Dr. Allen Lim pedals around the stage at last year's inaugural event.

​In January, the Denver branch of the national TED think tank staged its first-ever salon (and second-ever event). The evening's three hours of discussions and performances featured seven area personalities sharing their Ideas Worth Spreading -- with a couple even marking return performances with progress updates. The low-key evening, styled after an eighteenth century salon, was limited to a maximum audience of 300 people at RedLine Gallery, compared to the 1,800 who flocked to the Ellie Caulkins Opera House last year for the full-day TEDx conference.

But if you missed basking in all the Colorado inspiration, there's time to catch up between now and the next big event in June. All of this year's salon presentations are now available on YouTube -- and below the jump.

More >>

Poem on the range: Suzi Q Smith with Lady Wu-Tang.

​Denver's share of the country's slam-poetry scene is already a large one, with two nationally competitive teams and a role as the reigning national champion city. But from March 7 to 10, its role will grow even bigger as Denver hosts its first national slam competition, the five-year-old Women of the World Poetry Slam. Sponsored by Poetry Slam, Inc., the four-day event (mentioned in this week's cover story, "Slam, Bam, Thank You, Ma'am") will attract hundreds of international poets to compete for the art's top female spot.

More >>

​Artist Heather Doyle-Maier is stripping a common ritual to its most basic components. In two current shows in the Navajo Arts District, she explores the meaning of getting dressed and undressed.

Doyle-Maier is featured in Lovesick at Zip 37, and she has an installation in the back room of Edge, just up the block. "My show is looking into how gender is a construction -- a social construction that has been loosely based on anatomy, but also has its own separate life," she says of the work at Edge. "I think we are all constructed to perform a gender -- and part of what my work in Her (un)Doing examines is the particular way that girls have been enrolled into a gender."

More >>

​Suzi Q. Smith -- profiled in this week's cover story "Slam, Bam, Thank you, Ma'am" -- has performed poetry for more than a decade, and slammed competitively since 2006. Onstage, the Denver artist augments both her voice and her physical stature, increasing both her volume and her height as her message comes across. Her rotating list of performance poems numbers in the hundreds at this point, but some of her pieces have become staples. Click through to watch Smith perform "Lazarus," her most well-known piece, and two other poems.

More >>

​Editor's note: Westword cartoonist Noah Van Sciver paints the town like nobody else, as demonstrated in his recaps of visits to the Denver Art Museum and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. (Make sure you read Noah's blog for more comics and wonderment.)

On Saturday night, we sent him to Artopia, and this is what he saw...

More >>

No Shame Productions

Jeremy Make and Andy Raney stand with Christine, the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang of vintage golf karts.

​In December, we caught up with Andy Raney and Jeremy Make, the local co-creators of kART Across America, a documentary devoted to their 108-day trek across the United States in a fussy, broken-down golf kart named Christine. On Thursday, Michael Moore caught up with them -- on NPR. In a Talk of the Nation spot devoted to navigating the changes in Oscar rules for feature documentaries, the veteran filmmaker spoke to Make about the implications for artists with smaller financial backing.

More >>

Emily Driskill

​In this week's cover story, "Slam, Bam, Thank You, Ma'am," we profiled Suzi Q. Smith, one of Denver's strongest voices and the number three female slam artist in the world. Smith spends 30 percent of her year traveling to teach and promote poetry outside of Colorado, but she spends 100 percent of her time brainstorming, collecting and writing new poems. Throughout the story, Westword introduced you to one of her most recent pieces, "When I Am Quiet," but Smith's back catalog numbers in the hundreds.

Click through to read "When I Am Quiet" and six of Smith's other poems, and stay tuned for videos of her performances. It is one thing to read her poetry; it is quite another thing to see it.

More >>

​Indian artist Bunky Echo-Hawk is an old soul in a cutting-edge suit -- his bright paintings, slabbed with blocks of blinding color, mix traditional and pop imagery and ideas, resulting in a body of work that's funny, sad, stridently satirical and very smart. He's therefore an excellent choice as a lecturer for the University of Colorado's Center for the American West's Modern Indian Identity series, because he's taken a broad paintbrush to the subject, bringing it to life in ways nobody else can.

More >>

Beverly Lewis.

​Stroll through the romance shelves at any Barnes & Noble, and one subgenre stands out like Harrison Ford in Witness. In a territory marked by heaving chests and flexing muscles, Colorado Springs Christian writer Beverly Lewis keeps sex under her bonnets. But while her Amish romances feature more hand-holding than kissing, more Lord-praising than foreplay, more Pennsylvania Dutch than dirty talk, Lewis has earned a rabid cult following for her emotionally developed alternative to the randy romance novel.

More >>

​Love was in the air on Friday night at Zip 37 in the Navajo Street Art District, where the show LoveSick opened to the public. The exhibit, which features nine artists contemplating the meaning of being lovesick, was curated by artist Katie Hoffman, who unveiled her own piece, Heloise and Abelard , done in oil on canvas.

More >>