Best Smoking Area — Outside 2009 | The Fainting Goat | Best of Denver® | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Denver | Westword
Navigation
Support Us
Search

Best Smoking Area — Outside

The Fainting Goat

Molly Martin
The Fainting Goat took over a building on Broadway that's been a half-dozen restaurants and bars over the years, giving it a good cleaning, fixing the elevator and introducing a menu with an Irish accent. But the best innovation so far has been the bar added to the rooftop patio, which saves the servers (or customers) from having to run down three flights of stairs every time they need another round. And not only does this secluded sky-high spot offer a lovely view of the mountains, but it has wi-fi and ashtrays, since this patio is definitely far enough from the front entrance for smoking to be legal. Not only is this the best rooftop patio in Denver, but it could also be the best place to find your employees playing hooky.

Best Solo by a Local Master

David Yust

Last fall was a terrific time to visit the Arvada Center, because one of the region's acknowledged masters was the subject of an enormous show there. The exhibition, which sported a four-volume title — David Yust: Looking Back/Looking Forward: 1970s — 2008: Explorations in Symmetry and Inclusion Series: Circles and Ellipses — sprawled over the capacious spaces of the Lower Galleries and was expertly installed by designer Collin Parson. It showcased thirty years' worth of Yust paintings and prints, all of them abstractions, and every one created to the highest aesthetic and technical standard. It was a great show and, hopefully, a model for future exhibits at the Arvada Center.

Best Solo by an Up-and-Comer

New Works by Lorey Hobbs

Colorado artist Lorey Hobbs has come into her own in the past few years. Her efforts in painting and works on paper, as seen last winter in New Works by Lorey Hobbs at the Carson/van Straaten Gallery, have a distinct look highlighted by remarkable color combinations ranging from moody and dark shades to toned-up, dazzling ones. Her subject matter is hard to discern in these pure abstractions, but there's more than a little hint that views of nature are partly behind them. No longer just an emerging artist, Hobbs is on the cusp of being an established one, and strong exhibits like this are sure to move her reputation in the right direction.

Best Straight Bar for Gay Men

Harry's

When the blaring disco and bitchy drama of gay bars gets you down, it's time to take the show on the road to Harry's. And you don't even have to get on a plane. This '60s, space-age lounge is located in the corner of the Magnolia Hotel and can easily be accessed by light rail, should you not score the lucky invitation to spend the night upstairs. Not all of the patrons are lonely, jet-setting businessman with male-model beauty who want to have a local gay man answer their French-accented questions about the mystery of Denver's appeal while they eat their jalapeño-basil shrimp and sip their pinot grigio. There are also plenty of conventioneers from Ohio and happy-hour holdovers from the 'hood. If you enjoy people more than posing, Harry's puts the "style" back into the gay lifestyle.

Best Supergroup

Moonspeed

Being dubbed a "supergroup" can be a bit of a curse, but when your band includes members of local luminaries such as Bright Channel, Space Team Electra, Moccasin and Monofog, that term seems somewhat justified. But it would be meaningless if the resulting music was one iota less powerful, uplifting or sonically inventive than the music of Moonspeed. With eleven members, this band could easily have been an unholy mess ready to go off the rails. Instead, the group is a well-orchestrated affair, with all members contributing significantly to the beautifully textured, soothingly hypnotic yet exhilarating tapestries this outfit weaves at every performance.

Best Supporting Actor

Ian Merrill Peakes in Glengarry Glen Ross

In the Denver Center's sizzling production of Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet's play about a shabby, ruthless subculture, Ian Merrill Peakes played conscience-less super-salesman Roma, and he had every gesture, every seedy predictable inflection down exactly right. This was the salesman of your nightmares, callow and impermeable but wielding a perverse and frightening kind of power.

Best Supporting Actress

Kim Staunton in Doubt

Kim Staunton had only one brief scene in Doubt, as the mother of a boy who may have been abused by a priest at his Catholic school, but it proved pivotal. This mother's response to the accusation was both surprising and inevitable. She had been so beaten down by life that she had learned to accommodate in ways most of us could never imagine. Kim Staunton gave a subtle, multi-layered and deeply moving performance, communicating both the mother's love for her son and a slow, sad, inexpressible truth that was all her own.

Best Temporary Museum

Denver Community Museum

The DCM is dead. Long live the DCM! In actuality, the Denver Community Museum is on its last legs, but that's part of its beauty. The brainchild of design-community mover and shaker Jaime Kopke, this pop-up museum was never meant to last, at least not in its present form. Yet in its short lifetime, the DCM, which debuted in a Platte Valley storefront just last fall, has given a creative voice to people who wouldn't normally think of making art (and, conversely, to some who do), through monthly themed "challenges" and their resulting exhibits, as well as participatory community events. The last exhibit, Wonder Room, a subjective celebration of Denver the city, will open and close in April, with a gala silent auction of donated artifacts topping the whole thing off. And Kopke hints at plans to stage a collaborative show with folks from San Francisco sometime this summer, if the funds and space become available. The DCM is dead. Long live the DCM!

Best Textile Show — Contemporary

Magnolia Tapestry Project

The brainchild of artist John Nava and printmaker Donald Farnsworth, California's Magnolia Editions has been creating tapestries using digitized looms for the last ten years. During that time, Magnolia has produced works by significant artists such as Chuck Close, Deborah Oropallo, Lewis deSoto and Leon Golub. The results of translating paintings or prints into tapestries are stunning, and the Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art wowed us by putting more than a dozen of them on view last summer.

Best Textile Show — Modern

Designing Women

Over the past few years, collecting couple Jill Wiltse and Kirk Brown have assembled a definitive group of fabrics documenting the significant role women played in post-war Britain. Designing Women, organized by Wiltse and Brown's personal curator, Shanna Shelby, and Tariana Navas-Nieves of the CSFAC, showed off this collection in spectacular fashion and lured textile curators from Europe and across the United States to Colorado Springs.

Best Of Denver®

Best Of

Use of this website constitutes acceptance of our terms of use, our cookies policy, and our privacy policy Westword may earn a portion of sales from products & services purchased through links on our site from our affiliate partners. ©2024 Denver Westword, LLC. All rights reserved.
Do Not Sell or Share My Information
Powered By Foundation