For the past month Westword has been profiling the winners of the 2012 Mayor’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts. Since 1986 these awards have honored creative individuals and organizations that make artful impact in the community — but this year they were split into three new categories: Youth Arts,…
At the recent R-Squared: Risk and Reward conference held in Telluride, Cengage Learning offered a $5,000 reward for the library/librarian that came up with the most innovative way to engage the library’s customers. Basically, how to make libraries cool again. Joseph Sanchez, an employee of the Auraria Library, came up…
The Denver Film Society, which moved from its longtime home on the Auraria campus to the Denver FilmCenter/Colfax in 2010 will rename the complex in honor of Anna and John J. Sie, whose foundation just donated $2.5 million to the organization. The money — which consists of a $1.5 million…
Before forming LadyFace with friends Melanie Karnopp, Kristin Rand, Timmi Lasley and Mara Wiles, Chella Negro had never done comedy. The musician had clocked thousands of hours on stage as a singer-songwriter, though, and after hanging around the comedy crowd and hosting Denver’s Ladies Laugh-In stand-up night, she was ready…
To mark the transition of the former Bender’s space to the new home of Quixote’s True Blue, which opens tonight, the Johnny Cash mural on the eastern wall was replaced with one of Jerry Garcia — which was then painted over while the artist came up with a replacement Garcia,…
It’s fitting for the small Abecedarian Gallery to end the year with an exhibition of small-scale art. All the two- and three-dimensional works in the Modest in Scale show are twelve inches or smaller in every dimension. “It’s a great show to have right before Christmas because people are out…
Has the calm before the edible storm that is Thanksgiving got you down in the dumps? Revolution Circus, a huge compendium of bands, freaks, sideshow acts, burlesque girls, body painters, acrobats, tatto artists, belly dancers, hoopers and other circusy things will take over City Hall for a many-leveled, single night…
You’d have to be living under a rock not to know who Vincent van Gogh was. And I’m not just talking about art enthusiasts: Anyone with even a minimal sense of culture will have heard of him, if only for the severed-ear story. One of the greatest post-impressionists of the…
Clyfford Still. For the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, director Dean Sobel has installed a career survey of the great artist that starts with the artist’s realist self-portrait and features his remarkable post-impressionist works from the 1920s. Next are Still’s works from the ’30s, with some odd takes on…
Dixie’s Tupperware Party. Dixie is a booze- and sex-addicted, trash-talking, child-neglecting ex-con from Alabama who holds Tupperware parties in her trailer, and she’s invited you to this one. Dixie’s Tupperware Party, at the Galleria, really is a Tupperware party — you get a name tag and raffle number when you…
His obsession was born at the world’s largest Entertainment McDonald’s. It was there, at the Orlando behemoth, that sixteen-year-old Jourdan Adler began playing Mortal Kombat. And he’s never really stopped. The original Mortal Kombat was released in 1992, the same year that Adler got his first job, as a McDonald’s…
Woody Allen has been known to suggest that, in directing a good movie, much of the battle lies in casting. Were that entirely true, the Philip Seymour Hoffman-, Catherine Keener- and Christopher Walken-starring A Late Quartet would be phenomenal. As it is, the film about a New York City string…
If you Google the phrase “Danzig shopping for cat supplies,” you’ll find links to phone-cam shots of former Misfits singer Glenn Danzig crossing a grocery-store parking lot while wearing a Danzig T-shirt and carrying Fresh Step. He’s a striking figure, and, with his pale, vampiric aspect, totally incongruent with the…
There’s an un-fun tendency in American life to fictionalize our national heroes as rigid statue-people who only speak as though they are delivering commencement addresses, with a kind of unlovable, Al Gore-ish anti-charisma that would inhibit anyone in real life from becoming a national hero in the first place. Own…
What better time to contemplate the beginning of the world, or, as playwright Catherine Trieschmann puts it in How the World Began, “the leap from non-life to life,” than now, with the East Coast still struggling with the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy? As the evening begins, we hear terrifying winds,…
Many of the contenders competing in the second annual Kong Off cut their teeth on such quarter-munchers as Pac-Man and, of course, Donkey Kong. But today’s generation of video-game players are more likely to have gotten their start blasting terrorists into bloody chunks in the cheesy light-gun shooter Target: Terror…
The first few minutes of Lincoln play out like a parody of the expectations of Steven Spielberg’s detractors. The Great Emancipator rests like a humble Solomon upon a hard wooden chair, surrounded by freely mixing black and white soldiers of that great war of his. One black soldier dares to…
Attention, Eon Productions, Daniel Craig and Heineken: James Bond is not a beer drinker! Sure, I know. Getting all worked up about the new James Bond installment is like freaking out about a new Tim Burton movie: Past glories don’t justify contemporary relevance. The year 2012 marks fifty years since…
That the American cinema is deader than Dillinger is a fact no right-thinking observer unwilling to be laughed out of the room would even think of denying today. To do the current round of think-piece writers one better, we will add that not only are the movies dead, but they…
Best Instagram Account; Most Viral Video of the Year; Best Politician on Social Media: These are just some of the categories in West-word’s third annual Denver Web Awards, which honor the best and brightest minds and projects on the city’s digital landscape. More than fifty awards dedicated to arts, news,…
Take a little art, a little comedy, some music and an interview, then throw them all together on stage with a colorful host. Sounds like the golden age of late-night, right? That’s the spirit Onus Spears aims to re-create with Rawlitix. “This series, it’s everything — all kinds of art…
Every generation of artists has its hangout, and from 1984 until 1999, that place in Denver was the topsy-turvy City Spirit Cafe, on Blake Street in early LoDo. It was as much a work of art itself as it was a place for artists — and anyone, really — to…
