Not since the 1960s has there been so much aesthetic interest in popular culture. It all began a decade ago, when many contemporary artists grew tired of formalism and expressionism and began picking up on the pop-related styles of a previous generation. Some of these new-pop artists revived the original…
The spacious if grungy Andenken Gallery (2110 Market Street, 303-292-3281) near Coors Field is the perfect setting for the fourth annual Kinetic and Robot Show, which highlights art about actual and implied movement. Put together by Andenken director Hyland Mather, the exhibit is quite strange, mostly because the selections don’t…
Hidden Images. On the mezzanine of Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art is Hidden Images, which is dedicated to recent work by major contemporary Czech artist Adéla Matasová. The show is made up of a handful of things, including a group of conceptual installations that reconcile minimalism to movement. Three of…
Ellen McLaughlin’s Tongue of a Bird isn’t poetry, though it wants to be: It lacks conciseness, the sense of language reduced to its essence. Instead, it floods the stage with lyrical phrases and poetic images, as if the author were saying, “How’s this one? Didn’t move you? Didn’t quite work?…
As Communicating Doors opens, a leather-clad prostitute called Poopay enters a hotel room for an assignation and discovers that her customer, Reece, is a dying old man who doesn’t require her usual services. Instead, he wants her to witness his confession. In the course of his business dealings and the…
Bat Boy: The Musical. The character of Bat Boy is based on a recurring character in the Weekly World News — a two-foot-high boy, found in a cave in West Virginia, who endorsed Al Gore for president and later almost died after being sprayed by a pesticide truck. In the…
When we first see the title characters of Connie and Carla, a penny-dreadful imitation of one of Hollywood’s most inimitable comedies, they are loud-mouthed junior-high girls mugging in the school cafeteria. A minute later, they are loud-mouthed grownups (well, they’re the size of grownups) screaming out show tunes in a…
The six-month intermission is over; those of you left in the lobby wondering if Uma Thurman ever did kill Bill, may now return to your seats, unbuckle your belts and resume your gorging. Rest assured that Kill Bill Vol. 2, the final half of Quentin Tarantino’s fifth movie, offers just…
Claude Lanzmann’s agonizing epic Shoah (1985) remains, in critic Roger Ebert’s phrase, “one of the noblest films ever made” and, beyond all doubt, one of the greatest non-fiction works committed to celluloid. It runs almost nine and a half hours but never betrays its great length because (Ebert again) this…
Boulder musician and outdoorsman Loren Mach is a guy who’s thrown himself into his passions one by one: The owner of percussion performance degrees from the Oberlin and Cincinnati conservatories and a former percussionist with the New Mexico Symphony, he shucked a career on the skins to take a walk…
Thursday, April 15 Student moviemakers from around the world can bask in the limelight this weekend during the First Look Student Film Festival, a wide-ranging celebration of cinema’s bright future. More than sixty short films, including narrative, documentary, animated and experimental works, are set to screen today through Saturday at…
Terry Gross has mastered the quiet craft of listening. As the host of National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, she’s conducted more than 10,000 on-air interviews, and she faces everyone — artists, pornographers, international war correspondents, Tammy Faye Bakker and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog — with a willing ear and…
Denver fashionistas no longer have to make a run for the coasts to deck themselves out in red-hot designer duds. Now they can simply strut down to Skye, a newly opened LoDo boutique. “I really think it’s time to put Denver on the fashion map,” says owner Skye Forrest. “The…
FRI, 4/16 Think you play a mean pinball? Prove it. You’ll be up against the best of the flippin’ best at the Rocky Mountain Pinball Showdown, which starts today at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds. Elton John will be there, ready to whup your ass from behind the glass of his…
FRI, 4/16 Denver artist Jean Smith always had a knack for giving whimsy a three-dimensional shape, rolling slabs of clay into brightly glazed flowers and sweetly humorous wall plaques. But then her artistic career took an unexpected turn. “It all started when I bought this box full of bowling trophies…
FRI, 4/16 Soar past the second star on the right and find yourself joyfully lost in Neverland at the Colorado Ballet’s world-premiere production of Peter Pan. “I’ve been thinking about doing Peter Pan for a long time, but it’s a very hard story to tell because it’s very poignant,” says…
Half a century ago, women artists were viewed as second-rate, at best. Then, around 35 years ago, women challenged that old chestnut. In the intervening decades, numerous important female artists have emerged, and works from previous generations have been upwardly reappraised. This Cinderella story is the political narrative and organizational…
Susan Goldstein is one of the best experimental fine-art photographers in the region, and POLI VESTURE: Photographic Images From a Catholic Statue Factory, her current solo at Edge Gallery (3658 Navajo Street, 303-477-7173), proves it. The fairly large exhibit is handsomely installed in the front gallery. Poli Vesture was a…
Don Stinson, Chuck Forsman and Eric Paddock/Jim Colbert. The Western landscape’s natural beauty has taken hold of the imagination of generations of artists, but during the last twenty years, some have chosen to examine the stickier topic of civilization’s affect on the scenery. This intellectual approach is the collective theme…
In many ways Noel Coward’s life’s work was being a blithe spirit — and an intensely elegant one at that. An actor, writer and composer of songs, he was as much known for his suave persona as for his hilarious plays. He wrote Blithe Spirit in 1941, while German bombs…
Although it’s a comedy, The Merchant of Venice is far darker than such sunny Shakespearean offerings as Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s also a difficult piece for modern audiences because of the central figure of Shylock. Shylock is the money-lending Jew to whom Antonio, the…
Bat Boy: The Musical. The character of Bat Boy is based on a recurring character in the Weekly World News — a two-foot-high boy, found in a cave in West Virginia, who endorsed Al Gore for president and later almost died after being sprayed by a pesticide truck. In the…
