Some people just bask in the golden glow of old stuff; Jeanne Connolly’s one of them. A New Jersey native and former Crate & Barrel visual designer, Connolly, who longed to learn the ropes of upholstering, had one of those turning-thirty moments and moved west, on the advice of a…

The work of visual designer (and Resident Wizard at the Museum of Outdoor Arts) Lonnie Hanzon is often fueled by the ephemeral, lost in time and tinged with the brown edge of a daguerreotype. And that’s no accident. Hanzon’s own fascination with the toys and media of a bygone time…

One thing I love about the start of the holiday shopping season is that I get to see all my old entrepreneurial and handy friends — all the tried-and-true gift markets that I’ve grown to love, come back for another year, full of unlimited browsing potential and good buys from…

“I’ve always resisted the idea of the string quartet as an art form that exists for Sunday-afternoon soirees. I feel emboldened and empowered and enabled to make programs of our music that, in their own way, examine things in our society.” So says David Harrington of the musically outspoken Kronos…

There’s not a rock guitarist alive who can’t claim that at least a teensy bit of the Jimi Hendrix vibe flows in his veins; even today, the voodoo child’s screaming licks and dead-on phrasing still give ya the shivers, though he’s been dead for more than thirty years. That’s why…

TACtile Arts Center director Dianne Denholm can sew a pretty piece. But when she picked up a pair of needles recently to knit a pair of socks, something she’d never done before, she found herself less than impressed with the results. “I’m kind of stuck, and I don’t know anyone…

Ballet Nouveau Colorado artistic director Garrett Ammon casts a youthful aura over the troupe by creating such amped-up works as his hot, hot balletic version of Moulin Rouge and his growing series of Garrett Ammon’s Rock Ballets, which includes previous dance versions of “Mediate,” by INXS, and Queen’s “Love of…

“Omigod, I feel like it’s Christmas!” As the entries pour in to her EvB Studio for SolePurpose, a juried group show of shoe-themed clay artworks, Denver ceramicist Marie Gibbons gushes over them, calling every single piece “amazing” and “fabulous” and a few other superlatives women often reserve only for their…

Milliner Erin Saboe doesn’t mince words about being a hat maker. It’s what she does, and that’s that. It all started because she loved hats but couldn’t find a ready-to-wear one that fit her head, so she learned the trade at the top — at the Fashion Institute of Technology…

How is this year different from all other years at the Mizel Center for Arts and Culture? The former Leah Cohen Festival of Jewish Books and Authors, the organi-zation’s long-running annual combination Jewish book fair and author series, has morphed into the Jewish Arts, Authors, Movies and Music Festival, a…

The girlish pink-and-black curlicued, marquee-style sign in front says it all. When the decision was made to move downtown Littleton stalwart and favorite lady’s store Details Boutique across the street to roomier digs in the storefront at 2396 West Main Street earlier this year, the new building’s colorful past as…

One of the many centerpieces of New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee’s celebrated and fascinating literary foodie fling, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food, is the author’s exploration of “Why Chow Mein Is the Chosen Food of the Chosen People: The Great Kosher Duck…

Tiffany Smyth hangs with belly dancers, fire performers, the Ren Fest crowd and the tribal psychedelic rock band Kan’nal, but first and foremost, she’s a mask-maker of enormous talent, working in leather, beads and feathers to create art nouveau-inspired organic disguises unlike anything you’ve ever seen. She owes some of…

“You want to know what it takes to sell real estate? It takes BRASS BALLS to sell real estate.” In this day and age, David Mamet’s words ring especially true, making Glengarry Glen Ross, his Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about a cutthroat competition among corrupt real-estate salesmen, still relevant despite being…

The works of local artist Viviane Le Courtois never fail to fascinate, but her latest installation (and the centerpiece of Trickle Down, a show of works by Le Courtois, John Lopez and Andrew Englander at Plus Gallery’s intern-run Object + Thought, 3559 Larimer Street) will go a step beyond by…

Kitchen tales wear well. Anything, after all, that’s set behind the scenes and revolves around plates of food, glorious food, in constant degrees of preparation, can’t help but grab your gut…literally, figuratively and in every way possible. Fried: Surviving Two Centuries in Restaurants is a new, foodie-friendly history/memoir/personal tall-tale by…

Halloween’s more elegant primo, El Día de los Muertos, is often misunderstood by those who don’t actually celebrate it: As local muertos artist Jerry Vigil notes, the true meaning of the annual and traditional tribute to the departed in Mexico is perceived by outsiders as the simple sum of its…

American poet Ellen Rachlin once said, “A woman in her lifetime will spend far more hours hugging a handbag than a man,” which is the only justification needed for Pocketbook Anthropology: A Treasure of Handbags, a traveling exhibition currently on view at the Boulder History Museum, 1206 Euclid Avenue in…

It was the turn-of-the-century Y2K scare and its threatened “digital apocalypse” that first inspired Omaha-based bar-code artist Scott Blake to develop his oeuvre, along with the dot-screen technique made famous by pop art icon Roy Lichtenstein: His first bar-code image was “Bar Code Jesus,” a pixelated portrait mosaic of Photoshopped…

University of Colorado at Boulder dance professor Michelle Ellsworth is like the Roz Chast of performance: neurotic, quirky, concerned with the minute. But humor isn’t her intention when she creates a new work, which invariably employs choreography as a vehicle for something much more complex than sheer movement. “People think…

Though Damien Hirst was on her radar well before he sold a lot of art for nearly $41 million at Sotheby’s in September, departing MCA director and curator Cydney Payton says the time is right to be showing the controversial British artist’s large-scale works in Denver. It’s his moment out…

Singapore-born violinist Kailin Yong calls himself a “fiddler for peace,” and he does so without a shred of irony or self-consciousness; in 2003, Yong was even awarded year-long possession of the Daniel Pearl Memorial Violin, an instrument built in the memory of the American reporter slain by terrorists (Pearl was…