At the risk of pigeonholing MCA Denver, the city’s bastion of contemporary cool seems to focus a lot on conceptual projects, and its latest, Thinking About Flying, is no exception. To put the, uh, show together, Pittsburgh-based artist Jon Rubin asked to have a pigeon coop installed on the roof…
In the waning days of 2011, in the midst of holiday-season cheer, many folks turn to the movies — December blockbusters, to be sure, but also Oscar contenders. For Academy Award geeks, this is the season to both catch up with past and last-minutes entrants and look ahead, and if…
Robert Adams was teaching English at Colorado College in the early 1960s when he met Myron Wood, who taught him the basics of photography. But instead of taking the traditional approach of focusing on scenic beauty, Adams began capturing the ugliness of suburban sprawl — and it made him famous…
Nederland santera Catherine Robles Shaw usually sticks to the basics when creating her lovely retablos — plaques depicting the saints that are hand-carved and painted in a folk style that’s been handed down over hundreds of years in northern New Mexico and Colorado’s San Luis Valley. Contemporizing the old art…
Governor John Hickenlooper and others who are eager to put together a Colorado bid for a future Winter Olympics Games must be making a case study out of our state’s worldliness this month. Since Thanksgiving, Colorado has hosted the Aspen Winternational FIS Women’s World Cup at Aspen Mountain and the…
Dreams & Directions, the fourth annual anthology of poetry written by Denver Public Schools elementary school students, will be released at a celebration from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. today at the Tattered Cover in LoDo. DPS teacher Steve Replogle compiled the work, which DPS superintendent Tom Boasberg calls “an inspiring…
Good news! The world is not going to end next December 21, no matter what people insist the Mayan calendar predicts. Dawn Engle and Ivan Suvanjieff, the founders of PeaceJam, exploded that myth in 2012: The True Mayan Prophecy, the award-winning film they released last year that will air tonight…
In “Occupy Christmas: What protesters could learn from the true meaning of the holidays,” Jef Otte explained how the Grinch was about to steal Christmas from the 99 percent — unless they had secured a nice temporary job in some retail establishment, so that they could give nice presents to…
Long, long ago, in the fashion lexicon of yesteryear, satin meant “fancy.” But today, in the modern world of casual everything, sequins mean “fancy.” How fancy? Fancy, as in what you can wear with jeans to a holiday party. This is where sparkly tank tops come into play. Since fancy…
Editor’s Note: Cartoonist Noah Van Sciver brings us his trip to the Denver Art Museum in this web comic. Make sure you read Noah’s blog for more comics and wonderment…
After a seven-and-a-half-year run, Greg Baumhauer is pulling the plug on the Squire Lounge’s open-mike comedy night. “We’ve crushed enough dreams,” he says. And tonight, you have one last chance to catch Baumhauer and the Wrist Deep crew in action at what was once hailed as the meanest open-mike night…
Today was supposed to be the big reveal of the host cities for the 2012 Pro Cycling Challenge — but that list leaked on Friday, in the Denver Post. Still, organizers are going to make an event out of the announcement, with a live Internet broadcast at 5:15 p.m. MST…
Denver has Sun Spot, a giant dog sculpture created out of dog tags outside the new municipal animal shelter. Now Boulder has Alfie, a huge rooster made out of more than 3,000 pieces of old farm equipment by longtime local artist Robert Bellows. The sculpture was dedicated this past weekend…
Two years after a traumatic brain injury knocked him out of the 2010 Winter Olympics, Kevin Pearce is back on board — and will be riding one in Breckenridge today, before he moves behind the mike for this week’s Winter Dew Tour’s Nike Open. Pearce emceed the U.S. Grand Prix…
Though the Robischon Gallery (1740 Wazee Street, 303-298-7788, www.robischongallery.com) is a commercial enterprise, it’s indistinguishable from a tidy downtown museum in appearance and atmosphere. This has to do both with the relentless high quality of the offerings there and the venue’s enormous size. As you can imagine, that means there’s…
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Book-to-stage adaptations are often wooden, but playwright Laura Eason has done a terrific job with Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Her playhas energy and charm, and it really does communicate the fears, uncertainties and joys of childhood, as well as the atmosphere of…
A sensitive portrait of childhood just before pubescence, Tomboy, the second film by writer-director Céline Sciamma, astutely explores the freedom of being untethered to the rule-bound world of gender codes. About twenty minutes elapse before we learn the real name and biological sex of Laure (a revelatory Zoé Héran), a…
Although supplying boy’s adventure thrills on the side, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories are remarkable for how they make the process of empirical brainwork, and the resulting discoveries, breathlessly exciting. Each Holmes tale simultaneously unlocks a mystery while deepening the enigma of its hero in a miraculously sustained piece…
Steve McQueen’s first two films both star Michael Fassbender, feature virtually interchangeable titles, and are nearly as grueling to watch as they must have been to make. But where Shame might be nearly as excruciating as 2008’s Hunger, it’s a lot less exalted. In Hunger, Fassbender’s imprisoned Irish revolutionary Bobby…
Birger Sandzén. Though Birger Sandzén was born in Sweden, studied painting there and in Paris and later made his permanent home in Kansas, we in Colorado can claim him as one of our own. Sandzén found his muse here — in our stunning scenery — and after his first extended…
Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep tackles health, care, death and dying in the United States, and finding material should be easy. Is there anyone — beside those who profit from it — who is happy with our country’s medical system? Is there anyone who hasn’t experienced some level…
The film It’s a Wonderful Life is a much-loved American classic. Some families watch it together year after year at this time, like Miracle on 34th Street and varying versions of A Christmas Carol. So the first question that arises when you hear that author Joe Landry has made a…
