Scott Shiller, CEO of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, spoke with us a few months ago for our Winter Arts Guide, sharing what every newcomer should know about the Denver arts scene. “Denver is a true ‘arts city’ with a national reputation for creating some of the best…
It’s Friday night on Memorial Day weekend and you’ve chosen not to flee the city. Fortunately, Denver’s artist co-ops never go on vacation — so why not visit exhibit openings in art districts all over town? Ron Gerbrandt, Jesse Myers, Sarah Rockett, Karen Roehl Ice Cube Gallery May 26 through…
Outside of a movie-theater screen and red carpet, most celebrities go to great lengths to make themselves invisible. But most celebrities aren’t Shia LaBeouf. These days, the former child and action-adventure leading pretty boy-turned gonzo performer is known more for his bizarre and very public performance-art pieces and tabloid-famous exploits than for his starring roles in…
There’s a spectacular solo on now at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Martha Russo: coalescere showcases selected works from the 25-year career of the innovative ceramics sculptor. But when I walked through the show with Martha Russo herself, she explained that she came to be interested in ceramics by…
The metal door slams behind him as he looks up the last few flights of the stairway of a thirty-story office building in downtown Denver. Clean-cut, bearded, dressed in all black, he runs silently up the stairs until he turns a corner and sees a sign that reads “Rooftop Access,”…
For me, designing things is a two-steps-forward, one-step-back cha-cha-cha. The interior of the tiny house has been redesigned multiple times, as I think through what I really want. And even when the stairs were half-built, I still decided to cut them out, build out the loft and go a different,…
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. Lonnie Hanzon has shown his work in downtown windows, gardens, galleries, museums…
You can find new artwork wherever you go this weekend, from the Art District on Santa Fe to the co-ops of the Navajo Street Art District and the cultivated wilds of River North. Here are some of the hot spots…and hot shows. Modern Structure Space Gallery Through July 2 Space…
A longtime Edge member and noted ceramics artist, Gayla Lemke has mounted a bittersweet show, Watch Out for the Undertow, in the gallery’s front space; it’s dedicated to her mother, who died a few months ago. Lemke takes on this heavy topic by contrasting the memorial character of her floor…
Among the manifestations of the feminist movement in the ’70s was a critique of sexism in fine art. It was undeniable that at the time — and stretching back to antiquity — women had essentially been fenced out of painting and sculpture. (Interestingly, the barriers to women in ceramics and…
Not all new buildings in Denver are as awful as the kinds of n’architecture Michael Paglia lampoons in “The Hateful Eight.” Not all modern architecture rates a rant on Denver Fugly. Over the past fifteen years, this city has gained some beautiful buildings, including the Fredric C. Hamilton wing of…
The Sun Valley housing projects have gone through a beautiful transformation. Crime in this impoverished Denverneighborhood has seen a moderate drop over the past decade, thanks to more funding from the city to clean up Sun Valley streets and protect kids who attend Fairview elementary school. Now even the dumpsters…
Denver artist Thomas Scharfenberg believes art should be part of the landscape, not the other way around. Scharfenberg, whose visual world often leads him beyond gallery walls and into the outdoors, thinks outside of the box as he spreads what he calls “ground constellations” and “physical pixels” — painted rocks,…
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. “I grew up around Denver,” says sculptor Nicole Banowetz, who was born…
Last weekend we shared comments by Georgia Amar, a co-founder of Denver’s Art District on Santa Fe, criticizing Denver’s public arts program. And readers were quick to respond. Says Russ Wright: Art is subjective. You, I and everyone else has an opinion on what they like or dislike. Personally I have…
The art world has a very well-rounded Denver itinerary this weekend: Candy art, dream art and a scholarly lecture on regional architecture all figure into the calendar of new shows and events around town. Read on for the details. Geeky Tendencies: New Works by Kym Bloom Zip 37 Gallery May…
Bobbi Walker, director of Walker Fine Art, has assembled pieces by a half-dozen artists to create the engaging group effort Figuratively Speaking, which features sculptures, photos, drawings and paintings, all of which depict the human figure in some way. The gallery is enormous, and figurative sculptures by Gail Folwell have been installed…
There’s a spectacular solo in the main space at Pirate: Rebecca Cuming: New Work, featuring the artist’s signature monumental paintings, which come out of the landscape tradition. Cuming’s compositions are clearly views of grassy or even flower-filled fields, but she’s worked the paint so expressively that the scenes have been considerably abstracted, with…
The beauty of digital animation as an artform is its portability: It’s a case of have screen, will travel, as Ivar Zeile’s Denver Digerati has shown over several seasons of Friday Flash summer programs featuring motion-based video media on the Denver Theatre District’s giant LED screen at 14th and Champa…
The Rule Gallery is presenting a handsome solo, Beyond the Veil, by emerging artist Caleb Hahne, whose style combines realism and abstraction in a conceptual way. Every painting in the exhibit — whether a small portrait or a larger figure study — is anchored by a realistic passage done in…
The food and culture of Mexico took over Civic Center Park during Denver’s annual Cinco de Mayo festival last weekend. Photographer Aaron Thackeray was there on May 8 to caught all the colors, cars, good times…and good weather. Now see the full Cinco de Mayo slide show. …
Generally speaking, Facebook’s “memories” feature that it thrusts at the top of your feed every morning harkens back to meaningless, long-forgotten posts, often of things that you’d prefer not to remember. But this morning, as I turned on the computer and sat down bleary-eyed to attempt to write (after falling…
