Since MCA Denver was founded in the late 1990s, its directors have simultaneously served as curators for its exhibits. There have been guest curators — Julie Segraves, John Grant and Petra Sertic come to mind — but no one permanent. For most of the museum’s history, former director Cydney Payton…
Allen True’s West. Allen Tupper True was Denver’s premier muralist during the first third of the twentieth century. Sadly, many of his commissions have been painted over or were lost when the buildings they were in were demolished. In an act of cooperation, the three big cultural institutions on the…
Eventide. This is a sequel of sorts to Plainsong, which the Denver Center Theatre Company produced two years ago, though the language is less evocative and the vision less far-reaching. In Plainsong, we learned of two elderly brothers, awkward bachelor cattlemen, who took in a pregnant teenager after her mother…
It’s a telling detail that indie film’s premier misanthrope, Neil LaBute, has an executive-producer credit on writer-director Lee Toland Krieger’s scathing dysfunctional-clan dramedy, The Vicious Kind. Meet small-town Connecticut construction worker Caleb Sinclaire (Adam Scott, blistering), a sleep-deprived misogynist who maliciously projects his bitterness and insecurities on anyone foolish enough…
Cop Out establishes its movie lineage right away, with a slow-motion toe-to-head tilt up, set to the Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep ‘Til Brooklyn,” of black-cop/white-cop buddies Jimmy and Paul swaggering stone-faced toward the camera. Director/editor Kevin Smith (who notably didn’t write the Cop Out script; this is the Clerks auteur’s…
Katie Jarvis, who makes her acting debut as a rabid teenager in writer-director Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank, was discovered on an English railway station platform, yelling at her boyfriend. Whether Jarvis is a natural-born actress or simply playing herself as Mia, a foul-mouthed fifteen-year-old child of the Essex projects with…
Every time I re-encounter him, I’m surprised and thrilled by Dylan Thomas’s writing – the inventiveness, effusiveness, humor, insight, sheer appetite and joy, as well as his intoxication with words. Under Milk Wood, described by the author as a play for voices, creates a day in the life of a…
Pete Ellingson and Thomas VanSchoick created what is now the Cuban Music Experience six years ago in an effort to incorporate more Cuban music into their department at the University of Colorado Denver. “For me, it’s just the style of music that I really enjoy the most,” Ellington explains. “For…
Today is the birthday of one of the West’s most recognizable icons: William “Buffalo Bill” Cody. To celebrate, the Buffalo Bill Museum & Grave, 987½ Lookout Mountain Road in Golden, is throwing the legendary showman a free Buffalo Bill Birthday Celebration from noon to 3 p.m., complete with cake and…
Fame — if not fortune — and free beer for life at the Wynkoop Brewing Company are only two of the honors bestowed annually upon the person who survives a grueling judging process to become Beerdrinker of the Year. The victor is also awarded free clothing, a gift certificate and…
In 1974, two of film’s greatest movements — blaxploitation and zombies — combined to form Sugar Hill, one of the most unjustly forgotten movies in cinematic history. It’s the story of a woman (Marki Bey as Diana “Sugar” Hill) who turns to voodoo to get revenge on the powerful mobsters…
A pair of old Pirate gallery friends, clay artist Marie E.v.B. Gibbons and sculptor Craig Robb, finally share billing in Double Entendre, which opened February 26 at Ironton Studios & Gallery, 3636 Chestnut Place. In a departure from her familiar, otherworldly ceramic works, Gibbons is showing dreamy mixed-media wall works…
Kathy Knaus grew up in Wheat Ridge, where her father owned a meat market — Edwards Meats — that’s still a going concern now run by her nephew. When she was a teenager, she worked behind the counter during summer breaks from school. And since 2006, she’s created works of…
When students and faculty from the University of Colorado Denver’s HOT Sculpture Program are ready to pour and cast iron, they head to RiNo. “It’s such a performance,” says UCD sculpture professor Rian Kerrane. “And people really do get into the whole pyromania thing.” RiNo’s Tracy Weil agrees. “It’s super-cool,”…
Denver drummer and DJ Skip Reeves, aka Skip the Funktologist, is a generous man who will host a fundraiser at the drop of a hat. Tonight the Funktologist will give it up for one of the area’s premier cultural ensembles: the trailblazing Shadow Theatre Company, which in recent years has…
Tim McMurray, managing partner and talent buyer for the Mountain Sun, Southern Sun and Vine Street brewpubs, started the annual Chop Month in 1998. “This guy, Lou, who used to work here, he liked to do funny things,” remembers McMurray. “And he said, ‘We should do this thing where we…
“I’m a huge music fan,” admits Steve Byrne, a comedian who’s opened for Kanye West, Modest Mouse and Spoon, among many others. “I love everything from Dean Martin and Harry Connick Jr. to the Killers and the Beatles to Bob Wills and Dwight Yoakam. I think music and comedy complement…
Like the history of hooch, Max Watman’s new book, Chasing the White Dog: An Amateur Outlaw’s Adventures in Moonshine, is complicated and unabashedly dynamic. “It’s a hard book to sell,” Watman admits, “but I think that’s what makes it fun. There’s as much true crime as there is foodie exploit…
The potato-based latke, a Hanukkah tradition. The sweet hamantasch, a staple of Purim. Which is better? That’s a longstanding, semi-satirical debate that Sarah Pessin, director of the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Denver, is keeping alive with today’s The Great Debate: Latke or Hamantasch?, during which Pessin…
It’s no less than a miracle that Susannah Perlman and her New York comedy/burlesque troupe Nice Jewish Girls Gone Bad are returning to Lannie’s Clocktower Cabaret. They almost died the last time they came to Denver, Perlman says. Caught in a snowstorm on I-70 as they commandeered their two-wheel-drive minivan…
Give a man a bicycle and he’ll be able to get around, but teach him to build a bicycle and he can mobilize an entire village, even a country. Over the past four years, ACIRFA (pronounced a-ker-fa) has helped people in Zambia build over 2,500 load-bearing bicycles. “Until this organization,…
Tonight’s Artsy-Fartsy Chili Cook-off promises to be a gas for anyone who blows through The Other Side Arts (TOSA), the local nonprofit based at 1644 Platte Street that’s hosting its second annual chili competition to benefit the group’s arts programs. “One of our former staff members came up with the…
