Sculptor Bob Mangold moved to Denver with his wife, Peggy, about fifty years ago and helped to lay the groundwork for the contemporary sculpture scene here today. At the time, sculpture was a fairly undeveloped medium compared to painting, printmaking and even ceramics. There are still many more painters than…
You’d have to have been living under a rock to not have noticed the early-21st-century museum-building boom that’s been going on in Colorado over the past couple of years. There’s the Hamilton Building at the Denver Art Museum, the addition to the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center and the incredible…
About Us… et al. In the West Gallery at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art is About Us…, put together by freelance curator Mark Addison, who brought in two dozen works of conceptual realism by a raft of internationally known artists in addition to pieces from his own collection. Addison…
If not for lowbrow art and a lackluster Elvis impersonator, El Vez might never have been born. But history conspired to have Robert Lopez — the man behind the Mexican Elvis — curate an Elvis-inspired exhibit at the lowbrow Los Angeles art gallery La Luz de Jesus. A former vocalist…
I used to be addicted to coffee, but these days, tea is what gets me going in the morning, keeps me going in the afternoon and settles me down in the evening. It’s tasty, it’s comforting, and it’s packed with antioxidants. And today and tomorrow at the Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse,…
Trouble scoring a ticket to this year’s Democratic National Convention? Although I can’t help you this time around, this weekend’s Rocky Mountain Book and Paper Fair will feature rare paper collectibles from around the country — including, yes, a ticket to the 1908 DNC. If you love collecting books, 400-year-old…
I tried to chat with Betsy Tobin by phone, I really did — but her cell signal dove in and out like a shadow creeping across a rock as she traveled through the expansive desert southwest toward a gig at the Grand Canyon. Our conversation wasn’t meant to be, perhaps,…
Bits of scrap metal, pins, woven Tyvek, chopped paper maps, an unraveled sweater, recycled plastic, wool felt — this is the discarded and forgotten stuff of our times. However, any archeologist can tell you that this trash holds the key to how we live. It’s a smelly reflection of who…
“August is one of the most heavily attended First Fridays, so we wanted to take advantage of that and have a party,” says Andrea Barela, development director at NEWSED Community Development Corporation, the driving organization behind Santa Fe Drive’s revitalization and purveyor of premier Latino cultural events such as the…
The 26-year-old Chicken Lips comedy troupe is as busy as ever. This month marks the first time that the group’s members have performed an original show in the Avenue Theater since 2005, when they took it over. Free Gas: Chicken Lips Gives It to America, which opened last night and…
“Out West, people don’t parade their eccentricities. Down South, we put them out there for everybody to see,” explains former Southerner Charlotte D’Armond Talbert. Six years ago, the North Carolina theater teacher got together with former student Tessa Carr (now a fellow theater Ph.D.) to create an annual show that…
I just don’t understand the current administration. To wit: After suicide bombers take down the Twin Towers and put a hole in the Pentagon, George W. Bush swears up, down and sideways that Iraq is fully behind al-Qaeda, that Saddam Hussein has been secretly manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, and…
Modern Muse Theatre Company, created by Steve Lavezza and Gabriella Cavallero and dedicated to mounting daring and relevant works, has completed its third year and is about to announce its fourth. Tonight the company presents Back to the Muse, a major fundraiser featuring Jamie Horton, who for decades was one…
Despite recent efforts to curb usage of disposable bags, “Paper or plastic?” continues to be a question that echoes across grocery-store checkout lanes. Rik Sargent, curator of the new Paper or Plastic? exhibition at gallery910Arts, hopes to turn the query into a call for change by making shoppers aware of…
My science-fiction roots go deep. One of my first memories is of standing in line to see Star Wars when I was four. I grew up watching Star Trek reruns with my dad. I discovered and subsequently devoured Robert Heinlein’s juvenile novels in grade school and graduated to his adult…
Best-selling scribe David Maraniss, who visits town tonight, has written about politicians (most notably President Bill Clinton) and major sports figures, including coaching legend Vince Lombardi and baseball Hall of Famer Roberto Clemente. As for his latest, Rome 1960, which chronicles the 1960 summer Olympics, he says, “To some degree,…
I was nine years old the first time I saw Blade Runner, and at the time, I didn’t care that it was a thematically complex, multi-layered homage to film noir based on a masterwork of science fiction by Philip K. Dick. I just thought, “Wow, Han Solo is in a…
Brad and Libby Birky’s vision of feeding fresh, organic food to everyone, regardless of their ability to pay, brought SAME Cafe to Denver. SAME (an acronym for So All May Eat) utilizes local, sustainable food sources, and the cafe features a simple, healthy menu of pizzas, salads and soups. Diners…
America owes a lot to her dreamers, the people who stayed true to their beliefs, building personal empires — and anti-empires — that helped shape what’s come to be known as the American Way. Which, if you think about it, is really a story of multiple roads taken. Iconoclasts, romantics,…
As everyone knows, Andy Warhol (seen in a Jamie Wyeth portrait) was one of the most important artists ever. Less well-known was his private career as a writer. Every day, Warhol recorded his activities in diary entries, and it was only after he died in 1987 that the contents of…
Sao Paolo is a colossus of a city that boils and roils with a multi-culti influence that would make even Americans do a double-take. Enter the electronic duo Telepathique, whose synthed-out sound speaks to its hometown’s status as a cosmopolitan party palace— albeit one designed by a Soviet-era architect smoked…
I was thirteen when Stephen Sommers’s 1999 remake-in-name-only of The Mummy came out — just about the ideal age. Sommers is definitely some kind of junk-addled auteur, and if The Mummy didn’t achieve its obvious goal of topping Raiders Of The Lost Ark, it was close enough as far as…
