Ty Bradford takes the stage

November is TRUTH.

Truth lies at the bottom of a well, winding from its source in the icepack of distant mountains. Truth tastes pristine, uncompromised by what would be profitable or convenient. Truth causes your body to hum like a tuning fork, resonating at the same frequency as the universe around you. “When you experience an undeniable truth,” writer and social worker Jessica Dore observes, “you will beg, borrow, and steal. You will rearrange your whole life, forsake everything, just to serve what is real.”

Our Buenos Aires chapter chose this month’s exploration of Truth and Sol Cotti illustrated the theme.

For CreativeMornings/Denver’s event this month, we’re taking a trip to the Clocktower Cabaret to hear from designer Lonnie Hanzon, who incidentally designed the room we’re meeting in.

Lonnie’s going to be speaking on his process and work, including Camp Christmas, an annual event he designs that will open the week of our gathering.

The Clocktower Cabaret has been Denver’s premiere destination for live immersive entertainment since 2006. Located underneath the historic D&F Clocktower (built in 1911), this gem of a nightclub presents nationally known acts every weekend.

Walking into the showroom is like tripping back in time, with every detail working in tandem to create a seamless “retro” immersive experience.  Lonnie Hanzon’s decadent room design, the staff’s vintage attire, the glitzy and glamorous burlesque and drag acts, the noisemakers on each table, audience participation, food and drink…  it’s the complete package!

October’s theme is Ethos.

We’re excited to be hosted by the Museum of Contemporary Art here in Denver, and to feature Senior Curator Miranda Lash as our speaker.

Our friends at the MCA sent a special “welcome” message about the event that we’re excited to share with you here: Dear Creative Mornings Denver,

We’re so excited to welcome you into the historic Holiday Theater on October 21, 2022! We are Creative Mornings fans and look forward to hosting you for an enthralling conversation on “ETHOS” featuring Miranda Lash, MCA Denver Ellen Bruss Senior Curator.  You can learn more about Miranda here, here, here, and here. She’s amazing. 

To give you some background on MCA Denver at the Holiday Theater, about a year ago we announced a landmark arrangement with the Denver Cultural Property Trust about a new long-term hub for the arts on the Northside of the city.

The Holiday Theater was built in 1914, and was named the Egyptian Theater in 1926. It was renamed the Holiday in 1953 and was one of the first theaters in Colorado to present Spanish language films, featured there from the 1960s through the 1980s.

It has held a variety of other uses over the last 107 years, including as a church, and occasional location for MCA Denver’s artists’ talks and other creative programming since 2015.

We officially opened in April 2022 and are underway generating new opportunities for our brand of innovative, community and artist-driven programming and creative partnerships. 

Do you enjoy artist talks? Film series? Live music performances? What about a costume contest and drag show? Then you will love what we’re doing at the Holiday Theater.

Learn more and sign up to stay updated on the programs and events we are hosting at this link: https://mcadenver.org/holiday-theater

-Your friends at MCA Denver

September’s Theme is Depth.

Depth is a measure of distance. Get a feel for it by traveling along a rock fissure that tunnels into the earth, stepping across the expanse between our galaxy and the next, or diving into the mysteries hidden within ourselves. 

Depth is a space that denies easy ways of seeing or comprehending — when we shine a light into the deep blue of the ocean, we cannot see much further than the surface. In our age of instant answers, we bristle at this resistance. It’s often easier to reduce people, places, and ideas into flattened renderings, rather than grapple with the nuanced and contradictory truths found in their depths. 

In what depths could you submerge yourself if you let curiosity guide you? Ask open-ended questions and listen for responses to arise. With patience, watch those questions transform and transmute as they travel further. Blink your eyes open in the abyss, lose your frame of reference, and discover something altogether new. 
Our Columbus chapter chose this month’s exploration of Depth and Bryan Christopher Moss illustrated the theme.

For our “Depth” Event, CreativeMornings/Denver is featuring Cleo Parker Robinson on September 30th

Cleo is the founder, artistic director, and choreographer of the 50-year-old Denver-based artistic institution. She leads a professional dance Ensemble, Youth and Junior Youth Ensembles, a Dance Academy, an International Summer Dance Institute, a 240-seat theatre that bears her name, and a myriad of community outreach programs. She continues to be the recipient of honors and awards from civic, community, and artistic organizations around the world and is called on by a myriad of organizations and performance venues to bring her Ensemble for performances, and to conduct workshops, master classes, and motivational seminars. Her philosophy of “One Spirit, Many Voices” is reflected in all she does, and is the vision she brings to everyone she meets, everywhere she goes.

Get all the details on our event page!

Hey, there you fantastically creative human! Glad you found your way here.

We are looking to add a new team member to the CreativeMornings/Denver organizing team! If this is you, we’d love to hear from you. If you know someone who might be the right person, share this post with them and we’d love to hear from them.  

The ideal Social Media Chair is someone who is a champion for the Denver creative community and who would enjoy literally being in dialogue with our community through our social channels, managing our content strategy, and our social media platforms and being an advisor to the team on content engagement strategies.

The time commitment is estimated at 10-15 hours per month, which includes a monthly team meeting, time communicating on Slack, Basecamp, and email, and managing the distribution of content via our social media management platform.

You’ve also got a collaborative team that has a content strategy defined, a programming schedule for events and speakers, a ton of great historical media to draw upon, and a designer for all brand/assets design-needs we may have. We are looking for a person with a creative eye, a passion for the community, and a knack for managing social media.

Who’s the team you ask? Well, you get to create content and programming that provides inspiration and wisdom alongside these other creative Denver humans: the CM/D team!  

Tell us about yourself below and share a few things related to creativity and social media, using this link and we’ll be touch soon!

Can’t wait to hear from you!

Much love and loads of creativity,

The CM/D crew

For our third virtual gathering of 2020, we explore the world-wide theme of “NATURE” by way of learning about the collaborative nature between three talented Denver artists - Andrea Slusarski, Kathleen Hooper, & Aubrey Mable.

Andrea is an artist, professor, and sketchbook adventurer based in Denver, Colorado who runs a design studio called Draw From Nature, and Kathleen and Aubrey make up the Colorado-based indie-folk duo known as LVDY.

May’s them is “Nature” - chosen by the Salt Lake City chapter - and we find it such a timely gathering for us in the midst of such an interesting time where a great disruption in our lives has revealed so many more aspects of human nature and being part of the natural world. There’s one essential take away we’ll celebrate this month, and that’s the nature of being stronger together, of being more creative together, than separately.

This CreativeMornings talk will be part musical performance as a celebration, part storytelling to connect to our guests, and part discussion so you leave equipped to create and take on the new world ahead. We’ll learn how these three creative spirits have come to work together, how nature itself is a shared affinity, and how it provides creative fuel for each of them individually and collectively. We’ll hear their thoughts on creativity as part of our human nature and how it’s in our nature to collaborate and co-create TOGETHER…especially when things get funky, wild, and uncomfortable.

As a community of creatives, within the larger community of Denver, we are lucky to have each other, and lucky to spend time together like this!

We look forward to seeing everyone, and their living rooms, and we suppose we get to see some of your office-lives now too!

What a wild time to be alive.

Much love, CreativeMornings/Denver

(P.s. - show up a few minutes early (8:25a) and warm up your creative ears with tunes from LVDY.

We Want YOU for Audience Takes The Stage!

Creative Mornings Denver is calling out to our city! Are you creative? Are you making good work? Are you impacting the community? We want to hear from you during our upcoming event, Audience Takes The Stage!

Submit you idea for a talk here: https://forms.gle/6G2jxXkABWJKV4ZV7

Ever WONDER what you think about WONDER, Creative Mornings Denver?

May’s theme is PRESERVE! 

Every one of our speakers approaches our themes differently, often in ways that we don’t expect. When it comes to PRESERVE, here’s what YOU thought, Creative Mornings Denver!And don’t forget to come to see Toni Yagami on FRIDAY at Curious Theatre! If you haven’t signed up, tickets are still available.

~ and special thanks to our Creative Mornings Denver member, Meg Zimont, for putting this together!

Did you ever play with a kaleidoscope as a kid? But maybe you remember looking through the cardboard or tin tube and pointing the bottom at a lightbulb. As you twisted the tube, tiny colored bits split and fractured into all kinds of different patterns.

Despite being considered a child’s toy, kaleidoscopes are alive and well. Modern makers create incredible works of art, making the ones you played with as a kid pale in comparison. To gaze through a modern kaleidoscope is to experience a moment to breathe and relax. But why and how can a kaleidoscope have such an effect on us?

It’s all about the symmetry. At their core, kaleidoscopes are a perfect example of symmetry created by reflection. The multi-faceted reflections within a kaleidoscope give us the visual sense of balance and harmony. Each reflection is a perfect companion to the one beside it. And depending on the number of mirrors, there can be a plethora of patterns and combinations.

As human beings, patterns provide instinctual joy and calm. It’s why we take pictures of penny tile floors and why we love the shape of a perfect maple leaf. Wherever we find these reflections and patterns, we will likely find symmetry. It doesn’t matter if it’s in mathematics, in science and nature, the arts and even our interactions with other people. We crave symmetry and harmony.

The ultimate expression of symmetry is in the reflected similarity of the larger group. There’s symmetry in a maple leaf because it replicates itself along the vertical line. There’s symmetry in a pattern of hexagons across a floor because they’re each the same. The second you throw in a different element–an oak leaf or a square tile, for example–the symmetry is lost. If symmetry is comfort, then asymmetry is uncertainty.

As creatives, much of our lives is spent taking people out of comfort and putting them into places of uncertainty. It’s how we encourage interactions between the creator and the audience. An artist creates a piece that opens dialogue between different people. A need to find information quickly requires a new UX design. And we all of have experienced an ad for a product we didn’t know we needed. Each of these things takes something uncertain and offers a path back to symmetry.

Surreal is a hard word to describe. A simple Google search reveals a circular definition: “having qualities of surrealism; bizzare.”

That’s helpful, Google.

At the recent Dior exhibit at DAM, the opening section showcased the connection between Surrealism and the artistic brilliance of haute couture. Salvador Dali’s piece, Retrospective Bust of a Woman, was on display as one example of Surrealism. I overheard a woman trying to explain it to her young daughter. The best she could come up with was, “It’s like the painting with the melting clocks.”

Surrealism. Surreal. Why is it so hard to define these things and yet almost everyone can say they’ve had a surreal experience?

Perhaps surreal is hard to define because the word itself is inadequate. “Surreal” is an attempt to define a feeling, a brief second. We know it when it happens. We can’t describe the feeling before the moment happens and we still can’t, even after experiencing it.

Surreal exists between the expected, the unexpected and the incomprehensible. It takes something we know, something we think we know, and then demands we expand our thinking. Or maybe it’s an attempt regain something we lost as we became adults. Lobster Telephone starts to make a bit of sense when you remember that you played with a banana phone as a child.

Maybe that’s why we need surreal in our lives. It brings us back to the spontaneity and free association of childhood. In that world, a banana became a telephone, a blanket became the sail of a boat, and a tub full of bubbles created a mountain range. To watch a small child at play is to watch the imagination discover possibilities. Anything and everything can become part of a play world. Objects can be one thing one minute, and another the next. It’s ever changing, ever new and ever exciting. And from an adult’s perspective, it’s weird, bizzare and perhaps, surreal.

As adults, we rarely see beyond the black and white world of objects in front of us. Becoming “more creative” often demands we get out of our own assumptions and into the magical world where anything can become anything. In that way, surreal is an invitation from our inner five year-old to come out and play.