Articulate City

The August Art Party

RSVP Today for the August Art Party!
Register today for our August Art Party, and say so long to summer with our bicycle-icious outdoor cinema celebration! 

Join us on Thursday, August 28th, at 6:15pm at New Belgium Brewing Company (500 Linden Street) for one of our favorite traditions, New Belgium’s Bike-In Cinema, which benefits Arts Alive Fort Collins. Movie: The Goonies. Mode of transportation: Bicycle! We’ll form a formidable bike bunch & cruise to the cinema together to find a VIP seating section, delicious snacks, & a bevy of beers. Need a bike? Want to join our pre-party bicycle parade downtown? Contact us for the scoop! Articulate City Members attend for FREE and non-members pay just $30 if registered prior to 5:00pm on August 26th.
Click here to register for the August Art Party!

It’s been one crazy summer so far, and August promises to be jam-packed with all sorts of fun, festivalacious events. It’s kind of hard to keep track, but here’s an attempt to let you know what you’ll NOT want to miss in the upcoming month:

Casual Friday: Friday, August 15th

Casual Friday takes an unusual twist (of your arms) this month with a special invitation to a party at Mystiq Martini in Old Town Square on Friday, August 15th, at 5:01pm. Here’s the catch: in order to receive your invitation to the party, you’ll simply need to sign up for a volunteer shift during Bohemian Nights at NewWestFest, a FREE three-day community celebration which is taking place in downtown Fort Collins August 15th – 17th. NewWestFest celebrates Fort Collins’ birthday, and Bohemian Nights provides the music program portion of the festival; nearly 60 bands will perform on 5 outdoor stages throughout the weekend. Articulate City’s very own Julie Sutter is in charge of locating lots o’ volunteers for the Bohemian Nights side of the festival and is looking for enthusiastic, music-minded folks from Articulate City to fill volunteer shifts during the weekend, many involving the opportunity to meet and greet the artists who will be performing at the festival. If you love live music, this is a wonderful way to lend your support while you enjoy the performances. Email Julie directly at or give her a call at 970-420-6006 to sign up for a shift and receive your August 15th invite. The Mystiq party takes place right on there on the square just prior to the Bohemian Nights at NewWestFest kickoff concert featuring 12 Cents for Marvin. You’ll get to enjoy a beer or two, compliments of Bohemian Nights, all while mixing and mingling with other Bohemian Nights volunteers, including Julie, Jeanie and many more Articulate City members and new friends!

There are a limited number of shifts available, so contact Julie ASAP if you are interested. If we fill all the available volunteer shifts for Bohemian Nights, we’ll start a waiting list. There may also be some volunteer shifts available on the NewWestFest side of the celebration (where you could help out your fellow hard-working Articulate City Members Peggy Lyle, Amanda Miller, and Nikki Walters of the Downtown Business Association – it takes a village to put on a terrific festival, after all!)

Not interested in volunteering at all, but still longing for your monthly Casual Friday experience? We invite you to go renegade and make an appearance at a different bar downtown that Friday afternoon. We recommend Lucky Joe’s, Mystiq’s nearby neighbor in Old Town Square. Then we can all flock out and be reunited at the concert at 7:00pm!

Whether you plan to volunteer some of your time or just kick back and enjoy the festival that weekend, be sure you visit www.bohemiannights.org to check out the full line-up of bands and plan your mid-August hurrah.

Speaking of Volunteer Opportunities …

Volunteers are needed to help collect petition signatures to get an item that is very near and dear to our hearts on the ballot for November: a .1% retail sales tax that would benefit arts and science organizations in Fort Collins/Loveland. (That’s only 1 penny on $10 to help out the arts community!) 6000 petition signatures are needed by August 4th! If you can help canvas your neighborhood or work with a group to collect signatures outside places like King Soopers or Sam’s Club this weekend, please contact or call 970-223-3530 to sign up. Interested in getting together an Articulate City petition posse, or at least signing one of our petitions? Call Jeanie at 970.219.8333 or email her at .

Articulate City EXTRA! Garden Party for the Arts

It’s time once again for the most art-tastic outdoor party of the summer – the Garden Party for the Arts, produced by Arts Alive Fort Collins at the beautiful home and outdoor gardens of Gary and Carol Ann Hixon. This year’s Garden Party for the Arts takes place on Sunday, August 10th at 4:00pm and provides a unique array of mini-performances throughout the summer afternoon, showcasing Fort Collins arts in all forms. Contact us directly for tickets – we’re putting together a fun group of Articulate City-ites to attend the party and we can swing a smokin’ deal for our members (that may even include transportation to and from the party!) Call Jeanie at 970-219-8333 or email to reserve your tickets today!

Duet for One

Articulate City Members Matt Strauch and Allison Hines wanted us to let you know about a special partnership performance of Duet for One, a play based on the life of renowned cellist, Jacqueline du Pre, who struggled with an MS diagnosis.  The play will run at Bas Bleu Theatre Company for one week only in August, and all proceeds will benefit the Colorado Chapter of the National MS Society and Bas Bleu’s capital campaign. One great play, two great causes. Look for nightly performances August 11th – 15th at 7:30pm, with a Sunday matinee August 17 at 2:30pm. Visit www.basbleu.org for more details.

Articulate City’s August Art Party

Last, but certainly not least, make sure you SAVE THE DATE for Articulate City’s August Art Party, which will take place on Thursday, August 28th. More details coming soon, but we suggest you prepare for an evening of outdoor fun that might just involve your bicycle, will certainly involve some beer and will still be a cultural event, really! Stay tuned for more details …

Welcoming a Less-Than-Perfect Website to the WWW

In a move that defies conventional wisdom (in fact, this may defy wisdom, period), we have chosen to go live with our website. Immediately. There are many, many reasons why we SHOULDN’T have done this, including but not limited to the following: it’s not “done” yet, it’s not pretty enough, it’s not tested, and we know, for a fact, that a lot of it just plain doesn’t work yet.

So why on earth would we choose to do this, the global equivalent of walking through the convention center with our skirt tucked into the back of our pantyhose? Because we thought there were actually some very good reasons to go public with our site sooner rather than later.

For one thing, we are absolutely bursting with the need to share information with you all about some terrific upcoming arts events, and we wanted to do it NOW. Call it premature dissemination if you will, but we’re betting you’ll want to cuddle afterwards anyway.

Another pro-disguised-as-con: involving you, the world, in the process early means you get a chance to tell us what you actually want from the site before we smugly decide that for you. By all means, take a look at what’s there and tell us what you like, what you dislike, what you don’t see that you wish you did, what you do see that you wish we didn’t, etc. We have a long list of “to-do’s” to finish before we consider the site complete, but we’d like to incorporate your suggestions, too. And once we’ve got all the “to-do’s” turned into “ta-da’s!”, we can all celebrate together. We’ll keep you posted on our progress as we progress.

Finally, we know you’re the kind of people who will look back at this and say “well, the website took a while, but the enthusiasm was there all along.” Group hug.

So, without further ado, I invite you to explore http://www.articulatecity.com

The home page is the most important one right now ... check out all the cool stuff happening in the next week! Thanks for supporting our efforts to think locally and post globally. Viva la Art Party!