More by happenstance than by design, three of Colorado’s most important cultural institutions — The Denver Art Museum, the Denver Public Library and the Colorado History Museum — are all lined up, one after another, along the south side of the Civic Center. It wasn’t always so. The DAM got…
Through the weekend at the Spark Gallery is Elaine Ricklin & Jennifer Parisi: Recent Work, which sounds like a collaborative show but is, in fact, two solo presentations. In the front gallery, Ricklin has lined the three walls with individually framed Polaroid XS-70 photos, which are either landscapes or still-life…
Plays that illuminate the predicaments of entire cultural groups are inevitably propelled by richly detailed characters whose everyday struggles epitomize larger concerns. August Wilson’s soul-stirring dramas about twentieth-century black life, for example, strike universal chords because their theme of racial oppression never displaces the playwright’s broader message about the common…
From the moment she strides through the red-curtained setting that represents Diana Vreeland’s Manhattan residence, Deborah Persoff exudes the ebullience that one typically senses only from established performers appearing in test-marketed star vehicles. Suffused with a regal pride that verges on but never becomes haughtiness, Persoff cuts a commanding figure…
The last time Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in an apocalypse-themed action movie with a Guns N’ Roses theme song, it was Terminator 2, the biggest and loudest action movie that had thus far ever been seen. Since that time, he’s produced one bona fide balls-to-the-wall action flick (True Lies), one pale…
How do you make a sequel to a nearly perfect film? Toy Story, the 1995 hit from Disney and Pixar, not only was the first fully computer-animated feature, it was also as brilliantly written and directed a film as any of the classic Disney releases. Pixar did nearly everything right,…
Elvis fans, you know who you are. You might be a slightly addled, middle-aged white woman — that’s the stereotypical prototype — but chances are you’re not. So says Erika Doss, an art history professor at CU-Boulder and the author of Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith & Image. In reality, Doss…
In the last forty years, has anyone in pop culture been cooler than Sean Connery as James Bond? We don’t think so. Thank God a new 007 film, The World Is Not Enough, starring Pierce Brosnan, opens tomorrow to remind us of the glory days of style and save us…
“Funky” still lives on Santa Fe Drive. For instance, on the 700 block, a collective of potters, painters and photographers has banded together, bypassing middlemen, to sell their unique wares directly to the public at Artists on Santa Fe. Here you’ll find Cristine Boyd’s black-and-white animal-print ceramics, James Garnett’s raku…
In the year or so that it has been open, Ron Judish Fine Arts in LoDo has established itself as a key player in the contemporary art world in Denver. Its well-thought-out shows always feature an eclectic mix of the work of top local talents and nationally celebrated artists, and…
Guiry’s, which just opened a new, 25,000-square-foot store in the Ballpark neighborhood near Coors Field, is celebrating a century in business this year. “At first it was a wall-cleaning business,” says Dick Guiry, president of the company and grandson of founder Joseph Guiry. “Then they got into selling mirrors and…
Smaller in scope and more conversational in tone than last season’s effort by the Denver Center Theatre Company, the Avenue Theatre’s production of Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile proves nearly as amusing and, at times, more affecting. More than anything else, though, John Ashton’s environmental approach enlivens and…
The committee that awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1962 cited John Steinbeck for his “sympathetic humor and sociological perception” — qualities that his detractors had long disparaged as little more than sappy sentimentalism and simplistic moralizing. Regardless which assessment is more valid, each suggests Steinbeck’s ability to articulate…
The world’s demand for minimally talented thirty-year-old high-school dropouts who believe they’re great poets or great musicians or great movie directors isn’t going to catch up with the supply anytime soon. That won’t keep the strivers from striving, of course; nor will it snuff out their dreams. Case in point:…
The engaging and delightful low-budget feature Where’s Marlowe? began life as an unaired one-hour TV pilot. Somehow director Daniel Pyne and John Mankiewicz, his co-writer, have managed to expand their footage to roughly an hour and forty minutes without any of the seams showing. That would be an accomplishment in…
“Yesterday I wasn’t even sure God existed,” laments Bethany (Linda Fiorentino), the reluctant yet divinely touched heroine of Kevin Smith’s ambitious new film, Dogma. “Now I’m up to my ass in Christian mythology.” As it turns out, so are we. Strutting to a spiritually snappy groove not observed in mainstream…
The back pages of Colorado history are filled with hardy souls who conquered the rugged territory, who defied the odds with gusto. One of Colorado’s toughest early settlers was Augusta Pierce Tabor, a frail New England society girl whose transformation from debutante to pioneer is the most impressive makeover the…
As the longtime fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar, where she started out writing a snobbish — and frequently satirized — advice column called “Why Don’t You…?” and later, as editor-in-chief of Vogue (where she was abruptly given the gate in 1971), Diana Vreeland ruled New York’s fashion world for nearly…
When was the last time you really saw a neighborhood in flux? LoDo is over; with the addition of a few new restaurants, the Golden Triangle will be here to stay; and even Capitol Hill, bless its over-inflated heart, can just hitch its future to a star, because upscale inner-city…
The Denver Art Museum is riding high on the success of the traveling Impressionism exhibition, which pushed overall attendance to record levels — nearly 100,000 visitors in October alone — and following its $62.5 million capital improvement bond, which was overwhelmingly approved by voters last week. The money, which will…
You’ve got about ten days left to catch Master Drawings: 700 Years of Inspiration at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. The show, which includes approximately 150 pieces, highlights a selection of drawings from the collection of the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. The exhibit has been intelligently installed in…
Vowing to “revivify the vital fluids stored in the neural coconuts,” a failed jazz singer and his eccentric, ivory-tickling sidekick attempt to explain how the “elastic wholeness of the biomatrix” — or, in layman’s parlance, life — has slowly deteriorated since an event known as the Big Snafu occurred. With…
