Denver has been on a culture binge over the past decade, with major milestones being marked off every couple of years. It began in 2006 with the construction of the Hamilton Building, which doubled the size of the Denver Art Museum and became world-famous thanks to Daniel Libeskind’s futuristic design…
We’re used to gallery shows that look pretty much the same when they end as when they began. But Residue Denver, opening tonight at Edge Gallery, isn’t designed to remain static. Though the juried group show will begin with a variety of sculptural objects scattered around the space, five or…
Like gay marriage, marijuana use and tattoos, public perception of female sex toys is not what it used to be. While male sex toys still weigh heavy on the shame scale, a female pleasure device is mostly seen as a cute novelty. Encountering one while snooping is comparable to finding…
While most art galleries in town do all they can to promote themselves, some of them provide back room spaces, which are not advertised as often and usually feature the work of up-and-coming or associate-member work. This weekend is closing weekend for many shows, as galleries gear up for next…
Artist Chuck Dorsey crouches down, cutting a letter out of tape on the wall of Certified Customs, a tattoo, piercing and barber shop on South Broadway. He’s wearing an old painter’s shirt, splotched with bright colors, and drops his knife in his bag to pick up a fistful of brushes…
At a preview yesterday for the upcoming Denver Chalk Art Festival, artist Kyle Banister got a reminder of what it means to be a chalk artist. At ten years, the festival may be long-lived — but the art it celebrates is ephemeral. Banister’s piece, which he worked on with Southwest…
There’s a whimsical element in Liese Chavez’s paintings. A woman is baking a pie, but there’s feathers next to the pie, or a woman is holding a pear in her hand, but the pear is a house with a smoking chimney. The single maiden in a seemingly empty rustic house…
The hoopla at the Denver Art Museum this summer is mostly focused on fashion and Yves St. Laurent. But another small show, Abstract Angus, featuring works by contemporary Western painter Theodore Waddell, opened at the DAM over the weekend, offering museum-goers a completely different artistic point of view. The show…
Kevin Curry: Between Chaos and Order is a smart-looking solo at Rule Gallery that’s dominated by conceptual abstractions which the artist, Kevin Curry, made from reclaimed materials. Curry moved to Colorado in 2009 and has since made something of a splash. I first encountered his work in the Faculty Triennial…
Eggs Benedict is a notoriously hard dish to pull off. I wasn’t even intimidated, though, when my girlfriend told me that’s what she wanted for breakfast — even though I had never made it before, I’m basically like the King Midas of victory, and I made that Eggs Benedict, and…
With its accentuated curves and ability to look good in almost any color, the Volkswagen Beetle was made for customization. Until 2003, the Type1(the beloved and ubiquitous “vintage” model) bug had remained in production with few cosmetic changes for close to thirty years. Though the car has since seen a…
Definite trend: Drink and Draw, Cocktails and Canvases. No matter what you call the combo, it translates to knock back a few back while making art. And tonight at PlatteForum, the award-winning, innovative community art center that pairs underserved youth with artist-mentors, that’s just what you’re invited to do…
Update: Two corrections have been made: Tropic Thunder is now the only June 18 film, and viewers can vote on which film they’d like to see on July 16. It’s finally here. The 2012 Film On the Rocks summer line-up at Red Rocks Amphitheatre was announced this evening, and many…
Jacquie Van Horne believes that artists who are mothers, too, need to stick together, because — as she writes on her Facebook page — “Motherhood is not the time to put the paintbrush down.” That’s why she created Artistic Mamas, which is as much a celebration of mothers who paint…
There isn’t one definitive way to view spirituality, and that’s what Katie Hoffman and Hilary De Polo want to illustrate in their new show at Core. One of the reasons juried group shows like Spirituality are so interesting is that they can emphasize the diversity of a theme through many…
While it often gets overshadowed by the music scene, Denver actually has a rich history of underground literature. From the Kerouac-inspired bohemian coffee and bookshops of 1960s Colfax to the Yellow Rake readings at Old Curtis Street Tavern, our city has been spawning independent works of fiction and poetry for…
Faced with the postponement of two screenings of the highly anticipated film The Beatles: The Lost Concert, Boedecker Theater manager Glenn Webb didn’t cry in his kidney pie. Instead, he secured a replacement reel: Paul McCartney Is Really Dead: The Last Testament of George Harrison, a comic mockumentary corroborating the…
Friends and fans of Denver’s vast arts network gathered at City,O’ City last night for a reception marking the five-year anniversary of Ken Hamel’s genius website, Denverarts.org. Hamel started Denverarts.org because no one else was really doing it, he recalled during a Q&A in Deer Pile, the community space upstairs…
It’s difficult to say exactly what “mod” means in 2012. Even when the movement reached its zenith in London in the early ’60s, the definition wasn’t clear: not quite hippie, not quite punk, not quite English, yet not quite American, either. Inventing a sort of bohemian dandy aesthetic, the mods…
Contemporary abstraction is a well-developed scene in Colorado, with roots that go back to the 1930s, and four of the most important artists who work in this style are being featured right now in solo shows. Three are at the William Havu Gallery, and the fourth is just a few…
Ten Facebook Tips: It started as an informational list on Mashable to help people optimize their Facebook usage, but it’s become a top trending topic on Twitter, full of helpful and not-so-helpful — and some of it quite telling — advice about Zuckerberg’s site. Most of the tweets, which only…
Thornton High School senior Samuel Opoku, a two-time Colorado Poetry Out Loud champion, has made it to the final round in Washington, D.C. — again — and will be aiming for bardic glory as the national recitation contest concludes tonight. And not just glory. The winner of the event, sponsored…
