Appreciation for Denver artist Mark Penner-Howell’s clever paintings, which expertly mix pop images with ironic underlying themes in a colorful palette and humorous tone, has been gaining momentum over the past few years, but with his latest show — The New Normal, which opens tonight at Space Gallery — he’s…
Painter Jenny Morgan, a Salt Lake native with a Denver history, is now based in New York City, but her ties to the region, where she attended the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, are strong. Morgan came up through the gallery ranks here, from the co-ops to her…
Come April, Boulder’s renowned Frequent Flyers Productions aerial dance troupe will stage The Fabulous Freaky Flyers and their Flying Machines, an up-in-the-air homage to the ’60s, at the Lakewood Cultural Center. But while you’re waiting, rabid baby boomers and retro-fanatics, the company is offering die-hards an opportunity to bid for…
Zine author Enola Dismay doesn’t like to stay in one place too long; she’s 26 and just now “realizing that it’s becoming harder and harder to stay in one place. The main reason,” she adds, “is because when I settle down somewhere, I overload myself with projects, overextend myself and…
I don’t know about you, but when it finally got cold this winter, I had to pull all my sweaters out of mothballs or, rather, lack of mothballs. Which means that some of them came out of storage holey. Do you have holey sweaters, too? Or a favorite woolen scarf…
Photography, an alchemist’s medium dependent on a manipulation of light and time, unfairly stands in that no-man’s-land between fine art and technical craft, and working to change that general perception is half the job of promoting the photographic arts. That said, the tenth anniversary of Working With Artists, a nonprofit…
In these parts, we don’t just call this a holiday: The annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day Marade — so named by former Colorado First Lady Wilma Webb to denote it as a cross between a political march and a celebratory parade — is known for being one of the…
As anyone who’s crawled the Art District on Santa Fe on First Friday knows, the stretch of Santa Fe Drive between Alameda and Twelfth avenues is filled with talent. So when Dana Cain started planning the second annual Art District Best of 2010, she wanted a discerning eye to judge…
This I know is true: Comic books aren’t easy. Banish the idea that they are from your minds immediately before you proceed. Sure, artists like Noah Van Sciver (creator of Westword’s weekly 4 Questions strip) make it look easy, but a comic artist is kind of like a god-figure who…
There’s no time like the present. It’s time to get gallery-hopping, and the first First Friday of the year has plenty to offer. Such as:…
Mare Trevathan exists in the local theater scene on many levels: She’s an actress, publicist and booster all rolled up into one dynamic ball of energy, who’s played roles for numerous companies, including Curious Theatre, where she also manages community affairs. Mare has been all over the world and has…
Why not start off the new year with a Japanese animation about a futuristic cyberspace-crossed world that will blow your socks off and turn your world right around in the space of a couple of hours? If we got you at “Japanese animation,” your best bet is Summer Wars, a…
Broadway yields many surprises, and one of the biggest in recent years was Next to Normal, a musical about a bipolar woman and the havoc she wreaks on her family. The difficult subject matter might not sound like fodder for a musical, but the tough yet accessible treatment of the…
Quietly, in December, the Kirkland Museum opened a new installment of its ongoing Colorado art survey, a range of 51 art and decorative works, most of them culled from the museum’s collection and many on view for the first time. The show’s particular focus is on works by past members…
When Stranger Than Paradise hit the big screen, in 1984, indie director Jim Jarmusch was right in the thick of a trend: the American movie, made over in a drifting, plotless European sensibility that aped the way life usually continues to unfold, without a real storyline, sometimes in parallel worlds…
The newly rehatched Denver Art Talks, hosted by Eric Matelski, will hit the new year running by featuring designer/seamstress extraordinaire April Hoy as its first guest of 2011. Hoy has stitched her way through many behind-the-scenes professional layers: She’s a stage costumer, a corset-maker, a textile restoration worker, a pattern…
Everyone has their own way of celebrating the New Year: Some prefer to sit by the fire, play board games and watch the ball drop in Times Square on TV, while others crash into it drunk as loons, with confetti, a kiss from a stranger in a crowded room and…
I’ve been making the pilgrimage every Christmastime to the Kloewer family home on Elati Street, just north of Belleview, for at least the last eleven years, and this is why: Being Jewish and all, it doesn’t really feel like Christmas until I’ve immersed myself in some sort of urban electric…
This doctored stop sign is remarkable partly in that it’s persevered, untouched, for quite a long time — most suitably, in a neighborhood where people of every faith and stripe live side by side: Africans from across the Dark Continent, South Asians, Russians, retirees, young singles, Muslims and Orthodox Jews…
When an auteur as gifted as Steven Soderbergh takes on the story of an equally gifted performance artist, some kind of magic is almost inevitable, and that’s surely the case with the director’s new film portrait of the late Spalding Gray, whose mysterious suicide in 2004 still reverberates with his…
Lonnie Hanzon, Wizard in Residence at the Museum of Outdoor Arts, is making magic again at Hudson Holiday, the annual festival that MOA sponsors at Hudson Gardens. Spread throughout the grounds, this is a light show for the ages: lavish and excessive, psychedelic, funny as hell, beautiful, whimsical and an…
When Jump Suits: An Outis Space Venture opens tonight at PlatteForum, the inner superheroic fantasies of a group of Colfax Community Network kids, ages five through twelve, will be revealed. The students, who’ve worked for six weeks with Teddy O’Connor (an artist who embraces both comic-book and sculptural forms), will…
