Visual Arts

Half the fun of John Waters fan-dom is initiating newbies into the dark, sexually inappropriate cult of worship. The other half is watching Waters virgins become violently ill and/or mentally unhinged. But we don’t want you poor, deprived noobs going into a John Waters-fest with a completely empty toolbox, so…

“When you put something up on the wall in a gallery everybody looks at it and is puzzled and critical,” explains kite-maker Melanie Walker. “But you put something up in the sky and everybody immediately is enthusiastic and looks and points and says ‘Wow! Look at that!'” Walker and her…

The third annual EcoCreations opens tonight at Muse Gallery in Longmont. Seventeen artists were selected to display their work in this show, and it’s all created entirely from recycled materials and found objects…

Tomomi Colors is the passionate project of Dispatch musician Bradley Corrigan and Tomomi Kokubu, the artist the Denverite met in Japan in 2008. “I was struck by her artistic style, her colors and characters. They make my imagination go crazy from looking at them,” Corrigan says. Look at one of…

The sell-out crowd at yesterday’s 25th annual Colorado Business Committee for the Arts annual awards luncheon was treated to planned entertainment by local arts organizations, as well as some unscripted entertainment from Governor John Hickenlooper, whose introduction of Mayor Michael Hancock turned into an R-rated joke about showers…or something. But…

Stan Yan always had a fascination with comics. Even before he understood what they really were, he would draw stick figures in frames. And since then, he’s been a bit obsessed. “All of the stories I think up in my head are in comic form,” he says. Yan recently took…

Denver was one of Chinese art’s first foreign outposts. Back in the ’90s, Robischon became one of the first galleries in the United States to feature contemporary Chinese pieces, while MCA Denver presented one of the first exhibits of Chinese contemporary photography anywhere in the country. The curator of the…

Mythica von Griffyn says her connection to the person she paints goes deeper than some people may think. “It’s a spiritual process,” she explains. “I follow the same principals of Dr. Emato, who found that by writing words on jars of water, the water would form different crystallized compounds at…

Adam Lerner, billed as “Director and Chief Animator, Department of Fabrications” on his business cards, and his creative crew at the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver rate a rave in the New York Times this week. The March 1 piece titled “Puppies, Paintings and Philosophers” focuses on the Mixed Taste programs…

Tonight, photographer Terri Bell opens her tbellphotographic studio & gallery up to a group of seventeen Colorado artists she met, quite by chance, after issuing an open call and inviting Mark Sink to serve as juror for a show celebrating “the art of being in the right place at the…

When you think of fighting pollution and harmful waste, the images that come to mind are often of oil spills, nuclear meltdowns and bottle-nose dolphins caught in tuna nets. Typically, you don’t think of hair salons. “The salon industry has a great deal of waste,” says SustainAbility co-owner Melissa Kraai…

While First Friday is synonymous with the Art District on Santa Fe for some people, there are events in other districts as well. Here’s a selection of happenings tonight — from the Navajo, Tennyson, River North and, yes, the Santa Fe art districts…

If you’re wandering through Santa Fe’s First Friday Art Walk, be sure to stop at 747 Santa Fe Drive and take a look at the words “Clown Town” in bright blue L.E.D. lights up in a second-floor window. That’s the home of the Side Show Studio, an out-of-the-way gallery that…

Things that intrigue me are my job. If something is problematic or beautiful, it is my job to discover why and write about it,” author Chuck Klosterman told a crowd Tuesday at the Auraria campus, home to three colleges. “Now I get to come and speak at colleges like this,…

You cannot escape the groove of African dance. Doesn’t matter if you’re tone deaf, half-dead or were born with two left feet — African dance will pick you up and fill you with joy and never let you go. Which is why you should let the spirit move you to…

Mark Cline was genuinely surprised that we were asking about his chalk art. “That’s not even my best medium,” he laughed. “I just enjoy it a lot.” Cline’s main focus is on murals and painting, but he first decided to try chalk art after he went to the first Denver…

This is the first week Tara Lang of Littleton won’t be applying monster make-up on SyFy’s Face Off. The show, a sort of Project Runway with special effects make-up, has been somewhat of a hit since it started last year, with this season’s premiere hitting the highest ratings for an…

The beautiful South Broadway shop Ironwood, with its plant-strewn, new-Victorianiana steampunk vibe, isn’t very big. But it’s no doubt large enough to hold the musicians of the new, diminutive local Tinyamp Records, or at least some of them — members of Amphibian, Calliope of the Future and Year of the…

With the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum last fall, a number of galleries have mounted shows highlighting abstraction as salutes to the fledgling institution. The CSM has given its blessing to some of these, while others have sprung up spontaneously. I’ve enjoyed seeing most of these shows, but it…

Interviewing some celebrities can be as excruciating as putting out a campfire with your face, but talking to John Waters is a lot like talking to a friend — that is, if you have friends who have made freaks, gays, drugs, abortions and religion into delightfully irreverent movies that have…