“Happy birthday” is not an unusual phrase. Most people hear it often, at work or at home or in passing or whenever else they are near someone celebrating the anniversary of their parturition. One of improv’s most famous characteristics, one of its most celebrated, is its ability to take lackluster…
There are a lot of things more important than watching and liveblogging the 2011 Academy Awards – but none of them are things we have to do today. Look for our recap after the show!…
Is that a suspiciously shaped tendon, Jesus, or are you just happy to see us? A tad nonplussed at the photo (above) the Denver Post ran today on page 14D of Rebecca Vaughan and Peter Illig’s “Celestial Navigation” — part of the artist’s Displaced show at Ice Cube Gallery, which…
What’s a secondary art market? It’s a sale of works that have been sold before and are back on the market. The advantage of buying these pre-owned works, from the collector’s point of view, is the clear picture it gives for a work’s resale value and present worth in the…
When Matt Vogl and Harrison Rains started Mile High Sci-Fi five years ago, Vogl says, “We agreed never to watch Mystery Science Theater 3000 ever again.” In many ways, their show’s premise is the same — screen terrible movies and make fun of them — but Vogl and Rains also…
We are well aware that graffiti is not subject to the strict grammatical rules imposed on other art forms that, you know, involve words. But this proclamation found on the corner of Yale and University recently had us perplexed. Whoever scrawled these four choice, punctuationless words on a utility box…
Thankfully, foolishness is a worldwide phenomenon. Otherwise when we would see another culture’s advertising on the internetz we might feel all dumb by comparison and end up sending them angry emoticons in their comment boxes — because we all know Emoticon is the universal language. But since people are crazy…
There are endless affinities that connect gardening to ceramics, the most obvious of which is that both start with digging in the ground. The creation of vessels from clay and the cultivation of plants each came very early in the development of civilization, and both were necessary pre-conditions for it…
After more than a decade on Broadway, Rule Gallery, one of the city’s top contemporary art dealers, will be relocating in March to RiNo. Sky-high rents on Broadway have led owner Robin Rule to seek out a new spot for her twenty-year-old-plus business, and she apparently liked what she saw…
This past Saturday, at Westword’s biggest and undeniably bitchin’ art soirée, guests appreciated all levels of local talent. Artopia-goers also took in the large amounts of alcohol, causing thoughts from the silly to the profound to pour from their mouths just as smoothly as the booze flowed into their cups…
Last night’s On Being a Woman, a conglomeration of dozens of artists and performers of both sexes celebrating the female identity, was by all means a success. Spread throughout the maze of hallways and studio space at Wazee Union, Designer Baily Rose and community organizer and 2011 MasterMind Award Winner…
Last week someone forwarded me this video of a contestant on Family Feud correctly guessing “a joint” would be an answer to the question: “what is something people pass around?” Host Steve Harvey’s hysterically ignorant reaction to just how popular marijuana is makes the video. Below are four other classic…
David Zimmer is a man of action and few words: A longtime figure in the Denver art scene, he’s something of an art alchemist who straddles a century in his enigmatic works, which bustle with strangely iconic curiosities and found objects, hovering half in and half out of the Victorian…
Big ideas take time to hatch, and for that reason Denver artists Rob Mack and Samuel Schimek have already announced their joint exhibition, Microclimates, which they describe as a large-scale graphic art environment in three distinctive parts and will open in June at Super Ordinary Gallery (a nascent venue that…
Modern commercials rely on our collective impressions of happiness to catch our attention and tell us our lives aren’t good enough. This stupid ad from Pfister furniture does that with an almost sickeningly chummy, romantic dinner scene — but it has a twist, which is both slightly funny and slightly…
“Hipster or Jesus?” a new memeblog Denver Urbanist is linking to Boulderites Chris Znerold and Charlotte Myerberg may seem like all fun and games, but it actually highlights a major cultural challenge: How does one actually differentiate a precious ironic douchebag from the son of our Lord? After all, the…
Whatever else happened in the Denver arts world this year, one thing is certain: Fashion blew up like a balloon with a terrorist in it. At the forefront of that boom, of course, was Mondo Guerra, who took second place in this year’s season of Project Runway and first place…
There’s a pair of compelling solos at Spark Gallery (900 Santa Fe Drive, 720-889-2200, www.sparkgallery.com) that brings together two well-established Denver artists. And although their works are as different as night is from day, the exhibits go together well. On the west side of the gallery is Andy Libertone: Old…
Boulder filmmaker Stacey Steers is a patient artist who animates the old-fashioned way: shot by shot on a stationary animation frame. On Friday at the Denver Art Museum, DAM Contemporaries hosted a screening of her works, including the world premiere of her latest, Night Hunter. It takes one aback to…
The Museum of Contemporary Art’s wildly popular Mixed Taste series kicked off its first ever Winter series on Friday. For the uninitiated: MCA Denver invites two speakers on unrelated subjects to lecture for twenty minutes separately and then answer audience questions jointly. This week’s juxtaposition was Adrian Miller on Chicken…
Love makes people do bizarre things. The acts we have come to recognize as the signposts of romance at its most fervent are nearly identical to the symptoms of mental illness: the racing thoughts, the gloriously inflated self-esteem, the nonsensical spending (compressed rock on a ring, anyone?), the promiscuity, the…
As a longtime live concert photographer, Lucia De Giovanni’s work is entrenched in the local music scene. For her book, The Love Project, Giovanni decided to step away from the stage to capture something a bit more simple: The idea of love. This isn’t her first foray into portraiture–De Giovanni…
