Visual Arts

For the Arvada Center’s current Paper.Works show, this artist learned to create art at a snail’s pace.

Crossroads Theater had played host to many performance and community events in the decade since it opened in Five Points in 2007, but now the interior of the venue at 2590 Washington Street is gutted, making way for office space after a decade-long struggle to pay the rent as a performing arts and community space.

The African Community Center merges fashion, fundraising and vocational training at tonight’s Designing Women: A Cross-Cultural Design Collaboration. It’s the first time the organization has hosted a philanthropic event of this kind, which will showcase apparel created by refugee artisans trained through ACC’s We Made This program in collaboration with local designers.

Denver is positively bustling with activity all weekend long, which means that thrifty locals have plenty of opportunities to enjoy everything our city arts scene has to offer, without breaking the bank.

On a sunburn-inducing Saturday in Littleton, accompanied by the occasional faint sound of bagpipes from the nearby Colorado Irish Festival, orange-jerseyed athletes slam shoulders with their opponents and sprint across a field, balancing a fist-sized ball on a paddle. This isn’t football, or lacrosse, or likely any sport you’ve seen: it’s the Denver Gaels and Regulators facing off in the final game of hurling, an ancient Irish sport, before the Rumble in the Rockies Southwest Invitational Tournament hits Lowry Sports Center this weekend.

Devastating earthquakes. Unprecedented storms. Life-killing droughts. Unpredictable weather patterns. If these sound like worst-case scenario predictions for climate change, then that’s intentional. But in this case, the dystopian conditions do not apply to planet Earth, but instead to a fictional world that’s captured in the comic book series Acid of the Godz.

Summer means vacations and time spent with nature, as well as rousing group showcases and, sometimes, business as usual in the galleries. This week pulls it all together for art-lovers making the rounds.

There’s an unbelievably ambitious exhibition with an unbelievably short run at RedLine right now: Downshifting, which was curated by Ramón Bonilla, a RedLine resident. Bonilla was interested in highlighting the international trend of reductive art, which is art that employs some kind of less-is-more approach.

At their July 17 meeting, Denver City Council members voted unanimously to approve the Safe Occupancy Program, a conditional building occupancy program for unpermitted spaces designed to ensure safety while also limiting displacement; it will be overseen by Denver Community Planning and Development (CPD) and the Denver Fire Department. In the wake…

In summer, Denver’s calendar is so packed you can’t begin to hit all the festivals, markets, parties and celebrations around town. So this past weekend, we did it all for you. Keep reading for a look at four events in Denver we visited July 14 through July 16, with links…

Denver Design Week aims to give a platform to speakers from all design disciplines, bringing innovation and design-speak to the public through a series of tours, panel discussions, presentations and parties.

After more than seven months of discussion, the city presented its Safe Occupancy Program proposal for DIY spaces and other unpermitted facilities at the Denver City Council meeting on Monday, July 10. And already, amendments have been proposed.

Denver, it is hot. So hot, in fact, that there’s really nothing to do but find ourselves a body of cold water and take a plunge.

Florence Crittenton, an alternative high school for teen moms, just commissioned a mural by Julia Morgan for its 125th year.

Marvel superheroes have all but hijacked multiplexes during summer blockbuster season for more than a decade. And for good reason. Iconic characters like Spider Man, the Avengers and the Guardians of the Galaxy have been fodder for jaw-dropping epic stories, new myths that friends, parents and kids can bond over in air-conditioned, dark theaters with buckets of popcorn.

A tragedy centered around a woman fighting for political power may give audience members a stinging sense of deja vu, but the play in question is not about the 2016 presidential election. Rather, it’s Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s production of Hamlet which makes a bold choice: portraying the titular character as a woman.

July blazes on with art in all the right places, thanks to lots of new work, new ventures and new spaces. Get your fill at these five events.

At the July 11 meeting of the Denver Commission on Cultural Affairs, Kent Rice, executive director of Denver Arts & Venues, announced that he had approved the airport’s request to deaccession Interior Garden, with eleven stipulations.

Adam Milner: Desirable Objects, now on display at the David B. Smith Gallery, highlights recent works by Adam Milner, an artist who lives in Pittsburgh but is still well remembered in Colorado for his time here. Many of these pieces hark back to the kind of personal things Milner has…

John Cleese is one of the funniest actors alive. Known for his work with Monty Python and in A Fish Called Wanda, Fawlty Tours and so many more films and television shows, the performer is headed to Denver to tell stories from his life and career.

If you don’t follow comedy closely, you probably best remember the hilarious comic, woodworker and author Nick Offerman for his curmudgeonly man’s man role, Ron Swanson on Parks and Recreation.

Brian Jabas Smith has played for crowds of 10,000, but he says reading from his debut collection of short stories, Spent Saints and Other Stories, at some of the stops on his coast-to-coast book tour has actually been more nerve-wracking. Smith’s been a national-class bicyclist, rock ‘n roll frontman, alcoholic and crystal meth addict, and journalist, and it’s these experiences that fuel Spent Saints, which turn an empathetic and nuanced eye towards characters on the margins. On the third leg of a book tour that’s seen him reading in between rock sets (namely, the Tough Shits and Rocky Four) as well as leading a writing workshop at a Memphis Boys & Girls Club, Smith will be reading and screening the web series based on the collection at the Boulder Bookstore on July 11 at 7:30 p.m. In advance of the reading, Westword got on the phone with Smith, who called from the 110-degree heat of Tucson.