A couple of months ago, Zo Frechette led a writing workshop for a group of creative teenagers. They worked on novels, kept journals, turned their life stories into memoirs and proudly read their poems and short stories aloud. At the end of the class, the instructor felt as though she’d…
Thursday, February 10 The colorful community-oriented murals that dot today’s Hispanic barrios are only a stone’s throw, aesthetically and culturally, from the monumental twentieth-century works of politically driven leftist Mexican innovators such as David Alfaro Siqueiros. Siqueiros, along with Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, was considered one of Las…
In 1999, twenty young Israelis and Palestinians were invited to Japan for ten days by the Japanese Foreign Ministry as part of a joint peace mission. The group attended conferences together, ate together, sang karaoke together, even slept in the same rooms — and left embracing what they had come…
Face facts, gentlemen: Most women don’t want Victoria’s Secret for Valentine’s Day. Skimpy lingerie is what they, ideally, give to you. And everyone knows that too much chocolate makes a girl fat and pimply. So what do the ladies want? Women, you’ll learn, love the kinds of trinkets they won’t…
SAT, 2/12 Most signatures collected on a butt in two minutes: sixteen, Graham Ramsay. Most swear words on a Scrabble board: 22, Bart Scott. Longest continuous reading of Danielle Steel novels (complete books only): sixteen hours, fourteen minutes, Millie Chappell. These adventurers, cited by Guinness World Records, pushed themselves to…
WED, 2/16 “I was always dreaming about very powerful people,” Arnold Schwarzenegger says in the 1977 documentary Pumping Iron. “Dictators and things like that. I was just always impressed by people who could be remembered for hundreds of years, or even, like Jesus, be for thousands of years remembered.” It…
SAT, 2/12 The president and Martha Stewart are engaged in an executive laissez affair — or so it goes in performance artist Karen Finley’s newest work George & Martha, which opens tonight at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, 1750 13th Street in Boulder. The two-character satire, co-starring Finley and…
If I were asked to come up with a list of the most significant contemporary artists working in Colorado, Floyd Tunson would not only be on it, but he’d be near the top. The Manitou Springs-based artist, who taught for decades as a high school art teacher in Colorado Springs,…
The current solo in the main space of Rule Gallery (111 Broadway, 303-777-9473), James Westwater: 10 Years, Geometric Narcissism, 1995-2005, basically surveys the work Westwater has done since he settled in Santa Fe. This crowded show does not mark Westwater’s Denver debut, but it is his first major presentation here…
The Eternal Gift. The Taylor Museum in the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center is showing off some of its treasure in The Eternal Gift: Selections From the Fine Arts Center’s Permanent Collection. The Taylor’s inventory has many strengths, including modern art from the early to mid-twentieth century, which is what’s…
During the intermission of A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, I overheard some people talking in the lobby. They were trying to fit the play’s characters into the familiar Tennessee Williams oeuvre. Dorothea was like the self-deluded, fragile, alcoholic Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, they agreed. But who in…
Last year, director Israel Hicks commissioned Charles F. (OyamO) Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan, to write a play based on Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Hicks wanted it set in a contemporary milieu, with Torvald transformed into the Nigerian ambassador to the United Nations. OmayO obliged. The…
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…
When we first see Tony Fingleton, the plucky Australian hero of Swimming Upstream, he’s a cute little guy getting cuffed around by his vile big brother, Harold Jr. That’s just the beginning of a long ordeal. For the next two hours of screen time, Tony (played as a teenager by…
The Sea Inside, the new right-to-die drama from Spanish director Alejandro Amen´bar (The Others), is a flawed film that’s worth seeing. Based on Letters From Hell, a book by quadriplegic Ramón Sampedro about his thirty-year quest to kill himself, the movie favors the emotional over the legal, centering on Sampedro’s…
When was the last time you lost yourself in a Shakespeare film? It’s a testament to the success of William Shakespeare¹s The Merchant of Venice, the sharp and brooding new version directed by Michael Radford (Il Postino), that we leave the theater without concern for the production. Instead, the response…
If you can make it past the first ten minutes or so of Hide and Seek without busting up laughing, chances are that you’ve never seen a horror movie before in your life. This hack job of a “thriller” may steal from the best, but it does it so badly…
The thirteenth annual Black History Month Film & Video Festival this weekend will feature two films by the renowned Mexican documentarian Rafael R. Corona, as well as a 29-minute look at a late, lamented African-American bookstore here in Denver and a piece on the plight of Haitians as seen by…
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…
