It was probably a year or so ago that Molly Dubin, the curator of the Mizel Museum of Judaica, asked me if I knew anything about an artist named Akiba Emanuel. I didn’t, so Dubin explained that Emanuel was a modernist painter and sculptor who had lived in Denver off…
Error & Ingenuity: A Kinetic Sculpture and Robot Exhibit is an ambitious show being presented at the Andenken Gallery (765 Santa Fe Drive, 720-291-4567). Andenken, the joint effort of Hyland Mather and Malia Tata, originally opened in the Raven’s Nest studio complex but relocated last winter to the GOOG, Patrick…
Visualize a pretty young woman and a handsome young man heading for the bedroom. She has just suggested that she wants to show him what she really wants, so, naturally, he begins unzipping his pants en route to the bed. Oblivious to his loud boxers, she sits and begins swooning…
Im Kwon Taek has long been the best-known Korean director in America; in fact, it would be fair to say that he’s pretty much the only even vaguely known Korean director, and even then, his renown is strictly among festivalgoers. The general distribution of his latest film, Chunhyang, should be…
Joe Simon doesn’t read comic books anymore, and not because he’s an 87-year-old man with far better ways to spend his time. The former and, perhaps, future comics writer and illustrator simply doesn’t get them anymore; he doesn’t know who they’re for, what they’re about, why most of them even…
The Denver Art Museum has long been on the cutting edge of exhibition design. Unfortunately, that’s not always a good thing, as is evident right now at the DAM and other major museums around the world, where marketing and demographics are displacing connoisseurship and art history as key components in…
Emotional Distance, the superb photo show at Gallery Sink (2301 West 30th Street, 303-455-0185) combines the work of some of Colorado’s best-known artists with examples by well-known photographers from around the country. In the front space, exhibit organizer Mark Sink has installed a group of wonderful landscape photos by Boulder…
Bertolt Brecht was the last century’s most influential theater director and theorist. Since World War II, his beliefs about political theater have served as the cornerstone of practice for fringe groups and mega-companies alike (most prominently, the early days of Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company were marked by many Brecht-inspired productions)…
Family members and their friends rip each other’s hearts out, pour alcohol on the resulting wounds and then go at it all over again in A Delicate Balance, playwright Edward Albee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning look at relationships among the well-to-do. Like most of Albee’s family dramas, the 1966 play, being given…
Talk about an unholy union of souls! The latest project from director John Boorman (Deliverance, The General) seeks to be many things — spy thriller and black comedy among them — but at its core it’s a bizarre buddy movie. Behold Pierce Brosnan as a spy who lit out from…
There’s a majesty to Michael Winterbottom’s new film, a majesty and a terrible, icy chill. There’s also a fair bit of invention, as the director of the wrenching Jude — based on Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure — has shifted from the locus of that author’s fierce, beloved English west…
Denver painter and newspaper illustrator Herndon Davis is best remembered in these parts for his “Face on the Barroom Floor,” a dreamy portrait based on a poem by Hugh Antoine D’Arcy that still graces the floorboards at the Teller House in Central City. Davis is said to have painted the…
Local freelance writers Erin Kindberg and Wendy Burt don’t make any bones about it: Their new book, Oh, Solo Mia! The Hip Chick’s Guide to Fun for One — billed as a collection of things women can do alone, without benefit of male companionship or even a gaggle of gal…
For Urban Guerilla, the lovelorn protagonist in Gregory Walker’s techno-theater piece xy, the search for that special someone is played out as a Doom-like challenge. Against a backdrop of bleeps, beats and animated beasts, our hero navigates the various levels of a romance-themed video game — where he must meet…
The Aspen Shortsfest isn’t a Hollywood shmoozefest. Sure, this tenth annual competition is expected to attract a few film producers. But organizers insist that the festival’s purpose remains recognizing achievement. Guests, including bad-boy director John Waters (who will be featured during Saturday’s closing-night celebration at the Wheeler Opera House) and…
Paul McGuinness has never thought of himself as a teacher of life lessons, so it comes as a bit of a surprise for him to hear it relayed that Kelly Curtis considers him an adviser–hell, a mentor. It comes as even more of a shock to discover that Curtis recalls…
Edgar Britton was Colorado’s most significant and successful sculptor of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. He was to modernist sculpture what the late Vance Kirkland was to modernist painting. But unlike Kirkland, whose fame has grown since his death, Britton, who died in 1982, is known only to a smallish…
The idiosyncratic sculptures in Tom Nussbaum, which has been installed in the pair of spaces just inside the front door of the Robischon Gallery (1740 Wazee Street, 303-298-7788), are downright strange.Take, for example, “Head I Man” (left), an acrylic on resin of a bland-looking man holding up a giant, equally…
The number of world premieres produced by the Denver Center Theatre Company over the past few years makes it increasingly hard to think of the city’s flagship theater company as a repertory group dedicated to presenting periodic revivals of classic plays. Earlier this season, more doubt was cast on the…
Inna Beginning is a two-and-a-half-hour play that would pack a stronger punch if it were two hours shorter. Germs of ideas whiz about like supercharged particles in Gary Leon Hill’s play, which was conceived in collaboration with composer Lee Stametz and Denver Center Theatre Company actor Jamie Horton, who also…
Keep a diary and one day it’ll keep you,” said Mae West, and, while the sentiment rings true, it does little to explain the mystery of why Helen Fielding’s sliver of literary history managed to keep anyone. Fluffy, shrill and approximately as deep as Cosmo magazine, the book somehow hit…
One doesn’t watch Amores Perros (Love’s a Bitch) so much as absorb it — like a body blow. “I wanted to make a movie that smelled of filth,” Alejandro González Inárritu has said about his feature directorial debut. He has succeeded beyond perhaps even his wildest dreams. One of this…
