If conservative politics are a circus, then the Palin family is everyone’s favorite sideshow. The teen pregnancy, the strange babydaddy drama, the truncated term as governor — shoot, that was the Palins just getting warmed up, evidently, because just when you thought shit couldn’t get any weirder for the Addams…
Fashion Denver’s in-house French fashion designer and artist Raphael Lobello grew up in a fort built in the 1200s. After studying screen printing in Grenoble for two years, Lobello moved near Toulouse and studied fashion design for three more before coming to Denver, where he is learning English and making…
Dana Cain is the lady with her thumb in a million pies: The local maestra of event-planning throws several well-attended collectors expos, art shows, parties, chocolate fests each year. Her latest — and biggest — project is next summer’s Denver County Fair. But Dana is also an avid art collector…
What do you get when a popular game company swallows its pride and asks the anonymous users of 4chan’s video game forum why they didn’t like the new Call of Duty? You certainly don’t get a courteous discussion of the merits of the game along with some constructive criticism. No,…
Westword art critic and exhibit jurist Michael Paglia has already cast his votes and chosen the works for the upcoming Art District Best of 2010 exhibition at eventgallery 910Arts, and the results will be unveiled Friday night at the opening gala. But you still have time to weigh in, too,…
Walking along Santa Fe Drive the other day, I gazed at the van Straaten Gallery and thought about a shift that has taken place recently on the street. As usual, the gallery was closed, though a few spotlights were on so you could tell there was art on display inside…
Living in Denver — especially if you live in Capitol Hill, as I do — it can be easy to forget that, despite our fancy skyscrapers and hoity-toity public art, we still living in the wild American West, if a slightly more urbane one in within the blue insulation of…
Advertising is all around us — and thanks to the Internet, we can see all the weird stuff other countries are doing — telling us what to value and how to act, offering us insight on how to be better human beings (wink), or just making us laugh at ourselves…
Judge me if you will: I love The Jersey Shore. I love the uber-clever film editing designed to highlight the characters’ duplicity and incompetence, I love the fact that it’s inexplicably in Miami instead of New Jersey this season, hell, I even, in a weird way, love the Guido gang…
Vern Nieto knows his way around some Zuni fetishes — and no, you pervert, it’s not at all what you think. In the Zuni tradition, a “fetish” is a spiritually significant art object, a small, intricate charm carved from precious or semi-precious stone to reflect an animal of symbolic import;…
Denver Arts Week ends tomorrow, but there’s still plenty of time to participate. Especially if your idea of participation in the arts is pantomiming statues while standing in front of them. Worst case, there’s almost certainly free shit in it for you. The Denver Arts Week Scavenger Hunt is pretty…
At Plus Gallery last night, art lovers sat silently together in the dark, waiting for the next 16mm projected film to surprise and astonish. It was the ideal venue for the third Win Wear showcase, Into the Avant-Garde: Landscapes, with an intimate atmosphere and a large white wall to serve…
When it comes to advertising that is geared to deter someone from something, the most effective — and most often chosen — tactic is to use images that scare the shit out of any would-be buyers or doers. This is often seen in political ads and AIDS awareness ads, and…
Local artist Axel Geittmann’s paintings take viewers into a surrealist world of psychological landscapes, exploring complex emotional territory by combining gestures of realism with an essence of the other-worldy. Mostly painting with acrylic and spray-paint, Geittmann fuses traditions and viewer expectations to create a haunting mythology all his own. We…
How many cities can boast an annual city-wide contest honoring the most kick-ass building designs? Denver can, thanks to its six-year-old Mayor’s Design Awards, which recognizes achievement in new architecture and urban reclamation alike. And judging from this year’s 11 winners, who’ll be feted tonight at 6 p.m. in the…
Of all the U.S. presidents — George W. notwithstanding — Richard Nixon might have been the most unintentionally hilarious. A dour, glowering grinch with a cat’s disposition and a simian’s posture, Nixon nevertheless had a surprisingly expressive face, in a silly-putty sort of way, that makes his goofy faces that…
Before October, I don’t think I’d touched a lump of clay for at least thirty years. When I was in high school, I was lucky enough to take ceramics from the great local wood-fired pottery guru Mark Zamantakis, and that romp in the clay was delicious; though I couldn’t throw…
We cover culture low-brow and high on Show and Tell, which sometimes includes scraping the underbelly of the internetz to bring you memes that are incredibly popular on message boards and online forums, if nowhere else. Which is why today, we bring you the twelve best “Fuck Yeah” images from…
Randy Roberts, the owner of Z Art Department (1136 North Speer Boulevard, 303-298-8432), has done a good job over the last few years of picking up pieces of old modern art created by earlier generations of Colorado artists. In the past twenty years, there’s been increasing scholarly and collector interest…
Noah Van Sciver is a very successful comic book artist: Besides his weekly appearance in Westword with 4 Questions, he’s also been praised by comic critics and even nominated for an Ignatz Award for his series Blammo, now in its sixth issue. All of these things would be way better…
No one in their right mind would normally try to hit four art walks all in one night, but last Friday wasn’t any old First Friday, it was Denver Arts Week’s Know Your Arts First Friday and, courtesy of Visit Denver flak Rich Grant, I got to do it in…
Several blocks outside the First Friday art-walk on Santa Fe sits Illiterate Gallery at 72 South Broadway. It’s a part of town that some consider a place so-called “hipsters” call home — but if you stand in front of Illiterate too long on any other night of the week, you’re…
