Art for Every Body

At Access Gallery, the most visible wing of VSA Colorado, one expects to see work created by people with disabilities: The nonprofit organization primarily offers services and programs for the developmentally disabled, with the idea of giving them better access to the world at large. But Outside In, a new…

The Man in Black Is Back

Johnny Cash, with his craggy features and long, black coat, cut a majestic figure in the annals of American music, but his earthy baritone and his songs — stark, sometimes outspoken and always well-wrought — were his real legacy. It’s those songs, nearly three dozen of them, that make up…

Noah Van Sciver explores the final frontier at StarFest 2012

Editor’s note: Westword cartoonist Noah Van Sciver paints the town like nobody else, as demonstrated in his recaps of visits to the Denver Art Museum, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, our own Artopia and MCA Denver. (Make sure you read Noah’s blog for more comics and wonderment.) Last…

Rocky Mountain Pinball Showdown returns to Denver this weekend

Like vinyl records and postcards, pinball simply will not die. Despite technology providing plenty of digital alternatives to the quarter-hungry beasts of the 1970s, the public’s interest in these anachronisms doesn’t seem to be waning, says Dan Nikolich, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Pinball Showdown and Gameroom Expo…

Kent Haruf picks up his Stegner Award tonight at CU-Boulder

Following in the footsteps of Wallace Stegner, the “Dean of Western Writers,” takes a big pair of shoes. Though we don’t know what size award-winning Colorado author Kent Haruf wears, we do know that his literary prowess is deserving of the Wallace Stegner Award, given annually by CU-Boulder’s Center of…

Persistent Terrain is a solo that works better as a duet

It’s a funny thing about the exhibition business: Sometimes multiple solos are presented at the same venue that work in concert with one another and for all intents and purposes function together as a group show, and sometimes pieces by different artists are organized into thematic group efforts that actually…

Now Showing

Batura, Winograde, Kunkel, Emrich. Though the current shows at Robischon are a quartet of solos — Stephen Batura, Edie Winograde, Jerry Kunkeland Gary Emrich— they actually function together as a coherent thematic group show on the topic of the New West. Batura’s masterful and monumental casein-and-acrylic paintings capture scenes from…

Now Playing

The Drowsy Chaperone. The role of the Man in the Chair is the spine for The Drowsy Chaperone, and the primary reason that this lighthearted, inconsequential and very silly show is so much fun to watch: Without him, it would just float off into the ether. But with him, we’re…

Do we really need the angsty Four Lovers?

Using a fluid naturalism to establish its afterglow vibe, Four Lovers follows two married couples as they swap partners and invigorate their own marriages in the bargain — for a time, at least. Boutique jeweler Rachel (Marina Foïs) is unable to resist tattooed Web designer Vincent (Nicolas Duvauchelle), so she…

Gross Indecency traces the arc of Oscar Wilde’s ruin

Your sonnet is quite lovely, and it is a marvel that those red-roseleaf lips of yours should be made no less for the madness of music and song than for the madness of kissing. Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry. — Letter from Oscar Wilde to Lord…

Hoist a PBR to The Great American Trailer Park Musical

Lin’s husband is scheduled for execution, but the electric chair in the big house is so rickety he can only be put to death if everyone in the Armadillo Acres Trailer Park where she lives conserves energy. So she’s urging them to keep the lights burning. Betty’s husband is already…

Jason Segel and Emily Blunt drag us through their Five-Year Engagement

There is exactly one unexpected moment in the otherwise drearily predictable The Five-Year Engagement that, though little more than a throwaway line, at least adds a bit of charged political reality to puncture Nicholas Stoller’s limp, hermetic comedy of deferred nuptials. Tom (Jason Segel, who co-scripted with Stoller), a talented…

Whit Stillman’s latest is buoyant and frivolous…with dancing, of course

Back with his first film in fourteen years, Whit Stillman still operates in a world of his own. That’s true with respect to both the singularity of his deadpan, dialogic style and his hermetic milieu. With Damsels in Distress, Stillman’s followup to 1998’s The Last Days of Disco, the urban-haute-bourgeoisie-as-endangered-species…

Art attack? The Big Blue Bear needs a Big Blue Bathroom

Does a bear shit in the woods? How about in the city — in front of the Colorado Convention Center? The answer, it appears, is “yes.”Someone snapped the above picture of an awesome “art attack” that took place sometime on Sunday night or Monday morning underneath the Big Blue Bear…