Visual Arts

At least four hundred poets have descended on Denver, heads full of memorized verses, for the National Poetry Slam.For those who can’t distinguish a slam poem from a verbal fistfight or the recitation of iambic pentameter, or simply readers curious about what to expect, Westword got on the phone with Executive Director Suzi Q. Smith and her right-hand woman in planning the event, local poetry and art advocate Danielle Brooks, to demystify slam poetry.

Australian artist Craig Walsh, whose eerie and inspiring projections of human faces on trees are already an internet sensation, will bring his large-scale, site-specific installations to Colorado for the Breckenridge International Festival of the Arts.

From massive arts institutions to high-end commercial galleries and DIY spaces, Denver boasts an array of venues to check out first-rate art.

No one at the nineteenth International Aerial Dance Festival seems to be afraid of heights. At Frequent Flyers, the Boulder studio where dancers dangle from an arm wrapped in swathes of fabric or hang upside-down, practicing a swift unfurling movement that will drop them onto the thick blue mats below, everyone is committed to an art form you may not have known existed. Aerial dance, says festival founder Nancy Smith, is “anything anything that gets you off the ground dancing.” Imagine a cross between the soaring acrobatics of Cirque du Soleil, the Peter Pan flying on Broadway and the storytelling of modern dance, all requiring immense core and upper body strength. People don’t realize, Smith says, “how hard it actually is, since the aesthetic is effortlessness.”

The summer group show at Space Gallery, with the provocative title Alternative Facts, is a clutch of four solos that unfold in the enormous gallery.

At the beginning of every month, Denver’s creative community front loads the calendar with an abundance of appealing events.

Denver new media-artist Kristin Stransky’s FabLink 3-D-printed dress required ten pounds of nylon fiber, more than 800 hours of 3-D printing time, and 150 to 200 hours of assembly and fabrication time to make. The dress was assembled from hundreds of tiny links, each link hooked to the others by twelve even tinier rings. Stransky says it takes twenty to thirty hours to print every fifty links and an hour to print fifty rings.

This weekend, six Colorado playwrights will see their words brought to life in staged readings at the Vintage Theatre’s first-ever New Play Festival. The intimate Aurora venue opened up submissions for the festival last December as a way to reach out to the Colorado writing community and also meet playwrights’ need to have their plays read as a step in the editing process.

Denver Arts & Venues and the Denver Commission on Cultural Affairs have announced the recipients of the 2017 IMAGINE 2020 fund, a city grant that gives up to $5,000 for new cultural programs.

The First Friday of August brings new sights and sounds to art districts all over Denver and beyond. Where will you end up? We have some suggestions.

When the new Velorama Festival descends on RiNo August 11 to 13, you’ll be able to U-lock your cruiser to new, hand-crafted bike racks. In line with the festival’s ties to the Colorado Classic bicycle race, the RiNo Arts District has sponsored the creation of five artisanal, mountain-evoking bike racks by contest winners Mitch Hoffman and Tim Omspach.

Longtime Colorado Springs sculptor and installationist Sean O’Meallie spent ten years in the ’80s and ’90s pitching gizmos and pull toys as a toy inventor, commuting to toy fairs in Manhattan with storyboards in hand. He and his New York-based business partner “never scored it big,” he says, but he did take something valuable away from the experience.

The Western: An Epic in Art and Film is truly epic, as well as full of gimmicks. But when the curators are so knowledgeable and the quality of the material is so high, even gimmicks can’t detract from a great show, and the ideal summer blockbuster for the Denver Art Museum.

August has arrived, but just because the summer is reaching its final days doesn’t mean that Denver’s entertainment calendar is fizzling too.

The Denver County Cultural Council, which dishes out nearly $2 million a year to small arts and culture groups in the city (which happens to also be the entire county) has a vacancy, and Denver City Council is taking applications until Monday, August 14, to fill the position. The money…

Champagne 6, an all-women burlesque crew that aims to bring the spirit of Vegas to Denver, is run by mother-daughter duo, Jasmine and Katrina Lairsmith.

The weekend may be just around the corner, but in a city where life gets more expensive every day, many residents may feel like they have to forgo their leisurely pursuits.

Some naysayers were concerned that Pirate’s move to Lakewood would mark the end of the artists’ co-op as a place to see cutting-edge art by some of the city’s most interesting artists, but the current shows by Eric Anderson and Charles Livingston should put those fears firmly to rest.

For Thomas “Detour” Evans’ interactive exhibit in the Temple tonight, expect bright colors, loud music DJed live, and a chance to break the usual “look-but-don’t-touch” rule of art viewership. Detour, whose work you might recognize from his rose-backed murals, RedLine residency or if you happen to have visited soccer superstar Tim Howard lately, has put together Between the Hues, an art showcase that will culminate in an afterparty at Meadowlark Kitchen.

Born and raised in Utah, contemporary-realist painter Jenny Morgan now lives in New York, where she received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2008. But before that, she spent several years in Colorado, where she got her BFA at the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design in 2003. Now she’s back with a show at MCA Denver.

Enjoy the summer evenings and celebrate art at district-wide Final Friday artwalks and parties in Denver — or just go out and discover a rising young star or two. These five art openings are where it’s at this weekend.

For her current artist residency at the Denver Art Museum, dancer Laura Ann Samuelson encourages museum-goers to engage with the art around them in a different way.