FRI, 11/21 While his contemporaries flocked to New York and Paris, twentieth-century painter Vance Kirkland chose to spend more than fifty years living and working in Denver. He was not only an innovative artist who painted his way through five major periods, but also an educator — teaching art at…
SUN, 11/23 The image of the perfectly appointed dark-haired beauty in a pillbox hat and blood-spattered pink suit is the first picture that comes to mind at the mention of Jackie Kennedy, the princess of Camelot who sat by her husband when he was shot and killed in Dallas forty…
It was at the end of the nineteenth century that the worldwide romance with the American West first got off the ground. This happened because, even as the earliest settlers were making their way here, the dramatic scenery of the region was attracting artists, particularly photographers and painters. These artists…
Right now, in the South Gallery of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center (30 West Dale Street, Colorado Springs, 1-719-634-5583), there is a very good show called Gene Kloss: Southwestern Printmaker. The large exhibit, which has been handsomely installed, showcases the artist’s famous etchings and drypoints. Kloss was born in…
John Patrick Shanley’s Italian American Reconciliation is an amiable amble of a play that revolves around the friendship of two men in New York’s Little Italy. Aldo Scalicki (Tony Catanese) is a funny, fast-talking mama’s boy who has never managed to maintain a relationship with a woman. Huey Maximilian Bonfigliano…
I haven’t seen Eric Bogosian himself perform, and I haven’t read his work, so I really don’t know if his writing is as drop-dead funny as actor Alex Ray June’s performance makes it appear, or if June is as brilliant an actor as he seems to be when doing Bogosian’s…
In the annals of fraud and fakery, a discredited ex-magazine reporter named Stephen Glass will probably end up as a mere footnote. The people who forge van Goghs and the con artists who bilk naive grandmothers out of their life savings (not to mention certain fast-dancing corporate executives) more richly…
Russell Crowe to his agent: “More Oscar bait. Now.” Agent, considering his cut of Crowe’s $20 million payday: “Yes, sir.” A possible scenario, anyway. Thus, Crowe is back in another iconic, self-serious performance, and his beefy mug will stare down upon us from this season’s heroic movie posters until Tom…
The Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, a collection of ten new films that address social and political unrest in Rwanda, the Middle East, Chile and Bosnia, among other places, will screen November 13-16 at the Starz FilmCenter in the Tivoli Building on the Auraria campus. Co-presented by Human Rights…
Lila Downs knows no boundaries. A striking beauty with powerhouse vocals that sound as though she swallowed an entire orchestra (heavy on the oboe), Downs has been recognized across the globe both for her extraordinary singing and for her talented storytelling through song. An entirely new and younger audience in…
Thursday, November 13 The ongoing El Centro Su Teatro Visiting Artist Series brings in a little Puerto Rican spice from the Big Apple this weekend when it presents El Apagn/The Blackout, a comedy with live music performed by New York’s Pregones Theater Company. Based on the short story “The Night…
For the characters in Train, the latest book by Pete Dexter, golf isn’t a gentleman’s game; it’s an eighteen-hole lesson in existentialism. After one player loses a bet, he curses “like he just saw life’s grand design, as often happened in golf.” And later, Dexter says, “I talk about how…
THURS, 11/13 Why, exactly, does brown mustard suck? Find out tonight at the premiere of a new Denver-based sitcom, So Dope, to be screened at the entertainment extravaganza So Dope: An Evening of Comedy.”It’s a story about two lifelong friends who don’t want to work their corporate jobs anymore, so…
THURS, 11/13 At age 78, skiing and filmmaking legend Warren Miller shows no sign of slowing down: The powder runs, rail slides and freefalls are more extreme than ever in Journey, Miller’s 54th annual high-energy ode to winter sports.The filmmaker’s familiar voice opens the film with “Let’s get the freak…
THURS, 11/13 Mayor Hickenlooper doesn’t have to worry about cleaning up the city after The Day It Snowed Tortillas. Fortunately, the edible precipitation will be confined to the Denver Puppet Theatre, 3156 West 38th Avenue. The 45-minute Southwest-inspired production tells the story of a small town in which villagers save…
THURS, 11/13 When Denver resident Jason Bosch first attended the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival in July 2001, he realized that knowledge, not ignorance, was bliss.”I felt kind of ashamed that I was so ignorant about the world,” says Bosch, adding that the New York-based festival “gives people the…
FRI, 11/14 When does an independent film become a work of art? The International Experimental Cinema Exposition (TIE) poses that question to nearly fifty featured directors who carve and sculpt in celluloid. The result is a sort of dadaesque feast for the eyes in which said filmmakers manipulate their avant-garde…
Even when people were watching Will Ferrell on television every Saturday night, they weren’t seeing Will Ferrell. They saw no more than a glimpse of him, beneath wigs and behind glued-on beards and buried under characters who became almost better known than he during his seven years on Saturday Night…
In the 1970s, contemporary art fractured into a riot of diverse styles. The anything-goes situation in which we find ourselves today is the inevitable product of this explosion. Now that artists have had decades to work out the various logical extensions of this cornucopia of ideas, contemporary art encompasses a…
In the past couple of months, Bryan Andrews created dozens of large sculptures for his solo show, which is now playing at Cordell Taylor Gallery (see page 55). That would seem like a lot of work, but somehow Andrews had some spare time on his hands. How else to explain…
Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle is a bracing black comedy, an exploration of the nature of evil. But if the topic is murky, the play is not. It’s as straightforward, clean and ruthless as a pen stroke. The action takes place in a milieu we recognize from Alan Bennett and…
Playwright Kenneth Lonergan is, among other things, a poet of confused and disaffected youth. He’s perhaps best known for writing and directing the film You Can Count on Me, which involves a young woman and her charmingly feckless brother — played, respectively, by Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo. The protagonist…
