Visual Arts

The results are in, and Denver Museum of Contemporary Art’s Twelve and a Half Days of Xmas Live! has selected 12 performers who will rock the museum’s modernist atrium throughout the holiday season. Each act earns a $50 honorarium as they compete for the winning prize of $500 and With acts ranging from the holiday inspired burlesque of Gigi D’Lovely to the self-explanatory Crazy Gorilla Drummer, the 12 days of Christmas promise to be filled with all sorts of appealing weirdness from the curated best of Denver’s diverse arts scene. Westword spoke to MCA Director of Programming Sarah Kate Baie to hear about the finalists and the selection process.

The plucky Gildar Gallery on South Broadway has made a name for itself by promoting young up-and-comers that director Adam Gildar uncovers. But for the current show, running through the holidays, Gildar has tapped Clark Richert, one of the greatest, most accomplished and most heralded artists in the state’s history…

Colorado mom and author Patti Wheeler began traveling with her sons before they could walk, and what unfolded is a family tradition — a legacy, really — with far-reaching implications on the environment, and possibly even humanity. See also: Denver author KG Karmichael celebrates uniqueness with her book on Breck,…

The anonymously subsidized YES MA’AM PROJECT announced its first recipient today: Up-and-coming local multimedia installationist and visual documentarian Adam Milner, whose experiments in subjective experience and social media exemplify what it means to be an artist in the 21st century. See also: 100 Colorado Creatives: Adam Milner…

The Denver Art Museum learned an important lesson when it brought 2012’s Yves Saint Laurent blockbuster to town: The art of fashion is compelling, and not just to art aficionados, but to a wide cross-section of bling-lovers everywhere. Banking on a similar reaction, the DAM announced today that it will…

Denver’s sneaker-freaks converged on the EXDO Event Center over the weekend for a frenzy of wheeling and dealing for collectible kicks, with music, live art and other hip-hop-savvy vendors. Westword photographer Kenneth Hamblin III was there with a camera: Here’s the tease. See also: Sneaker of the week? Mission accomplished…

In the wake of the September floods that devastated many Boulder County towns, the City of Boulder and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art worked quickly to create the Flood Project: Rising Above & Rebuilding Boulder Through Art, a community-building public art project that would both commemorate the floods and…

Nominees and friends packed into Galvanize on December 5 for the 2013 Westword Web Awards, Westword’s annual celebration of the most interesting Denverites on the Internet. With MC Jordan Doll at the helm, we handed out 21 awards across four categories, from the Best Music Video to the Best Politician…

The instructors at the Art Students League of Denver practice what they teach, as evidenced by Revisiting: Celebrating 10 Years of the Visiting Artist Series at ASLD, a special exhibit opening this weekend. Offering art classes for every medium, the 25-year-old ASLD is a community-centric, non-profit, non-accredited art school right…

Boulderites — especially those in the city’s close-knit pro-cycling community — take bikes seriously. So it goes without saying that the annual Bike Art exhibition at the Dairy Center for the Arts is a big draw. The national show of more than 100 works in a variety of mediums is…

Ever since it opened in a shed off Archer Street in 2003, and in the five homes it’s had since then, the Denver Zine Library has been a community space where people can see handmade publications donated from all over the world — 15,000 zines in all today. On Friday,…

In a transitory town like Denver, many new parents find themselves stationed hundreds of miles from kin — and some moms, myself included, struggle to make it through the first year, feeling isolated while experiencing postpartum depression or struggling with breastfeeding. So, if it takes a village to raise a…

Among the offerings at Walker Fine Art is the standout Sabin Aell: Mond:See, a solo outing in the gallery’s main room. The show starts with a bang courtesy of the striking title piece, “Mond:See” (pictured), a mural that starts in the entry, then climbs the north wall and bleeds onto…

For close to twenty years, the LIDA Project, Brian Freeland’s experimental theater group, has been both a deliberately collaborative effort and the spawn of Freeland’s own unique vision, and the model has worked well for the company. Even when Freeland took a sabbatical in 2010, LIDA continued to take Freeland-style…

KG Karmichael has just published her new book, Breck the Floppy Eared Husky, with illustrator John Rose. Technically, the book is labeled middle grade, which means it’s for the twelve-and-under demographic. But if there’s anything The Hunger Games and Stargirl have taught us, it’s that even the most grown-up grownups…

As the world goes more and more paperless, so does the art world, too: It’s easy to post imagery online, and while coffee-table books are becoming expensive dinosaurs, exhibit catalogs are forever on the Internet. It was appropriate, then, for Philip J. Steele Gallery curator Cortney Lane Stell to document…

The fourth annual Victorian Holiday Home Tour kicks off tomorrow, November 30, inviting visitors to get an intimate look at some of central Denver’s oldest and grandest homes. A tradition that has fast become a local favorite, last year’s event featuring local mansions saw more than 800 people through the…

When the Denver Art Museum doubled its exhibition space in 2006 by building the Frederic C. Hamilton wing across the street from its iconic Gio Ponti tower, the idea was to use the new building for temporary exhibits — in particular, big blockbusters. A lot of people, especially art writers,…

Michael Paglia visits Denver Art Museum in this week’s review, taking in the three-part exhibit, Passport to Paris. The shows feature work by big names ranging from Toulouse-Lautrec to Monet. Continue reading for photos from all three exhibits…

If all the pressure to maximize your gastro capacity isn’t bad enough this week, try explaining why you’ll need to wait 77,798 years — until after Voyager 1 passes Alpha Centauri — to again use the menurkey. In the meantime, you have to navigate the explosion of mediocre Thanksgivvukah mashups…

No Shave November has become a cult-classic in our chilly city. If you’re male, chances are you’ve participated at least once or twice — it’s an excuse not to shave for a whole month, so why not? But while the hair apparent is all over Denver this month, most people…

Whovians are desperately loyal, and they have been for fifty years, ever since William Hartnell first hit the BBC as the original Doctor Who. Ten doctors later, with British actor Peter Capaldi set to become the twelfth Doctor beginning with this year’s Christmas special, the push to the future began…