Category: Culture

  • Yves Saint Laurent: 40 Years of Fashion, Yes, at Denver Art Museum from adobeairstream.com

    Yves Saint Laurent: 40 Years of Fashion, Yes, at Denver Art Museum from adobeairstream.com

    Fashion as art is nothing new. The first exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for a living artist happened in 1983 when Diana Vreeland organized Yves Saint Laurent for the Costume Institute. In 2011, Alexander McQueen’s Savage Beautybecame the best attended exhibition in the Met’s history. The populism of fashion…

  • Art Feasting in Santa Fe from adobeairstream.com

    Art Feasting in Santa Fe from adobeairstream.com

    Place: Santa Fe. Time: A crisp winter’s evening the end of February 2012. It isn’t snowing, the air is dry, cool, as I walk around the plaza, and up on Canyon Road wearing a coat–no hat or gloves are needed. It’s pleasant. I’m with my cousins from Texas and a friend from New York. We’ve…

  • To Calatrava or Not To Calatrava from adobeairstream.com

    To Calatrava or Not To Calatrava from adobeairstream.com

    In November, The Denver Post reported that the City of Denver had settled with starchitect Santiago Calatrava, agreeing to pay him a $250,000 licensing fee to utilize his designs for a hotel, bridge, train station and terminal extension at Denver International Airport. The article reports that the agreement between the City and Calatrava’s design firm…

  • The Arts as Catalyst for Change: Hardrock Revision from Arts Perspective Magazine

    The Arts as Catalyst for Change: Hardrock Revision from Arts Perspective Magazine

    “Colorado Art Ranch’s middle name is art,” executive director and nomadic Colorado wanderer Grant Pound proudly states. Yet he knows his five-year-old venture is confusing to some. “However, this may understate what we do. The arts are certainly involved, but we are promoting the arts as a catalyst for change. We want to see creative…

  • Colorado Releases Creative District Guidelines from adobeairstream.com

    Colorado Releases Creative District Guidelines from adobeairstream.com

    UPDATE: Salida Art District and Art District on Santa Fe in Denver certified as first two Creative Districts. In yet another effort to boost creative placemaking, the state of Colorado has released the guidelines in support of HB11-1031 the creation of Creative Districts in communities, neighborhoods or contiguous geographic areas around the state. Colorado Creative…

  • MCA Denver, Exploring the CounterCulture (West Coast Style) from adobeairstream.com

    MCA Denver, Exploring the CounterCulture (West Coast Style) from adobeairstream.com

    The counterculture movement was in essence a western phenomenon. That’s the premise of West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977, a book and exhibition currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver. Yes, significant moments played out at Woodstock and in Greenwich Village, but the American West allowed…

  • Fort Collins to Make a Rocky Mountain Regional Arts Incubator from adobeairstream.com

    Fort Collins to Make a Rocky Mountain Regional Arts Incubator from adobeairstream.com

    Fort Collins, Colorado, tasked with creating a Rocky Mountain Regional Arts Incubator, won a $100,000 “Our Town” grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The collaborators on this public-private “creative placemaking” initiative include the city of Fort Collins’s Cultural Services Department, Colorado State University and Beet Street, a cultural programmer behind Fort Collins’s creative…

  • Clyfford Still Museum to Open with Fanfare, and Controversy from adobeairstream.com

    Clyfford Still Museum to Open with Fanfare, and Controversy from adobeairstream.com

    I wrote this piece last month for adobeairstream.com. The museum opens this week. On September 22, I took a hard-hat tour of the Brad Cloepfil-designed Clyfford Still museum in Denver. The 28,000-square foot, two-story structure— a rooted concrete cube—sits behind its more outlandish neighbor, the Denver Art Museum. By way of  transition,  a pastoral park…

  • How Design for the Other 90 Percent Applies to Colorado

    How Design for the Other 90 Percent Applies to Colorado

    We live in a world filled with cool products and great design. I love my iPhone, desire an iPad and remain happy each day when I walk into my office and sit down in front of my sleek iMac with wireless keyboard and mouse. Everything works. I don’t have to worry about daily software updates…

  • Quilting for their Lives

    Quilting for their Lives

    In a remote village in the Thar desert of Pakistan, the women are primarily Hindu in a Muslim country. Not only that, but they are from the bottom of the untouchable caste system. They have very few options in life for what they can do to earn a living. Most of the women are illiterate…