The first-ever Denver Youth Poet Laureate will be chosen tonight, and along with confirmation that the winner has mastered the spoken word, the title comes with an official platform for the young artist to speak for the community. Five finalists have been chosen from several dozen who’d applied, submitting poetry…
March continues with a rush of new shows, including several Month of Photography entries and a summer-ready exhibition presented by RedLine at the McNichols Building. Here are a few suggestions of where to head this weekend to see and be seen. Cody Day and Brenda LaBier Sync Gallery March 20…
“A lot of young people express interest in wanting to make a difference in the world, but most of them don’t have a plan,” says Jeffrey Pryor, a professor at Regis University and the University of Colorado and CEO of Pathfinder Solutions, an organization dedicated to providing research and training…
Remember that episode of The Simpsons when Homer goes to the chili cookoff and then enters the third dimension? It was pretty trippy, but it taught us a lesson: If you’re going extra spicy, know what you’re getting yourself into or else you might wind up missing for a couple…
Ariann Black has worked as a professional magician since 1990, and she’s a master of her enchanting art form. The Canada-born magician began practicing the art of illusion when she was just four years old, working her way through magic school and onto the world’s stage. She’s performed on television…
A Tented Sky: New Works by Kristen Hatgi Sink, at Gildar Gallery, is one of several choice solos associated with Denver’s Month of Photography, which straddles March and April. The design of the show is spare and elegant, providing the ideal setting for Sink’s visually rich, oversized digital pigment prints…
Even among the most diehard zombie fans — and I unquestionably count myself among that number — the recent bonanza of zombie everything has led to something like zombie fatigue. What was the last great zombie movie you saw? Mine was The Battery, and that came out in 2012. Similarly,…
#30: Chris Bagley Filmmaker/videographer Chris Bagley studies the fringe artists of Denver and beyond, embedding himself in DIY culture concerns to create documentary portraits of musicians as well as music videos, including Wesley Willis’s Joyrides, a 2008 doc about the late savant musician that he co-directed with Westword MasterMind Kim…
After hosting the Handmade Homemade Market (HaHo), a venture that has helped launch dozens of small craft businesses, Stephen Toma and Dani Lanworthy are taking their concept to the next level with a shared workspace. But they need a Kickstarter campaign to reach its goal in order to take that step, and…
Sometimes going against the grain can help you stand out, creating very sticky style. That’s the case with Danyol Bernal, a Denver artist who creates his masterpieces using an unexpected medium: duct tape. Keep reading for his inspirations, as well as a look inside his bag. Here’s how his duct-tape…
We’re two films into the kiddie-dystopia Divergent franchise, and it’s still unclear if the sequel’s director, three screenwriters, eight producers and especially original novelist Veronica Roth have bothered to double-check a dictionary. Divergent, and now this new sequel, Insurgent, tracks the monotone mishaps of Tris (Shailene Woodley), a very special…
The pink-and-white stucco tower of Casa Bonita has been beckoning families, tourists and gaggles of curious humans off the busy Colfax strip and through its big brown doors for more than four decades. Colorado’s most confounding and simultaneously beloved piece of pop culture has been a constant force, an unwavering…
A folk tale, at the cozy Mai Wyn Fine Art, is a solo exhibit concerning artist Bryan Andrews’s longtime interest in examining myths. He does so here with simple and rugged abstract sculptures, as well as with paintings and prints. The show functions as an installation, though it is, in…
Spring has sprung, and theater is blooming across town. This weekend a world premiere will launch this year’s greatly expanded Athena Project Festival, while the longstanding Evergreen Players light up the foothills with a collection of one-acts and the Arvada Center puts audiences on the edge of their seats with…
What’s the Best Annual Festival? The Best Denver Arts District? The Best Club Night? You tell us: Voting ends at 11:59 tonight in our Best of Denver 2015 Readers’ Poll. In the first round, which started in January, we asked readers for their favorites in almost two hundred categories. In…
Mike Bartlett’s play is titled Cock, and, yes — to get the snickers out of the way up front — the title does refer to the male organ, and it feels pretty odd to call the Edge Theater Company’s box office for two tickets or tell your friends you’re off…
Jaume Collet-Serra’s Run All Night, a shoot-’em-up about an out-to-pasture hit man desperate to keep his boss and best friend from whacking his son, is humid with testosterone. It’s the sort of film where a woman accidentally caught by the camera practically apologizes and scurries away from the lens. When…
The Amazing Randi insists that the public wants to be fooled, that it’s easier and more comforting for us not to see unromantic truths — you can see him proclaiming this, a little sadly, in Justin Weinstein and Tyler Measom’s doc An Honest Liar, which plays like a companion piece…
It’s easy to forget what I’m doing and why. Though I walk by the tiny house several times a day, the winter months have meant less good weather on which to work on it, and fewer daylight hours, too. But more than that, the realities of the financial struggle that…
One of the year’s best films, Mary Dore’s She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry is an urgent, illuminating dive into the headwaters of second-wave feminism, the movement that — no matter what its detractors insist — has given us the world in which we live. “We live in a country that…
In the action thriller The Gunman, Sean Penn, at age 54, looks neither old nor young. He’s been in training to look this age for a long time. Even as a relative kid, in 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High, his sailor-on-shore-leave mug had a wry, quizzical roughness to it;…
A few weeks ago, a friend and I started talking about planning a summer road trip to Los Angeles. We’re both working on large creative projects — he’s got a documentary in progress and I’ve been sitting on a book idea for years — and a long ride in the…
