Art, Art on the Range

DENVER—No matter what you make of the Denver Art Museum’s new addition, there’s no question that it has raised the profile of the Mile High City. The Hamilton Building, architect Daniel Libeskind’s first project in the United States, is a wild response to the sober call of Gio Ponti’s 1971 North Building. An eruption of jagged titanium-clad forms, it has snagged massive national and international press, adding Denver to the select but growing list of adventurous and savvy cities that have erected must-see art museums whose silhouettes are as iconic as Monopoly tokens, if somewhat larger. 

The Denver Art Museum has not only brought in tourists but also lassoed the locals, which in the spread-out open West means anyone within a 400-mile radius. The DAM has long been known for its extraordinary collection of Native American art, its impressive holdings of pre-Columbian and Spanish Colonial works, and its innovative educational programming, especially for young children. Hot DAM: Art at All Hours, the 35-hour kickoff for the Hamilton Building one year ago, drew Denverites in droves. And with 22,000 square feet of sorely needed new temporary-exhibition space, the museum hopes both to keep them coming back and to attract new audiences with exhibitions like this fall’s “Artisans & Kings: Selected Treasures from the Louvre” that would previously have bypassed Denver en route from coast to coast.

Libeskind has said he was “inspired by the light and the geology of the Rockies, but most of all by the wide-open faces of the people of Denver.” The architect, bruised by the testy debates surrounding his master plan for the World Trade Center site in New York, may have wanted to be politic, but his comment reflects the perception of Denver as a power-to-the-people metropolis. After all, it was the local population who passed a $62.5 million bond initiative in 1999 to support the DAM’s $110 million expansion. On a per capita basis, Denver collects more for the arts than any other city in the United States. Its One Percent for Art program requires that 1 percent of the budget for new public works be spent on cultural projects. And a 20-year-old sales tax of one penny on every $10 spent (roughly $36 million a year) funds over 300 cultural organizations. So it’s fitting that engraved in the façade of the 2002 municipal building named for former mayor Wellington Webb is the rhetorical question “What Is the City but the People?”

Under current mayor John Hickenlooper, who is also a geologist, entrepreneur, and supporter of the arts, Denver pulled off an impressive coup, landing the highly sought-after estate of pioneering Abstract Expressionist Clyfford Still. For 25 years, the bulk of Still’s oeuvre—2,400 pieces, representing 94 percent of his life’s work—has been out of the public eye. That will all change when the Clyfford Still Museum, designed by Allied Works Architecture, opens in 2010 immediately adjacent to the Hamilton Building.

In spite of the more than 150 works of public art that dot the town, what the people of Denver are mostly wide open to are recreational opportunities. It isn’t easy distracting Denverites from the 650 miles of paved bike trails throughout the city and the infinite thrills offered by the Rockies that fence in the western horizon. When the Museum of Contemporary Art reopens this fall, its new home will be competing not just with the DAM across town but also with a building just a stroll away, over the 15th Street Bridge: the Denver flagship of REI (Recreational Equipment, Inc.). Within the former Denver Tramway power station, a 1901 landmark that’s three times the size of the Museum of Contemporary Art, are a 45-foot-high climbing pinnacle, a mountain bike course, and test stations for everything from bike lights to camp stoves to outdoor footwear. In the Titanium Cold Chamber, for instance, customers can test sleeping bags and parkas in temperatures as low as 30 degrees below zero.

Ideas are what will be put to the test at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s new home. Counting on the David Adjaye–designed building to be as alluring as the DAM’s Hamilton Building, the MCA nonetheless views its architecture as representing a different strategy. “The design sup-ports rather than defines our mission,” says executive director and chief curator Cydney Payton. “We’re a non-collecting institution dedicated to art of the past 10 years, to cross-disciplinary discourse, and to the dynamism of Denver, which artists and intellectuals move in and out of.”