Editor’s note: Our cover story this week, Alan Prendergast’s “Party in the Park,” looks at how Denver’s park rangers are gearing up for a busy summer season. In response, Westword writers are weighing in with appraisals of their own favorite Denver parks, starting with Prendergast’s tribute to City Park. City…
If you take a closer look, underneath layers of paint and decades of additions, there are gorgeous mid-century modern commercial structures along Colfax Avenue that have a story to tell. A sordid past is part of what makes the country’s longest main street fascinating to some, but for Bill Marino…
The William Havu Gallery is one of only a handful of top-tier contemporary venues in Denver. Havu specializes in the work of advanced or mid-career artists, most of whom work in Colorado or the Southwest. Currently, Havu is presenting Amy Metier: Preconceived Notions, which is filled with modernist-derived abstractions by…
Earlier this week, twenty handpicked local artists, each representing a different Denver restaurant or bar, gathered at the McNichols Building, where they’d been invited to participate in the touring “Red Bull Curates: The Canvas Cooler Project,” a contest that could take two of them all the way to Art Basel…
I complain about the bulldozing of Denver’s sometimes tacky but often unique cowtown-ish architectural history a lot. It wasn’t that long ago that we weren’t very cool; in my salad days of the early 2000s, I rented a sprawling two-bedroom apartment in a beautiful ’40s-era building on Cheesman Park for…
Musician, artist and former social worker Diana Rose Frances founded St. Francis Healing Works to extend access to the healing arts through Spacecraft, a creative re-use store; Forte Expressive Works, a music program, and more. “I consider the creative healing arts anything that connects people to their own human nature,”…
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. Artist, philanthropist and Iraq veteran Curtis Bean, mastermind behind the Art of…
Thirty years ago, when Sherri Tippie first got interested in trying to save a keystone species whose habitat was being wiped out by breakneck development up and down the Front Range, she was ridiculed by wildlife officials as a rank amateur. What, after all, could a hairdresser and former go-go…
Frothy brews, barbecue and the shiny pearl snaps on smartly tailored Western shirts from Denver’s own Rockmount Ranch Wear brought the night to life on Friday at the McNichols Building, where Imbibe Denver threw Slue Foot Sue’s Shindig, a party with a backdrop of contemporary Western art. Photographer Scott Lentz…
In a town with such an active co-op and alternative art scene, you don’t want to limit your gallery adventures to First Fridays — because you’d miss out on a lot of great art, including shows opening this weekend. Keep reading for a trio of exhibits worth seeing. See also:…
Just in time for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, the Denver Film Society and America SCORES Denver are teaming up with the Three Lions pub and SOCCER ELECTRIC to hold Denver’s first annual World Football Film Festival. The festival, which is set for June 5 to June 8 at…
The English translation of Los Phantazmas is “The Ghosts,” says artist Carlos Fresquez, explaining his art collective’s name, which evokes the invisible work that many Latinos, Mexicans and Chicanos perform in the United States. The four-person collective emerged in the mid-’90s, disbanded around the turn of the century and has…
Michael Paglia visits the Clyfford Still Museum in this week’s art review, taking in a recreated show based on an exhibit that Still himself organized in 1959 at the Albright-Knox in Buffalo, New York. The exhibition marked the first time he was able to fully envision what it would be…
On April 26, professional and amateur filmmakers alike joined in the “One Day in Denver” project, part of “One Day on Earth: Your Day. Your City. Your Future.” During this participatory media event, they documented the answers to ten questions on the future of Denver; meanwhile, filmmakers in eleven other…
The Clyfford Still Museum is one of Denver’s great cultural assets, but it’s also the kind of place that most people feel they only need to see once. Museum director Dean Sobel told me that 80 percent of visitors are new to the institution, coming for their first time, with…
For (Residency): Process to Consumption, a new work-in-progress exhibition opening this week at the McNichols Building, Lisa Gedgaudas wanted to make people uncomfortable — in a good way. As program director for Create Denver, Gedgaudas is the brains behind this project, one that unites artists with art enthusiasts to create…
It’s the little things that help a community thrive, and that’s where ArtPlant artist residencies fit into Denver’s scene, spreading the wealth by creating an atmosphere of good will and collaboration. Last fall the program’s first resident, Kansas City installation artist Rashawn Griffin, took full advantage of the ArtPlant offer,…
Last summer, Ivar Zeile and Ryan Pattie of Denver Digerati brought a quiet revolution to the Denver Theatre District’s giant LED screens: Between the ads and promos most often seen flashing on the screens, Zeile and Pattie’s curated series of short Friday Flash programs traded commerce for cutting-edge digital art…
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. Rita Conway had been coming to Colorado to camp every summer since…
Denver’s Art District on Santa Fe was in full bloom on the First Friday in May, with pleasant weather and lots of action indoors and outdoors all along the drive. With Space Gallery debuting its high-tech new space and food vendors and crowds filling the street, there were ample opportunities…
First Friday comes but once a month, with an embarrassment of gallery riches: fresh exhibitions, pop-up parties, people-watching, performances and great art. Organized navigation isn’t always necessary to have a good time on First Friday; still, it doesn’t hurt to have some direction — especially since there are some don’t-miss…
Back in the 1980s, Philadelphia artist and collector Linda Lee Alter realized that the collection she had assembled was dominated by the works of men. So she decided to sell them off and begin building a collection exclusively dedicated to women. From the start, Alter intended that the collection would…
