Artist Heather Doyle-Maier is stripping a common ritual to its most basic components. In two current shows in the Navajo Arts District, she explores the meaning of getting dressed and undressed. Doyle-Maier is featured in Lovesick at Zip 37, and she has an installation in the back room of Edge,…
Every picture tells a story, Rod Stewart once said. And he might have been paraphrasing an ancient Chinese proverb, but that’s not the point. The point is, every person who views a work of art will undoubtedly experience something different. And while that experience is linked to the power and…
Artists, it’s always a good idea to sign your work — and in this day and age, when you can include a website on the piece, all the better. Case in point: a square-foot piece of art we found on a busy Denver street this past weekend. It was only…
The latest local version of the Shit Girls Say viral video trend is “Shit Girls in Denver Say,” starring Erin Streets, a 25-year-old fashion designer and stylist who utters cliches and catch phrases for a good three minutes. It’s funny. Watch the video below and read Street’s reaction to its…
This year’s juried annual at Ice Cube Gallery, Icebreaker3, includes works selected by Denver Art Museum curator Gwen Chanzit, who also designed the installation. Though Chanzit took an inclusive approach, she laid out the show coherently by grouping together works with stylistic affinities. Owing, no doubt, to Chanzit’s position, a…
It was a clothes call, but the results are in: Last month Meghan Throckmorton, owner of Rakun, issued an open call for local design students to submit original, custom-crafted women’s looks. She’s now selected the top three garments, and is encouraging people to stop by Rakun, her shop at 1147…
Suzi Q. Smith — profiled in this week’s cover story “Slam, Bam, Thank you, Ma’am” — has performed poetry for more than a decade, and slammed competitively since 2006. Onstage, the Denver artist augments both her voice and her physical stature, increasing both her volume and her height as her…
Editor’s note: Westword cartoonist Noah Van Sciver paints the town like nobody else, as demonstrated in his recaps of visits to the Denver Art Museum and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. (Make sure you read Noah’s blog for more comics and wonderment.) On Saturday night, we sent him…
In December, we caught up with Andy Raney and Jeremy Make, the local co-creators of kART Across America, a documentary devoted to their 108-day trek across the United States in a fussy, broken-down golf kart named Christine. On Thursday, Michael Moore caught up with them — on NPR. In a…
If you missed our Artopia event last night, catch up with what you didn’t experience with these tweets…
In this week’s cover story, “Slam, Bam, Thank You, Ma’am,” Westword shadowed Denver poet Suzi Q. Smith and traveled to Wyoming with her and two other big names on the national touring roster: Bobby Lefebre and Theo “Lucifury” Wilson. Aside from a lowly Westword writer, the rental car held three…
One of the best films of the year, Midnight in Paris, and one of the most popular albums of the year, Kanye West and Jay-Z’s Watch the Throne, have little in common on the surface…
In this week’s cover story, “Slam, Bam, Thank You, Ma’am,” we profiled Suzi Q. Smith, one of Denver’s strongest voices and the number three female slam artist in the world. Smith spends 30 percent of her year traveling to teach and promote poetry outside of Colorado, but she spends 100…
I was going to do the gonzo journalist thing and participate in last night’s chalk pastel class at Xcentricity Gallery, led by Corrina Espinosa, but I thought I would make all of the other students feel bad if I busted out my mad pastel skills. That’s a lie: I knew…
It’s been a busy sixteen months for Handsome Little Devils. In October 2011, the vaudevillian comedy troupe took its Squirm Burpee Circus act — a blend of acrobatics, juggling and juggling — to Broadway, enjoying a successful run at the New Victory Theatre and getting positive reviews in such little…
Colorado is no Hollywood, but the state does have a rich film past, if not an active film present, as detailed in our cover story “The Reel West.” Today, in an effort to jump-start the state’s movie business, lawmakers will debate a plan to increase incentives for filmmakers to shoot…
In this week’s art column — “The Faculty Triennial documents Colorado’s art history as it races by” — Michael Paglia writes of the Faculty Triennial at the University of Denver: The current exhibition, the Faculty Triennial, is part of his continuing program to “document and to stimulate Colorado’s art history,”…
Legendary illustrator John Powers Severin, whose 60-year career in the comics world stretched from the dawning of MAD magazine to the Silver Age at Marvel to a gay revival of the Rawhide Kid and beyond, died over the weekend at his southeast Denver home. He was 90 years old. “Truly…
In January we reported on a handful of homegrown Colorado ski companies making handcrafted and custom skis that stand up to or surpass anything else on the market. If we’d waited a few weeks, we could have added another local brand to the mix: Silverton-based Venture Snowboards. For the last…
Theresa Anderson may not be the first artist to incorporate text and art — Da Vinci’s journals testify that written language can contain aesthetic merit. But according to contemporary standards, what Anderson does in many of her drawings — adding an original narrative element — defines her as a conceptual…
Indian artist Bunky Echo-Hawk is an old soul in a cutting-edge suit — his bright paintings, slabbed with blocks of blinding color, mix traditional and pop imagery and ideas, resulting in a body of work that’s funny, sad, stridently satirical and very smart. He’s therefore an excellent choice as a…
Stroll through the romance shelves at any Barnes & Noble, and one subgenre stands out like Harrison Ford in Witness. In a territory marked by heaving chests and flexing muscles, Colorado Springs Christian writer Beverly Lewis keeps sex under her bonnets. But while her Amish romances feature more hand-holding than…
