Arts & Culture

Whether or not you attended prom in high school, “it is sort of a pinnacle event,” notes Michelle Baldwin (aka Vivienne VaVoom), spokeswoman for the Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails (LUPEC). “And if you truly want to go to prom, it’s rather sad if the only reason…

Our town rocks the arts all year ’round, from those crowded First Friday art walks to the vibrant club scene, where live music thrives; there’s so much to do that it’s often difficult to make room for it all. But one night a year, Westword makes it easy for you…

“We decided that since none of the cool vendors ever participate in cheesy bridal expos, we would just put all of the cool kids together in one room,” says Tom Wright, whose company, Lovesick Inc., is behind today’s Lovesick: Denver 2014. A traveling collaboration with the world’s largest alternative wedding…

In this age of digital video, on-demand entertainment and HD picture, it’s easy to forget how revolutionary the VHS era really was. Not only could you watch movies at home, but you could make your own, even if you had no training, budget or discernible skill. Those movies live on,…

Since it premiered seventy years ago, Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie has been performed in countless incarnations and studied in high-school classes all over the country. But Phamaly Theatre Company’s version of the classic offers something none of the others do, says director Bryce Alexander. “Our Glass Menagerie is different…

Sixty years after her death, Mexican painter Frida Kahlo continues to capture the attention of modern audiences; she’s commemorated in everything from yearly tributes to her iconic unibrow to films including the 2002 biopic starring Salma Hayek. But years before that movie told Kahlo’s colorful story, Denver playwright Melissa Lucero…

In the 1970s, second-wave feminists began fighting for gender equality all over the country, including Colorado. As part of that current of change, Front Range Women in the Visual Arts, a grassroots collective, was founded in 1974 to study and promote the visibility of female artists through innovative exhibits, exchange…

After Boulder County’s devastating floods in September, the City of Boulder and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art quickly mobilized to put artists on the job for the Flood Project, actually a series of projects commemorating the disaster and lifting the human element out of the mud it left behind…

Books and documentaries abound on the subject of Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, the Los Alamos-based lab where scientists researched and built the atom bomb during World War II. But what about the young wives who followed their husbands to Los Alamos, where they lived in a shroud of…

Author Ralph Ellison, whose novel Invisible Man became an instant classic, provided important insights into an array of subjects, from the craft of fiction and homegrown American idioms of jazz and blues to the 21st-century political movements that still define our nation. But University of Colorado English Professor and New…

Three years ago, on the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, President Obama symbolically passed the intent of that document forward with the creation of Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month, an observance meant to increase awareness of worldwide injustices and give recognition to agencies battling them. “Around the world, millions…

One day, we’re all going to die. But, according to local geo-dreamscape artist Gemma Bayly, this prognosis isn’t so grim. In her enlightening exhibition, You Are Going to Die and That is OK, Bayly skillfully explicates the notion that death doesn’t exist. “It’s a condition of the space-time continuum and…

Sometimes the most interesting theater experiences in Denver are bare-bones productions: a handful of actors and an interesting script can spark the imagination in ways elaborate tech often can’t. Today, Rachel Fowler, Bill Hahn and Gabra Zackman — three of the area’s finest performers — will open Tomorrow in the…