The modern quilt world’s obsession with straight lines and symmetry rubs quilter Mike “Mac” McNamara the wrong way; he never cared for prescribed patterns. His emotionally evocative quilts reflect on life’s biggest issues: desire, grief, politics and childlike wonder. Often as humorous as they are critical, his quilts are gifts…
From an art-toy meet-up to an experimental film symposium, this weekend is full of great events — and we’ve found ten that are absolutely free. So save your change for bus fare and get out and enjoy this city. Did we miss a bargain? Share news of more economical events…
The most notorious haunted hotel in the world, the Stanley Hotel, inspiration for The Shining, will host the second annual Stanley Film Festival, April 24-27. Organized by the Denver Film Society, the festival fits right into the historic hotel, with a theme — presented by NBC Universal’s Chiller TV –…
Matt Scobey is always busy working on something interesting. For his brand-new installation at Fancy Tiger, the artist drew inspiration from the 1920s art movement Proun to create a concrete-and-wood modular installation with pieces that viewers can purchase to take home in order to create their own personal installations. In…
For GrowHaus, an urban greenhouse and marketplace, the objective isn’t just to provide high-quality food for the Elyria-Swansea neighborhood it calls home — it is to empower the community to grow its own, too. This Saturday, March 8, the garden and education center will host its fourth annual Seed Swap,…
Last year galleries across town gave over all of March to the Month of Photography, a biennial showcase of camera-work from not just around the region but around the globe. This year it’s Month of Printmaking’s turn, loosely tied together by Marina Graves’s arts organization without walls, the Invisible Museum…
Like any subculture, geek culture has its own terminology. A lot of it is self-explanatory, but some of it requires some foreknowledge or insight to really understand. Naturally, most geeks reading this will have that terminology on lockdown, but for the merely geek-curious, it can all be a bit confusing…
Bored Japanese businessmen started the air-sex trend, says Bryan Poyser, director of the raunchy, heartbreaking romantic comedy, Love and Air Sex, which opens at the SIE FilmCenter on Friday, March 7, for a weeklong run. Air sex is the erotic equivalent of air guitar. Pornographic mimes boasting filthy stage names…
More than thirty years ago, 36-year-old dark-horse candidate Federico Pena rode to victory as Denver’s mayor waving the slogan “Imagine a Great City.” Under Pena, the city released its first arts plan in 1989 — and now, 25 years later, Denver has released Imagine 2020, Denver’s first cultural plan in…
Man, woman, gay, straight, bi: There’s something for everyone in 300: Rise of an Empire, the XXL sequel to the also-larger-than-life Greeks-in-shinguards extravaganza 300. In that picture, directed by Zack Snyder and based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel about the three-day Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., the Spartans and…
For more than two decades, Alain Guiraudie has been unrivaled in depicting desires that upend convention, whether homo or hetero. In the comedy The King of Escape (2009), for instance, a middle-age gay man falls in love with a sixteen-year-old girl; the film ends with an all-male gerontophilic ménage a…
Be a Cloud not a Grid. Vertigo Art Space owner Kara Duncan invited well-known Denver artist Theresa Anderson to curate a show, which resulted in Be a Cloud not a Grid. And although Vertigo is fairly compact, the show’s charisma makes it look bigger than it is. Anderson’s selections are…
The latest chin-out probe into the mutual-lockjaw Israeli-Palestinian scenario from Paradise Now director Hany Abu-Assad, zippy melodrama Omar immediately homes in on an athletic Arab twenty-something (Adam Bakri) scaling the West Bank wall and shrugging off gunfire in order to both visit his swooningly adorable girlfriend (Leem Lubany) and meet…
Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane is a brilliant work, its flaws so intertwined with its crazed strengths that you can hardly separate one from the other. McDonagh grew up in London, the son of Irish parents, and shot to fame in the 1990s. He invented an Ireland —…
Joel Swanson: Left to Right, Top to Bottom is currently occupying the main level at MCA Denver. The smart, elegant solo features work by Swanson, a Denver artist and director of the Technology, Arts & Media Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder. It represents a career high point…
Alain Resnais’s last completed film, Life of Riley (2014), presents a group of aging friends who plan, hope, wish, dream and scheme after they learn that one of their own is dying. The doomed man, George Riley, never shown on screen, is enlisted to join an amateur theater production in…
(Spoiler alert: The following piece discusses up to the February 16 episode of Looking.)HBO’s Looking has had a tough time winning over its intended fans. Upon its premiere, Gawker’s Rich Juzwiak yawningly summed up the political achievement of creator Michael Lannan’s wonderful half-hour dramedy about three homosexual men in San…
If you were to survey people who pay attention to movies — to go door-to-door with a clipboard, a sharpened No. 2 pencil, and a sheaf of forms with the word SURVEY printed in clean block letters across the top, later to be tabulated on a vintage Underwood adding machine…
First, the pleasant surprises. In puffing up the slight, absurd Mr. Peabody and Sherman shorts from Jay Ward’s The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show into an 82-minute 3D save-the-time-stream child-distractor, director Rob Minkoff and his many writers have preserved a few of the hallmarks distinguishing the dada, deadpan, almost primitive original,…
Over the past two years, more than a hundred people, all of them minors, have been recovered from the sex-trade industry in Colorado, according to a nonprofit called Street’s Hope. Tonight the organization will shed some light on the global sex-trafficking industry with a screening of Tricked: The True Story…
The world’s top snowboarders will converge in Vail this week for the 32nd annual Burton US Open. Now in its second year in Colorado after a three-decade run in Vermont, the Open marks the first major snowboarding contest following the 2014 Sochi Winter Games. “The pressure is off for these…
One of the main purposes of Cochon 555 is to introduce the general dining public to heritage-breed pigs, which Cochon 555 founder Brady Lowe compares to heirloom tomatoes. “The main component of the event is the flavor profile of these animals,” he explains. “The difference between the standard pork we’re…
