Visual Arts

Today doesn’t just mark the start of that festive, lush, and green holiday: St. Patrick’s Day. It also kicks off that upcoming festive, lush and green season: spring…

Luckily, they aren’t the running zombies. The “Run for your Lives” zombie 5K obstacle course is coming to Colorado this summer, where fitness freaks bored by the running routine will have to dodge “zombies” — volunteers complete with fake blood and lumbering steps — as part of the race. It’s…

Sarah Haney takes pictures of Barbies in compromising positions. Her art could be construed as a feminist discourse, commenting on the pressures of womanhood, and some of that is true. But for the most part, Haney’s just being hilarious. Currently, she’s spending most of her time experimenting with different forms,…

The University of Colorado Denver is firing up its College of Arts & Media this week by bringing in iron sculptor and performance artist Matt Toole for a lecture tonight and live pour tomorrow…

Sandra Fettingis has been creating art for over a decade. In her new series of sketches and 3-D wall sculptures, which debuts tonight at City, O’ City, Fettingis says she “explores confusion in conversation and in life’s agendas — specifically, through the patterning and layering of the art.” The title…

Several nationally renowned artists and musicians are Denver natives: Philip Bailey of Earth, Wind and Fire graduated from East Denver High School; The Fray’s Isaac Slade and Joe King were schoolmates at Faith Christian Academy. Now Denver’s First Lady Mary Louise Lee wants to promote Denver’s notable cultural legacy with…

To make a sweeping generalization, all art has to do with nature, because it is, at its core, an extension of the human hand, eye or brain. But some artists go further in expressing this underpinning by either literally or figuratively referring to natural processes or settings. This is what…

Amanda Willshire is busy. Really busy. She works as a graphic designer and website developer and she’s currently getting ready to help one of her clients promote herself during the upcoming season of Dancing With the Stars (she’s keeping her lips sealed about who her client is). Willshire is also…

On Saturday night, March 10, Wazee Union was filled with comics, art, artists, music, open studios, beer from Breckenridge Brewery and music from Little Fyodore and Black Out Beat. Photographer Javid Rezvani brings back photos from the free event at the RiNo space. More photos are below…

The Lobby is only one of the venues that have relied on Denver art curator and 2010 Westword MasterMind Eric Matelski to organize a rotating series of art shows for their walls over the years — the Lobby is the only venue he’s curated its doors first opened to the…

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…