“I always had a good time at Artopia,” says Silas Ulibarri, aka Jolt, the founder of Guerilla Garden. He’s talking about Westword’s annual celebration of the arts, which has evolved a lot over the past two decades but remains one of the best annual parties in town, showcasing the best of…
Shove off, John Hughes. The DUFF, a high-school comedy by Ari Sandel, opens by declaring that The Breakfast Club’s social categories are, like, way passé. Explains lead Bianca (Mae Whitman), “Jocks play video games, princesses are on antidepressants, and geeks rule the world.” Today, be ye goth kid, science dweeb…
Five years ago, four losers passed out in a jacuzzi, boiled back to 1986, healed their past wounds, rocked out to Poison, and returned to their timeline as gods. Thusly, Hot Tub Time Machine director Steve Pink was hailed as a minor deity: He’d taken a dumber-than-huffing-hairspray premise and made…
Last week three Denver artists were each surprised to be gifted with a yellow packet of fresh twenty-dollar bills — $500 in all — that were delivered with a handful of candy and a big message. Their tardy Santa Claus is the anonymous Yes Ma’am Projects, which each year awards…
Artopia, Westword’s celebration of the arts, will return to City Hall on Saturday, February 21. In addition to cutting-edge art and live music (and yes, food and drinks), the evening’s events will include Whiteout, our annual fashion show that’s returned to the mix. Watch the video above to see what…
#37: Molly Bounds Young Denver artist Molly Bounds, aka Moldy Bong, straddles the worlds of DIY homemade comix and fine art, making deadpan and unironic drawings that work just as well splashed in colors across a wall in a mural as they do carefully inked in black and white for…
RiNo’s Helikon Gallery and Studios is currently hosting Spark & Ruin: Anatomy of a Flame, a handsome group exhibit that examines fire, which is a pretty relevant local topic. Though gallery director Cayce Goldberg’s family has owned this particular rail-side property for decades, Spark & Ruin was guest-curated by Raymundo…
Late yesterday, science-fiction fans got a great bit of news: District 9 director Neill Blomkamp will be directing a new Alien film. This is good on many levels, since the Alien franchise needs some serious love (sorry, Prometheus made things worse, not better) and given the genius of District 9, Blomkamp…
Back in 2009, Denver School of the Arts student Quinn Marchman and a group of friends decided to take the lead and create an original production for the school’s annual Black History Month production. Together they wrote, directed, produced and acted in a play about a fictional character named Barry,…
Realism and its derivations are still hot properties in the fine arts, especially in contemporary painting, and this is a good time to immerse yourself in works of this type. Robischon Gallery is highlighting four artists, in separate shows, who are all doing work that riffs on realism. And that’s…
Bike enthusiasts gathered Sunday at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds to take a spin through aisles of fancy wheels and cycling accessories at the Colorado Custom and Vintage Bicycle Expo and Swap Meet, looking for new rides and old gold. Brandon Marshall was there; keep reading for his photos of the…
With Louis Silver’s music for The Jazz Singer in 1927, talkies ushered in a new age of recorded sound; what audiences heard when they watched a film took a bold step into completing the grand illusion of cinema. Yet even without recorded sound, the silent film era flourished with hand-crafted scores,…
The musical Next to Normal garnered a Pulitzer Prize for composer Tom Kitt and writer Brian Yorkey and high praise from critics — in part because it dealt with the ugly realities of mental illness, an unusual and courageous focus for a generally upbeat and unrealistic medium. At the center…
For the next ten weeks Denver will experience the ways in which history, violence and three-dimensionalism intersect through the work of Cristóbal Gracia, who was selected to represent Mexico City as a 2015 Biennial Ambassador, alongside fellow Mexican artist Daniel Monroy Cuevas. The 2015 Biennial Ambassadors program is a ten-week…
American Sniper notwithstanding, the first fresh multiplex trend to emerge in 2015 is Old White Dudes Learning to Share Their World. First came Kevin Costner in the sour Black or White, playing a coot who discovers that black folks love their kids, too, even in South Los Angeles. Then, in…
Cells phones have taken over. We use our phones everywhere — in the car, on the toilet, while we wait in line for coffee or groceries. We even use them in the sacred space of our bedrooms, in our beds, when we are supposed to be sleeping. We’re shameless about…
At first glance, Sharon Feder’s work seems to focus on sweeping, modern landscapes; train tracks and abandoned buildings fill massive canvases, alongside other familiar structures from Denver’s not-so-distant agricultural and commercial past. But she sees the paintings a little differently. “The reason I began painting buildings was because I had…
There’s always a cost to not knowing what you’re doing. You can watch all the YouTube videos and read all the books in the world — but in the end, you’re still bound to make mistakes. And this is precisely why I’m so thankful that Victoria Salvador is in my…
On February 21, Artopia will take over City Hall on Broadway, filling the club with the exhibits by Denver artists, a runway show featuring work by some of the city’s top designers and performances by local bands. Among the entertainers: The dancers of Bboy Factory, a Denver studio founded to…
Loveland residents headed into the Sweetheart City’s streets this past weekend to celebrate Valentine’s Day with a blast of winter fun at the Fire and Ice Festival, an outdoor hoedown with ice sculptors, a heavy-duty snow-vehicle show, carriage rides, live music, marshmallow roasting and, to top it all off, a…
Counterpath Press is more than just a press. In addition to publishing experimental poetry and prose, the 2013 Westword MasterMInd award-winner also hosts readings, performances and lectures. It serves as a gallery space for visual and audio material as well, and carries books from like-minded small presses across the country…
Westword’s Artopia now includes Whiteout, our annual fashion show. In advance of this year’s art extravaganza, which is going down on February 21 at City Hall, we checked in with the seven designers and boutiques that will be part of the Alice in Wonderland-themed Whiteout to ask what they have…
