Arts & Culture

RiNo’s Helikon Gallery and Studios is currently hosting Spark & Ruin: Anatomy of a Flame, a handsome group exhibit that examines fire, which is a pretty relevant local topic. Though gallery director Cayce Goldberg’s family has owned this particular rail-side property for decades, Spark & Ruin was guest-curated by Raymundo…

Back in 2009, Denver School of the Arts student Quinn Marchman and a group of friends decided to take the lead and create an original production for the school’s annual Black History Month production. Together they wrote, directed, produced and acted in a play about a fictional character named Barry,…

Realism and its derivations are still hot properties in the fine arts, especially in contemporary painting, and this is a good time to immerse yourself in works of this type. Robischon Gallery is highlighting four artists, in separate shows, who are all doing work that riffs on realism. And that’s…

With Louis Silver’s music for The Jazz Singer in 1927, talkies ushered in a new age of recorded sound; what audiences heard when they watched a film took a bold step into completing the grand illusion of cinema. Yet even without recorded sound, the silent film era flourished with hand-crafted scores,…

The musical Next to Normal garnered a Pulitzer Prize for composer Tom Kitt and writer Brian Yorkey and high praise from critics — in part because it dealt with the ugly realities of mental illness, an unusual and courageous focus for a generally upbeat and unrealistic medium. At the center…

For the next ten weeks Denver will experience the ways in which history, violence and three-dimensionalism intersect through the work of Cristóbal Gracia, who was selected to represent Mexico City as a 2015 Biennial Ambassador, alongside fellow Mexican artist Daniel Monroy Cuevas. The 2015 Biennial Ambassadors program is a ten-week…

Cells phones have taken over.  We use our phones everywhere — in the car, on the toilet, while we wait in line for coffee or groceries. We even use them in the sacred space of our bedrooms, in our beds, when we are supposed to be sleeping. We’re shameless about…

At first glance, Sharon Feder’s work seems to focus on sweeping, modern landscapes; train tracks and abandoned buildings fill massive canvases, alongside other familiar structures from Denver’s not-so-distant agricultural and commercial past. But she sees the paintings a little differently. “The reason I began painting buildings was because I had…

Westword’s Artopia now includes Whiteout, our annual fashion show. In advance of this year’s art extravaganza, which is going down on February 21 at City Hall, we checked in with the seven designers and boutiques that will be part of the Alice in Wonderland-themed Whiteout to ask what they have…

You can find art all over town — not just on gallery walls. In this series, we’ll be looking at some of the local artists who serve up their work in coffeehouses and other non-gallery businesses around town. TeJay Mora’s art appears, well, just about everywhere. That’s because this quirky…

After tackling the life of a young Abraham Lincoln for his first graphic novel, Denver cartoonist Noah Van Sciver turned to a more accessible, but no less dramatic, subject for his follow-up: the modern American working class. In Saint Cole, Van Sciver explores the plight of the average man raising…