Danette Montoya, assemblage clock.#91: Danette Montoya Danette Montoya creates jewelry and found-object treasures for her business Tinkerbirds, making a living by way of her own imagination. That keeps her busy enough, but somewhere along the way she and fellow starving artist Rebecca Peebles decided to open a gallery. GroundSwell was…
From unconventional drawing workshops to lectures on what is real, Moxie U is redefining school. Founded by Rebecca Vaughan and Susan Stites, two former employees of the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, the new organization offers a variety of classes for people who want to learn something new…
The promise of seeing Scarlett Johansson fully nude is probably enough to lure lots of people into Jonathan Glazer’s alien-among-us fantasy Under the Skin, and the vision doesn’t disappoint: Her figure, seen in long shot, is a grand and glowing thing; she has one of those butts shaped, adorably, like…
A grave has been freshly dug in the opening shot of director Gareth Evans’s ultra-violent Indonesian flick The Raid 2. It’s a start, but Evans is going to need 400 more. In the first few minutes, Evans dispenses with three-quarters of the survivors of 2012’s The Raid: Redemption, the writer-director’s…
As its subtitle suggests, one reason that Errol Morris’s 2003 documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara proved so resonant is that its subject was partly a proxy for his most notorious professional successor. “I don’t do quagmires,” Donald Rumsfeld said in a…
I walked into the Arvada Center for the Judy Garland bio-play-musical End of the Rainbow thinking about the intense gay identification with such icons as Judy Garland, Edith Piaf and Maria Callas in the mid-twentieth century, the sheer awfulness of being gay in those days, and how it created a…
Athol Fugard’s The Road to Mecca, currently playing at Miners Alley, explores huge and unanswerable questions: questions about age, death, love and trust, the meaning of home and the significance of art — how creativity animates our lives, what happens when creativity’s lost. It does this through the lives of…
Denver Art Museum director Christoph Heinrich has a gift for understanding how to attract an audience. His secret is presenting exhibits that appeal not only to the art crowd, but also to the general population. These blockbusters — dubbed as “beacons” by Heinrich — zero in on a topic of…
Critical Focus: Ian Fisher. This show, located in the informal Whole Room at MCA Denver, is made up of a group of mostly monumental paintings of the sky. It’s the type of thing that has become the artist’s signature. Though Fisher begins with photographs of clouds used as studies, the…
Anthony Garcia Sr. started the Birdseed Collective four years ago with the goal of building community by showcasing young and struggling artists while also bringing art classes and other programs to the at-risk youth of Globeville through the Street Kidz community center. And in a way, he can now measure…
“To me, it’s never been about being a woman in a man’s world; it’s been about delivering a consistently funny and entertaining show each night,” Chelsea Handler shared in a recent piece about her position in the boys’ club that is late-night television. A comedian, actress, author, TV host and…
Known to hip-hop heads and vinyl connoisseurs as Peanut Butter Wolf, Chris Manak is a DJ and producer who is also the founder of influential underground label Stones Throw Records. The new documentary Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton tells the story of this nearly two-decade-old Los Angeles record label through…
Urban walls are the favored medium of Longmont street artist Gamma Acosta, ideal for creating murals that make you look twice — such as his now-famous Peyton Manning image on the side of the Monkey Barrel. “I like making murals outside, where the artwork can reach people,” he explains. “The…
From deep-space exploration to the front lines of conflict to mundane tasks like cleaning your floor, robots are taking over. Why go all John Connor and try to stop them, though, when you can just join them at Robotics at the Hangar? “It’s an expo of all things robotic, from…
Doors Open Denver is all about showing off the city’s bones. The theme of this year’s two-day citywide open house is “Celebrating Neighborhood Architecture,” and it will shine a spotlight on over sixty structures — city buildings, historic mansions, hotels and theaters — in more than a dozen Denver neighborhoods,…
No matter how advanced video games get, there’s still something special about smacking a metal ball around a ringing, blinking maze of machinery. Celebrate the bliss of pinball with collectors, enthusiasts and exhibitors alike at this weekend’s Rocky Mountain Pinball Showdown and Gameroom Expo. “It’s kind of like a car…
Su Teatro’s fourteenth annual Neruda Poetry/Spoken Word Festival kicks off tonight with PLACAS, a performance combines spoken word, hip-hop and theater that’s written by visiting artist Paul S. Flores, directed by Michael John Garcés and stars Ric Salinas of the performance group Culture Clash. “Paul did a lot of research…
The folks at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema think 1984 was a very good year, and for that reason, the Littleton outpost will be screening favorite films from thirty years ago throughout April. Tonight’s flick is Miloš Forman’s Amadeus, one of the best classical-music biopics ever made. With a script by…
The Medora Hornets are not the kind of state-championship contenders that moviemakers tend to chronicle. In Medora, a documentary by Davy Rothbart and Andrew Cohn, every time these charming serial losers hit the basketball court, the audience faces the nail-biting question: Can’t they win just this once? But it’s the…
For many people, April 15 is a taxing experience, so Warm Cookies of the Revolution is throwing a day-after Tax Day Carnival, aka “The Esteemed Philosophe and Adventurer, Dr. Fosberry, & His Civicus Carnivale Spectacular: Burlesque & A Lively Discussion of Issues Pertaining to Taxation, The Publick Sphere, and The…
Michael Emmitt and Sean Paul Mahoney envisioned their Horse & Cart company as a kind of traveling road show rather than a stationary theatrical entity, and that’s pretty much how it’s shaped up, with programming that’s been part improv, part game show, part tradi-tional theater, part burst of genius —…
Christy Montour-Larson has directed some of the most significant productions at Curious Theatre Company, and Good People looks set to be another triumph for her and the company. The protagonist of David Lindsay-Abaire’s play is a Boston Southie who, falling on hard times, turns to a successful old boyfriend for…
