The basic origin of the phrase “It’s on like Donkey Kong” is clear enough: the 1981 video game, in which said large ape somewhat inexplicably terrorizes a construction site. What’s less clear, though, is how that ape went from mindlessly slinging 8-bit barrels at Mario to an icon for getting…
Jennifer Garner, the director of Metro State’s Center for Visual Art (965 Santa Fe Drive, 303-294-5207, www.metrostatecva.org) has organized Reclamation, featuring pieces made from trash. “It’s not recycling,” Garner points out. “It’s reuse.” Garner had conceived Reclamation as a group show, but there’s an unexpected solo within it. Ann Weber,…
Although IKEA didn’t even allow people to start lining up outside its doors for Wednesday’s grand opening until 9 o’clock this morning, it’s been more than 30 hours since the line effectively started forming in the parking lot across the street. The Swedish home-ware retailer, of course, is offering a…
There’s something about the nurse in popular culture — and while hospital-based programming has fallen from popularity in recent years, the image of the workday nurse in all its forms has been one that anyone who’s spent time in the ER or recovery room knows, whether via a hazy, drug-induced…
If you know Dave Foley, you know the Kids in the Hall. Sure, he fell into the mainstream with News Radio (and rocked it), but he will forever be an inappropriate kid with daddy issues who likes to dress in drag, an icon among comics for when he and his…
If you haven’t yet seen Marvelous Mud, the homegrown, summer-long blockbuster at the Denver Art Museum, you might think it’s a single show. But it’s actually eight different exhibits, a series of workshops, lectures by artists and curators, various special events, and even a symposium. For the DAM, it’s an…
Summertime and the living is easy…not. Here are five ways for local artists to stay busy during the dog days. Because — wink, wink — we know you’re all lying around the pool sipping lemonade all summer long…
While it may be true that the two reviews we’ve run on the Sarah Palin documentary The Undefeated have not been favorable, we didn’t mean to make the Teabaggers and Palin-supporters who have deluged us with angry comments so furious — we just thought the fact that Palin’s movie sucked…
Three weeks and change after Colorado State Parks issued its long-awaited approval of the artist Christo’s proposed “Over the River” (not to mention several more years of infighting and bureaucratic hoop-jumping), the project, which would suspend some 5.9 miles of fabric panels over a stretch of the Arkansas River between…
Rae McCall didn’t grow up wanting to be a cop. She didn’t dream of going undercover or busting bad guys. In fact, McCall was a wife, mother and waitress hoping to become an attorney when friend, Armedia Gordon, approached her with a tempting opportunity. According to an ad in the…
Strange, intricate art projects have a way of randomly popping up around the Westword office, but usually they come with some kind of semi-frightening note with a phone number, or at least an indication of their ownership — like terrorist groups always admit when they bomb stuff. Except we like…
With DSK (Dominique Strauss-Kahn) and his did-he-didn’t-he-rape-a-New-York-hotel-maid story all over both sides of the Atlantic, it’s not a great time to be French. The guy once seen as a top contender in 2012 presidential election pool has now become a poster-child for what Americans think is wrong with the French…
Yesterday, Netflix informed its users that from September on, its services are going to cost more and offer less — a pretty harsh blow to its wide base of users. The move came as a surprise to many Netflix customers, who have flooded the Netflix Facebook page, blog and Twitter…
Broadly speaking, realist work with a conceptual component has been around a long time, but it wasn’t until the 1980s and ’90s that it really took hold, arguably becoming the stylistic choice for contemporary artists during that time. Now the idea is well established, and there’s no shortage of it…
In a nutshell, a completely sustainable nutshell, the idea behind Design for the Other 90%, a traveling exhibition from the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, has to do with the impact of good design on developing populations who must usually make do with no help from the design community at…
David Grinspoon is a local treasure, and we’re lucky to have him: The astrobiology curator at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, he’s not at all what you expect a scientist to be like. Instead, Grinspoon, who is also a musician and a funny guy, channels the downright psychedelic…
From my point of view, solo shows, and retrospectives in particular, occupy the top place in the hierarchy of art exhibitions. But group shows organized around a theme are a close second, and they are a staple of the summer season. At the moment, there is an astounding array of…
Tonight, First Friday attendees can take a break, grab a drink and a doughnut and raise money for Youth on Record, a non-profit that provides music classes for young people in treatment facilities, at Tattooers on Deck, a silent auction bidding off custom-painted skateboard decks from several tattoo artists, including…
If he were around today, it’s pretty certain that Neal Cassady, immortalized as Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, would appreciate what the street artist Theo has been up to lately. Cassady was a born rabble-rouser, after all, and in more ways than one Theo and a small…
Jack Kerouac was here. He came here and wrote about it in On the Road, his most enduring work, and fell in love with Denver to the extent that, at one point, he actually bought a house in Lakewood. Yes, Kerouac was indeed here, but one thing that will not…
Advocacy for photography in the metro area just took a powerhouse leap forward: Late last week, the region’s two major nonprofit photography organizations — the Colorado Photographic Arts Center and Working With Artists — officially announced their merger, something that’s been a long time in the making. Together, they hope…
While we were researching asteroid movies for Monday’s honorary tribute to Earth’s near collision with an oncoming asteroid, one thing was pretty apparent: In the late ’90s there were a relative shit-ton of asteroid/meteorite/comet/basic space-junk-getting-hurled-at-Earth movies. Turns out, Michael Fairchild, author of Rock Prophesy, Hendrix researcher for the Experience Music…
