The thing about walking into Five Green Boxes is this: You won’t want to leave. You’ll want to move in and walk across the white floor and settle yourself between its clean, cool chartreuse (!) walls, under the high ceilings and unimpeded loft-like expanses. Read the newspaper on a fuzzy…

In the beginning, there were little people. If you understand that, you can begin to understand Charles Simonds and his work: unfired miniature clay structures that seem to have been left behind by some vanished civilization. Invented by Simonds, the intricately formed pieces first began popping up over twenty years…

Alison Hawthorne Deming is a woman who knows her place. Born and raised in Connecticut, Deming came west to live in Tucson only about ten years ago, the practical result of being offered a position at the University of Arizona. But the unique problems of a region where great natural…

Janie Geiser doesn’t do just one thing. She doesn’t even do two things. Instead, her creative world seems to be constantly ascending: one thing leading to another, with every new element upping the ante just a little bit more. At the top, there’s a private world as small as it…

The first thing you focus on is their eyes. The animals in James Balog’s portraits seem to be — to borrow baseball’s colloquialism — staying within themselves: living in the moment, thinking clearly, and being completely comfortable with their animalness. Head-on and dynamic, the images challenge the catch-all designation of…

To be Asian-American is to be in a constant state of diffusion. It’s a perspective distorted by opposing cultures, all falling under one identity-flattening aegis. For the average non-Asian-American, the banner carries a quality of exoticism, stoicism and mystery, but for those who walk in its shoes, it’s life –…

Half a decade ago, Boulder dance-scene veteran Danelle Helander did modern dance. Though marked by her own style and ideas, her work was still modern dance — nothing more, nothing less. But then her creative life as a choreographer took on an exotic new slant, spurred on by a percolating…

When Hector first formed nearly ten years ago, lots of names were tossed in the hat: Cowsville. Gary. Wilhelmina. But when someone suggested Hector, the lightbulb flashed in Tom Motley’s brain. Motley, a lone local cartoonist seeking to evolve into a many-headed graphic monster by establishing a collective comic strip,…

Can you hear the dreams crackling like a campfire? Can you hear the dreams sweeping through the pine trees and tipis? Can you hear the dreams laughing in the sawdust? Can you hear the dreams shaking just a little bit as the day grows long? Can you hear the dreams…

Thursday August 12 Author Patricia Hersh doesn’t just report on American teens in her book A Tribe Apart: A Journey Into the Heart of American Adolescence–she quietly weaves herself into the fabric of their lives, the result of which is a fascinating, immediate cultural study that reads like an especially…

Boulder choreographer Jerri Davis says she’s a lily-white girl from Idaho who grew up knowing little about domestic violence and the damage it can do. But several years ago, while she was studying dance at the University of Colorado, she decided to base a work on the stories of battered…

Thursday August 5 Oh, those Russians–so romantic, so histrionic. It takes an even hand to navigate an orchestra through all of those ups and downs, and that’s what the Colorado Music Festival will get from guest maestro GYnter Neuhold, an Austrian wunderkind who’ll lead the festival orchestra–and his wife, piano…

In truth, the miles between Hong Kong and Denver can’t be counted. So how does one individual reconcile such an insurmountable distance? M. Elaine Mar doesn’t exactly have the answer, but she’s living testimony to the process, a uniquely American rite of passage she chronicles on the most personal level…

Thursday July 29 They say Mahler’s Symphony No. 7 isn’t often performed because it’s just so darned long, and even the most dedicated classical music fans have been known to squirm in their seats when that happens. But the faithful know that it’s worth it: When Maestro Giora Bernstein and…

The year was 1965, and Danny Valdez was seventeen when he landed in Delano, California, during the thick of the first legendary union-generated grape strike, led by Cesar Chavez and the United Farmworkers of America. A different kind of strike, it had deep cultural roots in addition to a hard-line…

Thursday July 22 One of Denver’s better cultural values–not to mention a great way to while away a summer evening–is Theater in the Park, which returns tonight to the open-air Greek Amphitheater in Civic Center Park at Broadway and Colfax. Show up with a picnic in tow, and you’ll be…

Many Colorado Gold Rush prospectors of yore relied on the tenacious little burro–a small but sturdy equine that can surefootedly haul its weight in gold–to pack necessary gear through the steep, rough terrain of the Rocky Mountains. But that was then, and this is now: Though lots of the fuzzy…

Judith Schwartz moved into Warren Village with her two young sons in February 1974. It was a subsidized, live-in, welfare-to-work program for struggling single parents, and Janet and her sons were the inaugural participants in a grand experiment in human services. The first facility of its kind in the nation,…

Thursday July 15 While author and former Crusade for Justice member Ernesto Vigil’s first-hand account The Crusade for Justice: Chicano Militancy and the Government’s War on Dissent is a look back at a notable page in Denver history of the 1960s, the book doesn’t linger there: His profile of Crusade…

When Denver’s considerable Japanese-American colony decides to throw a party, everyone gets involved. The epitome of community events, the Cherry Blossom Festival–taking place this Saturday and Sunday–has risen and set downtown at Sakura Square for 27 years, but not without the help of a whole network of elders, parents and…

Thursday July 8 Jazz has another phenom of a female vocalist to contend with: Kansas City singer Karrin Allyson is racking up the kudos left and right these days while knocking out great albums on the Concord Jazz label. So why have you never heard of her? Who knows–Allyson’s substantial…

Come look at the freaks. Come look at the geeks. Come look at God’s mistakes… So opens Side Show, a Tony Award-nominated musical based on the story of conjoined twins and vaudeville stars Daisy and Violet Hilton, whose fifteen minutes of enduring fame came in Tod Browning’s 1932 cult-classic film…