Internationally renowned designer Geoffrey Mac began his career in fine art, working as a painter and photographer. Eventually shifting his discipline to fashion, he’s now a couturier for famous clients like Lady Gaga, Debbie Harry and Britney Spears. The New York City-based designer will be in Denver tonight showing his…
As you read this, there are thirteen (or fewer!) shopping days until Christmas. For many of us, that means it’s time to panic. (You smug bastards who already finished your shopping can just keep it to yourselves. No one wants to hear how organized and on top of things you…
The results are in, and Denver Museum of Contemporary Art’s Twelve and a Half Days of Xmas Live! has selected 12 performers who will rock the museum’s modernist atrium throughout the holiday season. Each act earns a $50 honorarium as they compete for the winning prize of $500 and With acts ranging from the holiday inspired burlesque of Gigi D’Lovely to the self-explanatory Crazy Gorilla Drummer, the 12 days of Christmas promise to be filled with all sorts of appealing weirdness from the curated best of Denver’s diverse arts scene. Westword spoke to MCA Director of Programming Sarah Kate Baie to hear about the finalists and the selection process.
#27: Lisa Gedgaudas Lisa Gedgaudas works behind the scenes as program director for Create Denver: While we enjoy the evidence of her efforts in art exhibits at the McNichols Building and public forums like the recent Denver Music Summit, she’s running the numbers on who’s out there in the local…
Elves snore, it turns out. Their maidens make teensy-peen jokes and pine for the hottest of dwarves. And Bilbo Baggins, so concerned about his doilies just three hours of screen time ago, now punches his sword right through the trachea of a goblin — and then looks rather proud of…
Here’s a question you never thought you’d hear Noam Chomsky answer: “What makes you happy?” That puzzler comes near the end of Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, an animated marvel of a film rigged to set your brain off like fireworks. The great linguist and activist’s easy surge…
The year’s third everything-goes-wrong-in-space flick is its second-best one, stripped of the dewy self-helpisms of its better, Gravity, and the limiting found-footage approach of its brainy/dumb lesser, Europa Report. Ruairi Robinson’s The Last Days on Mars doesn’t monkey with any of that NASA-approved, Neil deGrasse Tyson-pleasing speculative-fiction realism. Instead, it’s…
The power of Charles Dickens’s famous novella A Christmas Carol — and the reason it keeps getting resurrected in so many forms, Christmas after Christmas — stems from the depths of sorrow that underlie the joyously optimistic resolution. Ebenezer Scrooge lives in a London where poor people face the kind…
The plucky Gildar Gallery on South Broadway has made a name for itself by promoting young up-and-comers that director Adam Gildar uncovers. But for the current show, running through the holidays, Gildar has tapped Clark Richert, one of the greatest, most accomplished and most heralded artists in the state’s history…
Catalyst. The beautiful grounds of the Denver Botanic Gardens are the ideal place to mount an outdoor sculpture show, and over the past few years, there has been one such presentation after another. This year, the theme is contemporary sculptors in Colorado. The pieces are picturesquely sited throughout in clearings…
Jackie and Me. Jackie and Me ,Steven Dietz’s dramatization of a young-adult book by Dan Gutman, is a kids’ show, and also a remarkably flat and didactic one. It tells the story of a baseball-crazed boy named Joey Stoshak, who, with the help of a magical baseball card, goes back…
Bronx-born filmmaker Abel Ferrara considers all of his fiction films to be documentaries: What you see is what happened in the moment that it was shot. That mentality informed the making of Ms. 45, Ferrara’s characteristically complex 1981 rape-revenge drama. In the film, a mute teenager (Zoë Lund) copes with…
After viewing this year’s punk-infused Met Gala celebration, makeup artist and fashion-show producer Katelyn Simkins found herself inspired. Fashion Feast is the result of the artist’s creative insights: a night of runway walks, live performances and fundraising for Colorado’s hungry. Local clothing and accessories by Rachel Marie Hurst, 50 Dresses…
Can you spin a plate on your fingertips? Are you the best tap-dancing burlesque performer on the scene? Maybe you’ve got the ukulele chops of Tiny Tim. Whatever your strange and unusual skill, the Sounds on 29th Live Gong Show wants you. Tonight, 3 Kings Tavern will host its own…
Gifts have become such an essential part of the holiday season that in the midst of the shopping frenzy, few people stop to think about the implications of buying local versus buying from a global corporation. But Evan Weissman, founder of the “civic health club” Warm Cookies of the Revolution,…
Mother-daughter relationships are not new territory for writer Amy Tan, who first explored the subject in her debut novel, The Joy Luck Club. But in her latest book, The Valley of Amazement, she finds fresh ways to explore this ever-changing landscape. Chronicling the lives of a Chinese-American mother and daughter…
If you haven’t yet had the pleasure of meeting Rick Griffith — he calls himself design director, but we prefer “letterpress king” — you can get to know the typographer behind the hair at tonight’s MATTER’s 14th Annual Print Sale and Party, which the King and his posse are throwing…
Don’t expect a traditional poetry reading at Robert Rutherford’s release party for Dragging Out the Old Cheer, his first poetry collection. The former member of Rabbit is a Sphere and Everything Absent or Distorted is approaching his poetry much the same way he approached his music. “There’s going to be…
A generation of comedy nerds has grown up with Mystery Science Theater and DVD commentaries for their favorite films, so it makes sense that a live version of the same would become wildly popular decades later. And there’s probably no one better than Doug Benson — host of Doug Loves…
The story of how evangelical Americans sparked a venomous wave of fundamentalist religious thought and anti-gay sentiment and legislation in Uganda is one of this country’s sorrier chapters. And it was especially poignant for film director Roger Ross Williams, who is not only gay, but was raised in the black…
You stop at the bar for a drink and two people begin to dance around you, spinning stellar choreography with light feet and a beautiful twist, under the sky-high rafters of a re-purposed foundry that’s an urban experiment in itself. That’s what will happen tonight at Choreography and Cocktails, a…
It’s funny how we can pass a landmark day after day and never really know anything about it. That’s true of the stately Colorado Governor’s Residence, built in 1908 as the Boettcher Mansion and handed over to the state in 1959: Rush-hour traffic blows by the elegant hilltop home in…
