As Optimystic Arts, artist Gemma Bayly works with many mediums. But when it comes to her intricate, hand-drawn mandalas, she recites a prayer with each line she creates. “Any time I approach a piece, it’s always with the intention of bringing a healing light that can rejuvenate and bring peace…
A generation ago, in the latter third of the twentieth century, post-modernist deconstructionists were finished with abstraction. It was dead, they said, along with painting itself. But in the intervening decades, two things happened. First, this deconstructionist idea became entrenched in academia, and second, it was proven to be wrong…
You can find art all over town — not just on gallery walls. In this series, we’ll be looking at some of the local artists who serve up their work in coffeehouses and other non-gallery businesses around town. Alex Graham is part of a rare breed: She’s a fourth-generation Coloradan…
Walking on hot coals? Swallowing fire? Sticking a pair of scissors down your throat? It’s all in a day’s work for a side show attraction. Last Friday night, the daring circus freaks of the Oh No Variety Show and the Faded Freakshow went mano a mano in a contest of…
Elizoebeth Jensen’s first move to a creative life was leaving California for Colorado in 2005. Seven years later, she gave up her California consulting job and became a full-time designer and mother. Jensen is now the creative mind and designer responsible for beautiful, delicate pieces of jewelry. She recently took…
You’ll find a wide spectrum of new art big and very small this weekend, on gallery walls and as moving pictures on downtown streets. Here’s a sampling of what you can see… See also: By the Letter: Joel Swanson at David B. Smith Gallery…
Karl Christian Krumpholz is a historian of the most seamy, lurid thoroughfare in Denver: Colfax Avenue. His medium is his webcomic, 30 Miles of Crazy! where he trawls the street for stories of drunkenness, depravity, and insanity. Now he’s rolled the archives of the comic into one handy paperback: the…
The Boulder International Fringe Festival is one of many fringe fests around the world where cultural gatekeepers have opened the dam and flooded audiences with playwrights, filmmakers, dancers, artists and curators showing off their works without censorship. Nobody gets turned away. Anything goes. The joy and trouble for audiences is…
The landscape has long fascinated artists, particularly in the American West, with those interested in the form today falling into two broad categories. There are artists who re-create the high points of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century realism and impressionism. And there are those who try to introduce new ways of dealing…
George Saunders is one of America’s most celebrated short story writers. Winner of the Folio and Pulitzer prizes and been granted. MacArtuthur fellowship. Since 1996, he’s professor at Syracuse, itself an incubator for the best authors of his generation. Saunders returns to town this week to the Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop, both to participate in a big reading and signing event for fans, and also to conduct a narrower and more focused writers’ studio. However, that group is already full. Westword caught up with Saunders for a phone interview before his trip, to discuss finding out which literature is bullshit, writing stories based on dream images, and how creatively, it’s always best to steer towards the rapids.
Back in August, I wrote a love letter to Denver, the city I used to know. Though my intention was to remember the good things about my city that are gone now, it was also, perhaps, a thinly veiled criticism of the way progress is going in Denver. Recently, there…
You can find art all over town — not just on gallery walls. In this series, we’ll be looking at some of the local artists who serve up their work in coffeehouses and other non-gallery businesses around town. James André says he’s one of the twelve or thirteen people in…
When the Chocolate Skateboards team rolls into town this weekend on its twentieth anniversary tour, local artist Evan Hecox will be front and center at the celebration. His artwork for the iconic brand will anchor a one-night-only art show at Super Ordinary that features his skateboard graphics, along with photographs…
This weekend’s gallery openings include works that reimagine inner and outer landscapes, inspire creativity in youngsters or just plain look good on a wall. Highbrow, lowbrow and everywhere in between, there’s something for everyone in Denver this weekend…. See also: Golden Opportunity: Jenny Morgan at Plus Gallery…
I’m a big fan of public art, and Denver has commissioned some standout pieces over the years that really spiff up the city. But sometimes things go awry when politics and civic bureaucracy meet the art world. While some of the people who serve on selection committees may have artistic…
Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim are enfants terrible whose rhythm, aesthetic and sensibilities have informed everything from cinema to sketch comedy and deodorant advertising in the years since Tom Goes to the Mayor debuted on Adult Swim nearly a decade ago. Gallows humor abounds in their new series Bedtime Stories, a hilariously macabre horror-comedy anthology which makes its Adult Swim debut on September 18. The show is a huge step forward for the duo, who’ve mounted their second national live tour in preparation for the premiere. What sets this tour apart from their last is the inclusion of Dr. Steve Brule on the lineup. Played by character actor John C. Reilly, who relishes each awkward syllable in the role of a profoundly unsettling physician with dubious advice, Brule first appeared in interstitial segments on Awesome Show and then spun off into his own series, Check it out with Dr. Steve Brule. Westword caught up with Heidecker before his Paramount theater show for a brief phone interview.
The Denver Art Museum’s Gio Ponti tower — now ignobly dubbed the North Building — was completed in 1971. It was less than two years later that a young Asian-art scholar, Ronald Otsuka, was hired to shepherd the Asian-art department there. This December, Otsuka, the Joseph de Heer Curator of…
When Front Range communities washed away in last year’s torrential rains and subsequent floods, some folks who experienced the disaster firsthand did so with cameras in hand, documenting the stark power of nature as rivers jumped their banks to wreak havoc. A year later, the Dairy Center for the Arts…
Michael Burnett, director of Space Gallery, has a taste for neo-modernism — that post-postmodern style that’s been coming on strong for the last decade. You can see it in his neo-modernist building, which opened this past summer (and which, by the way, has become the place to have your cannabis-friendly…
You can find art all over town — not just on gallery walls. In this series, we’ll be looking at some of the local artists who serve up their work in coffeehouses and other non-gallery businesses around town. Blake Adams wants to democratize the viewing, understanding and appreciation of art…
Fall is unofficially here, and with it comes a busy First Friday with an eclectic slate of new shows, including everything from an exhibit of fresh work from a 91-year-old legend to a contemporary three-artist tribute to the beauty of the prairie West. Keep reading for more details about these…
Sharon Feder has been painting for as long as she can remember. Along with studying painting under the mentorship of Colorado modernists like Ed Marecak and Mark Zamantakis, Feder also has had decades of technical experience as a set designer, muralist and sign painter. Combined with her passion for urban…
