Denver is a festival town: Our hot, dry, sunny summers and balmy autumns are not just a boon to the sunscreen industry — they also provide the perfect backdrop for mass fun in the great outdoors. We eat and dance and view art under blue skies each year, and now,…
Some poets don’t live in ivory towers. Some don’t even come close. New Mexican bard Jimmy Santiago Baca started out on a tougher road than most before clawing his way out of adversity on a bridging torrent of words. Despite ensuing laurels as a poet — from numerous literary awards…
What will it take to win this year’s upcoming National Slam Poetry Competition? Denver’s team, nearly a carbon copy of the one that lost in Providence last year, thinks it’ll have a fighting chance when 56 squads meet in Seattle beginning on Tuesday. Spokesman and returning member Seth says last…
Been there, done that. There are psychologists and birdwatchers and cowboys and gourmands solving crimes in books these days, along with the tried-and-true police detectives, private gumshoes and busybodies of classic mystery lore. So can the detective fiction/thriller market possibly support yet another brand of hero? Wyoming mystery writer C.J…
Fishing has long been a man’s domain, especially in Florida, where the big boys go out on big boats to hook really big fish. Men, it seems, have something to prove as fishermen, while the girls just want to have fun. Therefore, coed angling experiences can be humiliating for members…
A dance festival in the summer, in Colorado? You’ve gotta wonder what folks are thinking. But the Colorado dance festival manages to pull it off each year by performing annual feats of programming magic, and this year’s prestidigitation outdoes them all: The folks at the CDF are pulling no lesser…
If you’re seventeen today, Bob Dylan may be an afterthought: But your boomerish folks? Well, they’re a different story. Like Mizel Arts Center curator (and baby-boomer) Simon Zalkind, who’s put together a multidisciplinary series in celebration of Dylan’s sixtieth year on the planet, many oldsters still get Dylan’s appeal. Check…
Don Ed Hardy has dragons under his skin. The indelible kind, all over his body. But the Bay Area painter, probably best known for his 34-year catalogue of works as a groundbreaking tattoo artist, has now — in the tradition of the great narrative scroll painters of Asia — committed…
South Dakota artist Mark McGinnis spent the ’80s exploring political and social issues in his work, in search of a doable code for living, but he wasn’t finding any answers. So he turned to religion. Embarking on a personal journey based on painstaking research, McGinnis sought to decipher the myriad…
Are you detail-oriented? Is your spidey sense tingling? If so, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science wants you. Arachnophobes can check out right now: The museum seeks citizen scientists interested in signing up for summer workshops offering hands-on training on how to hunt for spiders, garden-variety and otherwise. Folks…
In Pueblo, there are two distinct classes: westsiders and eastsiders. The westside folks, notes Jina Pierce, visual-arts curator at the Sangre de Cristo Arts Center, are the ones who frequent the cultural venue. But each summer, when the center celebrates its anniversary, it’s Pierce’s job to find new ways to…
The Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities tends to be taken for granted, in spite of its groundbreaking accomplishments. On the eve of its 25th anniversary, the Center is still a veritable beehive of cultural activity, where quality art exhibitions, theatrical presentations and concerts are par for the course…
Every kid’s a comic artist. John Murphy, owner of northwest Denver’s Highlander Comics and Games, can vouch for that: “When my comic store had been open a few months,” he recalls, “some kids started bringing their drawings in. Soon, I had a wall full of them. After a while, I…
In America, we’ve got a holiday for everyone and everything. And in case you didn’t know, May 25 is, by governmental decree, National Tap Dance Day. It has been so since a joint resolution was passed in Congress back in 1989. And what better day to celebrate tap dance, anyway,…
Growing pains are to be expected in any endeavor as ambitious as the Celebrate Colorado Arts Festival, but no one could have predicted the problems that occurred during last year’s sophomore event at the Denver Performing Arts Complex: A bit of culture clash — concurrent high school graduation ceremonies in…
When was the last time you had a life-altering art encounter? Folks at the Mizel Museum of Judaica are willing to bet, well, never. That’s why they’re shipping in Body Packaging 2001 — one of the wildest, weirdest and unquestionably artiest fashion shows you’ve ever seen — from Colorado Springs,…
It’s been a few years since we’ve heard a peep out of the Mackey Gallery: Artist/proprietor Mary Mackey closed the venue in 1997 to concentrate on her own work, leaving an unfortunate little hole in Denver’s art scene, an unfilled gap perched somewhere between the high-end and alternative galleries that…
You could call it the greening of North America, because it seems that you don’t have to be Irish to enjoy things Gaelic in the New World. Celtic-flavored successes such as Riverdance and Angela’s Ashes prove that, as do lower-profile, hometown successes like Denver’s own Irish theater company, Tir Ná…
The spread-out life women lead in the rural West poses unique challenges, not the least of which would be steering through the vagaries of friendship. When complicated by distance and spotty populations, that sterling necessity in any woman’s day often resembles the ubiquitous sage plant that covers the prairie, hanging…
Think of the theater, and you think of a curtain, a proscenium, a rack of lights. Characters enter and exit; a story is told. But how, within that narrow framework, will theater keep up with times so modern that all the action seems to be shifting into newer, more technologically…
Local freelance writers Erin Kindberg and Wendy Burt don’t make any bones about it: Their new book, Oh, Solo Mia! The Hip Chick’s Guide to Fun for One — billed as a collection of things women can do alone, without benefit of male companionship or even a gaggle of gal…
Denver painter and newspaper illustrator Herndon Davis is best remembered in these parts for his “Face on the Barroom Floor,” a dreamy portrait based on a poem by Hugh Antoine D’Arcy that still graces the floorboards at the Teller House in Central City. Davis is said to have painted the…
