CORE New Art Space, which hangs open-entry shows quarterly, decided to turn this summer’s into an unofficial Biennial offering. Juried by Ken Hamel of Denverarts.org and curated by CORE member Mark Penner Howell, the resulting show, Locally Grown, puts the open-minded CORE stamp on a showcase of largely unaffiliated local…

The tiny town of Glendale has been doing a bang-up job of celebrating July 4th for years – though its festivities, which always fall a day before or after Independence Day, never compete with all those municipalities that shoot off their own spectaculars on the holiday proper. The date isn’t…

For Ultimate Fighting Championship fans, the biggest bang of this Independence Day weekend involves a different kind of fireworks: After illnesses and postponements, the long awaited heavyweight match between two really big boys – Denver’s own Shane Carwin and formidable opponent Brock Lesnar – will air tonight on pay-per-view television,…

Cinema Q is the Denver Film Society’s monthly nod to GLBT culture. But Cinema Q is also a once-a-year film festival designed to celebrate and kick off another year of those monthly screenings. The second annual Cinema Q Film Festival begins today at Starz FilmCenter with a 7 p.m. opening-night…

If you’ve been lying awake at night thinking desperately about how to save helpless Gulf seabirds covered in goo, you’re not alone. But thanks to fellow worrier and block organizer Robin Lohre of the Talulah Jones boutique, 1122 East 17th Avenue, you can now contribute in a small but certain…

Art is a big element in the Biennial of the Americas, but many of our local artists felt left out as the event began to take shape. So when Lauri Lynnxe Murphy, one of the area’s toughest artist activists, was offered a chance to curate a showcase that reveled in…

Those Iron Chef competitors have no problem looking tough as they prepare for a match: Nothing says “Don’t touch me” better than a row of perfectly sharpened Wüsthofs glistening on a counter. But what about an Iron Artist? Can he wield a nasty Kolinski sable brush in your face and…

If you love good coffee, you know that it is an art form: Its origins and the quality of preparation are what separate a bitter cuppa diner joe from a perfect espresso topped by a smooth, airy layer of foamy crema. Ah. And there’s no better place to learn more…

The Denver PrideFest runs on a shoestring each year, but it still remains free, and that’s just the first perk of this annual festival, which rolls around for its 35th year today and tomorrow in Civic Center Park. Not every pride event can make that boast anymore, notes Heather Draper…

Among the myriad festivities going on all around downtown today, there’s at least one that comes with a big slice of history. Juneteenth 2010: We Define Who We Are, taking place on Welton Street between 24th and 29th streets, commemorates the end of slavery in Texas, as it has on…

Detective fiction is a territorial genre by nature because of the way location flavors the action and guides the characters. The nice thing about that is how even the most remote locales can support and enhance a solid plot. Considering its sparse populace, Wyoming’s been lucky in that respect: At…

We’ve already come to know and love the RiNo seasonal open-studio tours in Denver’s workingman’s art district “where art is made.” But today’s 2010 RiENNIAL studio tour raises the bar even further. With a heightened sense of community wafting through the air, the RiENNIAL will operate as an unofficial introduction…

Denver’s Hope Communities has been finding ways to get local low-income, working individuals and families into affordable housing and better jobs since 1980, and that’s more than enough cause to celebrate. Feed Your Face, Find a Place, the organization’s thirtieth-anniversary fundraiser, will do that in a style befitting its overall…

Anyone who hooks up with the RiENNIAL studio tour today (and even some art collectors who don’t) will not want to miss today’s Lauri Lynnxe Murphy Studio Sale, the last of two closeout bonanza open houses hosted by the departing Denver artist, who’s on her way to grad school in…

You will be speechless. Trying to describe the work of Baltimore-based multimedia artist Jimmy Joe Roche in words — mind-blowing, psychedelic, weird, hilarious, frightening, creepy — won’t help, either. But perhaps American Ectoplasm, the title of a new show by Roche opening today at the Rocky Mountain College of Art…

The thinking behind this year’s Denver Bike to Work Day echoes the way people have already been thinking these days: Why not bike to work every day? As usual, today’s annual event will include breakfast stations en route, downtown tech stations, prize giveaways and free bike parking, particularly at the…

Perhaps it’s a wee bit presumptuous for the members of Aurora’s East End Arts District to call their slice of town the “New Brooklyn.” But they’ve got the right idea picturing themselves as pioneers in a more affordable territory, and in order to understand what kind of scene is percolating…

It wasn’t easy, but I’m finally getting used to the idea of Broadway musicals based on comic movies. And vice versa, for that matter, but that’s another tale to tell. There was Hairspray. And The Producers and Spamalot and, lately, hysterical visions of Nathan Lane as Gomez Addams dancing in…

You know the scene in Lady and the Tramp where it’s just two dogs in love in an alley, with the moonlight and a plate of spaghetti? Alleys do have a certain charm, and, as in the case of local designer Trisha Hoke, they can be downright inspirational. Hoke’s latest…

For Stephanie Shearer of Pandora Jewelry, a birthday party just wouldn’t be the same if it wasn’t also a fundraiser for a great cause. Pandora, the long-lived anchor of the little retail/restaurant enclave on the 200 block of East 13th Avenue, turns seventeen this week, and to celebrate, Shearer and…

It’s concert season all over the Front Range, including at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, where the spirit of the music lives on this summer, not only on the outdoor stage, but in the galleries. Three music-inspired summer shows — Two Fisted Art Attack: Denny Dent Retrospective;…

Ask Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art associate curator Petra Sertic what’s special about a trio of shows opening today, and she’ll tell you straight up: “Everything.” A mixed bag of shows by two strong artists with local ties — Tony Ortega and Gary Sweeney — and a collaborative exhibition focusing…