Festival season is in full swing, with a wide variety of outdoor celebrations this weekend. From Chipotle’s Cultivate Festival to the annual Lafayette Peach Fest, you have endless opportunities to enjoy both great weather and great entertainment — for bargain prices. And if crowds and meat on a stick aren’t…
In the thirty-plus years that Pirate Contemporary Art has been part of the Denver arts landscape, dozens of member artists have marched in and out of the trail-blazing cooperative’s doors. Every once in a while, they come back. See also: – My first art purchase: a Louis Recchia piece from…
No need to check your watch if you’re at the light-rail station at Littleton and Mineral: Robert Tully took full advantage of Colorado’s sunny days when he created his public-art piece, “The Silver Band of Present Time.” He recently took a few minutes to talk with us about art, public…
#53: Rebecca Vaughan Denver installation artist Rebecca Vaughan is right at the center of Denver’s art community: As a highly credentialed departing RedLine resident and continuing chair of Fine Arts and head of Sculpture at the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design, she’s working alongside longtime professionals and the…
“You’ve got red on you.” Don’t like that one? How about “We’re coming to get you, Barbara!” — which serves as a clever callback to the movie that birthed the modern zombie. Maybe you prefer something like the creatively cursed “Fuck-a-doodle-doo!” There’s no question that the abundance of quotable lines…
Alley Cats: An All Women Art Show, which opens Friday, August 16, was the result of two friends desiring to see more gallery access in the art community. “I’ve not been super-pleased with how things are run in the Denver art scene,” says Taylor Boylston, artist and co-curator of the…
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…
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged). The Colorado Shakespeare Festival staged a pretty good version of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) five years ago, so we’re not sure why the CSF decided to bring it back this season. The show, written in 1987 by Adam Long, Daniel…
Collin Parson wears two hats in the local art world — three, if you count the fact that he is the son of prominent area sculptor Charles Parson. One is as the director of the visual-art program at the Arvada Center, where he has shown himself to be a gifted…
Tilikum, the 12,000-pound bull orca whose big splashes still climax daily SeaWorld shows, has been implicated in three human deaths, spread over his three decades of forced performances: Two trainers, twenty years apart, and a drifter who in 1999 apparently hid in the park and dove into the wrong pool…
Despite the giddy, gory ridiculousness of Kick-Ass 2, this summer’s most violent yet least punishing comic-book movie, there’s a kernel of ugly human truth at its core. In the first issue of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s Kick-Ass comic, from 2008, a lonely high-school twerp dons a wetsuit and…
A movie can be highly imperfect, stilted or implausible in all sorts of ways — and still be everything you go to the movies for. The Canyons, Paul Schrader’s contemplation of moral decay in Hollywood, is that kind of picture — in some places so crazy-silly you want to laugh,…
Steel Magnolias was inspired by the death of playwright Robert Harling’s diabetic sister, and I’ve tended to think of it as a pale-pink, Hallmark-card production — which is appropriate, since the ailing Shelby is obsessed with pink and is busily planning a sugar-pink wedding while ensconced in the home salon…
A lot goes on in three days in Washington Heights, Manhattan — at least as portrayed in In the Heights. Graffiti Pete gets driven away from Usnavi’s bodega — where everyone stops for light, sweet coffee in the morning — before he can make his mark on the door; Usnavi…
Lake Bell can do incredible things with her tongue. She can touch her nose, twist it to both sides, and fold it backward as flat as an omelet. In a studio in L.A.’s Silver Lake neighborhood, recording vocal exercise warmups for an online campaign promoting her directorial debut, In a…
Like so many screenplays, The World’s End has its origins in a Starbucks. As director Edgar Wright tells it, the ideas for next week’s sci-fi action-comedy starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost came to him while shooting the trio’s last film, the buddy-cop parody Hot Fuzz. That film takes place…
When fashion designer Stephanie Ohnmacht visited the Clyfford Still Museum, she immediately began envisioning ways to incorporate the artist’s work into her own. What emerged is Stephanie O. Designs’ Spring 2014 collection, which features a series of clothing items — from dresses to a sheer Georgette chiffon blouse — that…
Even if you hate exercise, there’s a definite appeal to the thought of getting doused with a rainbow of color while strolling through the Denver Botanic Gardens at Chatfield. The annual Color Me Rad is a 5K race that involves getting showered with a different color at every kilometer. And,…
Madonna, already famous as a pop star, found a new level of fame with her breakout film Desperately Seeking Susan, in which she played a character similar to her music persona. In the classic ’80s romp, Madonna’s quirky New York party girl is accidentally snatched by Roberta, a bored housewife…
Not every fast-casual restaurant chain would go out on a limb to host a street festival on the scale of today’s Chipotle Cultivate Festival in City Park, but Chipotle, which opened its first store in Denver twenty years ago, has always been at the forefront of the movement to make…
The city of Wheat Ridge used to be known for its carnation plantations (in fact, growers there even supplied the White House), and although development has replaced many of the nurseries, the city still hosts the Wheat Ridge Carnation Festival every year to celebrate the ubiquitous flower. But this year,…
Denver’s healthy salsa-dancing community comes out to dance every Wednesday night at Salsa Central’s weekly event at the Denver Turnverein, and everyone’s always welcome. But once a year, just for fun — and also in hopes of drawing in newcomers — they move it all outdoors, to Cheesman Park. For…
