The River North Arts District is booting out actual artists – that’s the claim of a group of arts activists who ramped up the fight against gentrification in the River North neighborhood by redecorating three iron slabs touting the RiNo Art District with flowers, crosses and other objects of mourning on Monday, August 14, 2017.
The High Plains Comedy Festival has announced its full schedule for its fifth edition.
The author Lorrie Moore once described a novel as a marriage, while short stories function more like brief affairs. Colorado has inspired many literary hookups, some passionate and some bleak. Here’s a list of short stories set in Colorado that you can easily read on your next lunch break.
The Denver improv scene is “more diverse than Portland, not as diverse as Queens,” explains Nick Trotter, Voodoo’s Director of Education. This is a low bar.
“In order to be a strong ecosystem where artists can thrive, we have to have a healthy amount of cross-pollination” says Libby Barbee, Arts in Society and Programming manager at RedLine. It’s that aim, along with a vested interest in socially- and community-engaged art, that anchors the 48 Hours Summit, a free and open-to-the-public August 11-12 series of talks, workshops, and visual and performance art related to the gallery’s annual theme, (dis)place.
Ron Campbell quit animating after fifty years in the trade to try his hand at painting. His subjects of choice: the characters he had once inked to life: the Smurfs, the Jetsons, Scooby Doo and especially the Beatles.
It’s hard to write about a play that’s so secret that even the actors haven’t seen the script until the lights go up onstage, but we thought we’d give a try, because Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour’s White Rabbit Red Rabbit seems to be worth the trouble. Censored and unable to leave his native country, Soleimanpour managed to send the script of his one-actor play out into the free world beyond Iran’s borders, where it’s graced numerous international stages since 2011, including a nine-month run last year in New York at the Westside Theatre,
First Friday is over and the crowds have left the streets, but the art must go on — and it will, at these six openings and events.
Taking advantage of the gallery’s floor plan, Michael Warren Contemporary is currently presenting solos by Kelton Osborn and Andrew Roberts-Gray that bookend a group show.
At least four hundred poets have descended on Denver, heads full of memorized verses, for the National Poetry Slam.For those who can’t distinguish a slam poem from a verbal fistfight or the recitation of iambic pentameter, or simply readers curious about what to expect, Westword got on the phone with Executive Director Suzi Q. Smith and her right-hand woman in planning the event, local poetry and art advocate Danielle Brooks, to demystify slam poetry.
Australian artist Craig Walsh, whose eerie and inspiring projections of human faces on trees are already an internet sensation, will bring his large-scale, site-specific installations to Colorado for the Breckenridge International Festival of the Arts.
From massive arts institutions to high-end commercial galleries and DIY spaces, Denver boasts an array of venues to check out first-rate art.
No one at the nineteenth International Aerial Dance Festival seems to be afraid of heights. At Frequent Flyers, the Boulder studio where dancers dangle from an arm wrapped in swathes of fabric or hang upside-down, practicing a swift unfurling movement that will drop them onto the thick blue mats below, everyone is committed to an art form you may not have known existed. Aerial dance, says festival founder Nancy Smith, is “anything anything that gets you off the ground dancing.” Imagine a cross between the soaring acrobatics of Cirque du Soleil, the Peter Pan flying on Broadway and the storytelling of modern dance, all requiring immense core and upper body strength. People don’t realize, Smith says, “how hard it actually is, since the aesthetic is effortlessness.”
The summer group show at Space Gallery, with the provocative title Alternative Facts, is a clutch of four solos that unfold in the enormous gallery.
At the beginning of every month, Denver’s creative community front loads the calendar with an abundance of appealing events.
Denver new media-artist Kristin Stransky’s FabLink 3-D-printed dress required ten pounds of nylon fiber, more than 800 hours of 3-D printing time, and 150 to 200 hours of assembly and fabrication time to make. The dress was assembled from hundreds of tiny links, each link hooked to the others by twelve even tinier rings. Stransky says it takes twenty to thirty hours to print every fifty links and an hour to print fifty rings.
This weekend, six Colorado playwrights will see their words brought to life in staged readings at the Vintage Theatre’s first-ever New Play Festival. The intimate Aurora venue opened up submissions for the festival last December as a way to reach out to the Colorado writing community and also meet playwrights’ need to have their plays read as a step in the editing process.
Denver Arts & Venues and the Denver Commission on Cultural Affairs have announced the recipients of the 2017 IMAGINE 2020 fund, a city grant that gives up to $5,000 for new cultural programs.
The First Friday of August brings new sights and sounds to art districts all over Denver and beyond. Where will you end up? We have some suggestions.
When the new Velorama Festival descends on RiNo August 11 to 13, you’ll be able to U-lock your cruiser to new, hand-crafted bike racks. In line with the festival’s ties to the Colorado Classic bicycle race, the RiNo Arts District has sponsored the creation of five artisanal, mountain-evoking bike racks by contest winners Mitch Hoffman and Tim Omspach.
Longtime Colorado Springs sculptor and installationist Sean O’Meallie spent ten years in the ’80s and ’90s pitching gizmos and pull toys as a toy inventor, commuting to toy fairs in Manhattan with storyboards in hand. He and his New York-based business partner “never scored it big,” he says, but he did take something valuable away from the experience.
The Western: An Epic in Art and Film is truly epic, as well as full of gimmicks. But when the curators are so knowledgeable and the quality of the material is so high, even gimmicks can’t detract from a great show, and the ideal summer blockbuster for the Denver Art Museum.
