, mildly entertaining evening. You get an efficiently evocative set that’s divided into three parts: a down-home apartment; an old-fashioned country bar, complete with jukebox; and, in the center, the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. There are two skilled singer-performers, one of…
Some people think they’re a new art form; others see them as adolescent time-killers. Whatever they are, video games don’t make good models for feature films (mostly because their interactive essence is lost), and their clumsy transfer to the big screen continues to invite all kinds of speculation — not…
With all due respect to the barbecue kings who enlivened The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a pair of deranged Danes called The Green Butchers would likely win the cordon bleu for cannibal cuisine. Hannibal Lecter himself might savor something called “Svend’s Chicky-Wickies” — not poultry at all, of course, but fillet…
When did we first encounter a feel-good film that united delinquent kids, a devoted (if professionally frustrated) teacher and the transformative power of music? Was it with Julie Andrews? Could it have been the spirited, soft-hearted Maria and her Austrian brood, trilling their way up the hills above the abbey?…
In her first stab at narrative drama, writer-director Shainee Gabel has managed to assemble a superstar cast and a seasoned technical team. She spent five years on the project, adapting an unpublished novel written by the father of a friend, working with a clarity of vision and an admirable goal:…
Last fall, the Swiss-French, Denver-based director Alexandre O. Philippe completed a profoundly weird and wonderfully engaging documentary called Earthlings: Ugly Bags of Mostly Water — a vivid look at the quirky obsessions of members of something called the Klingon Language Institute. For those who have confined their travels, real and…
New Zealand metal artist Murray Swan is thinking about sculpture a lot differently these days, thanks to his partnership with a suburban Denver music teacher. Inspired by a request from Tommy Reddicks, music director at Pinnacle Charter School in Federal Heights, Swan created “Voyage of the Dream,” an enormous copper,…
Thursday, January 27 As the burgeoning Latino community continues to make its mark on American culture, its artists continue to negate the stereotypical labels they’ve been saddled with over the years by weaving together popular and ethnic imagery with a scathing, satirical eye. Leaving Aztlán: Rethinking Contemporary Latino and Chicano…
Like ragged scrapbooks of everyday life, zines reveal an alternative perspective not found at the local Barnes & Noble. Boosters of these homemade, small-print publications note that in an increasingly homogenized media realm, anyone — including those without a lot of money or experience — has the ability to create…
At first, the darkness was intimidating and the smell of ozone strong. My mind wouldn’t slow down. Why, I kept asking myself, would a self-proclaimed ADD sufferer voluntarily submit to lying in a ten-inch-deep tank brimming with water and enough epsom salts to fill the Dead Sea? I was trapped…
