Ask locals where to see the best art in Denver and more than a few will point you toward the famously angular Denver Art Museum. Multiple Uber drivers will suggest you visit the trendy RiNo district. Both are good ideas, but keep pestering the nice people of Denver and the recommendations start to get more interesting. There’s the American Museum of Western Art. There’s Meow Wolf’s Convergence Station, though I leave it up to you to decide whether that’s really art. There are the eye-catching public installations, many rather horsey, like Donald Lipski’s The Yearling and the sculptor-killer, Blue Mustang (Observer correspondent Nick Hilden rightly pointed out some months back that Denver has a thing for big blue mammals). Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s monumental dustpan, Big Sweep, is certainly something. And Leo Tanguma’s murals in Denver International Airport are said to hide the secrets of the Illuminati.
But I’m not here to see any of that. I’ve traveled to Colorado’s capital with a friend for the sprawling Cherry Creek Arts Festival—an annual juried event that attracts applications from thousands of artists and supports arts initiatives across the state. This year’s festival was spread out over six short blocks with tent after tent of exhibiting artists plus at least four cross streets with more artists’ booths and food vendors, live music, a silent auction and a crafty area for kids, which is where we stopped for shade and shaved ice on Day 0.
It wasn’t just the heat that got to us. As Jason Horowitz—now Rome bureau chief of the New York Times but once staff writer for this publication—put it in 2008: “Even if you are not thirsty, the one thing everyone in Denver tells you to do is drink water. That headache you feel is not a headache, it’s dehydration. Don’t take Advil, Bayer or Tylenol. Drink water. Lots of water. Keep water on your bed stand and water in your car. Put water in your backpack.”
My friend put water in her bag; I did not, but I did pack sumatriptan, and she was kind enough to share her water with me during our whirlwind semi-self-guided tour of what’s on in Denver. We had two days and two nights to experience as much art as possible—like a pub crawl of culture. Our host and home base: Hotel Clio, one of several upscale hotels in Denver, home to Toro Latin Kitchen & Lounge (more on this later) and the site of one of the most well-appointed fitness centers I’ve ever encountered. Also, deep, deep bathtubs. I took two baths per day, just because I could, but beyond the baths, here’s what our 48 hours of art in Denver looked like.
Day 0
I pick up my friend at 4:45 a.m. for a 7:30 a.m. flight. Neither of us plans to check a bag, but I am naturally anxious and like to be in the terminal two hours before boarding to confirm that my gate actually exists. We breeze through security, our gate does in fact exist and we grab breakfast sandwiches that I can’t eat because who the hell is actually hungry before nine? I end up tucking into my gluey room-temperature egg and cheese on the plane while cringing through the new Mean Girls and then Jules, which I’d never heard of and am honestly still not sure I’d recommend. My friend graciously takes the middle seat and sleeps through almost the entire flight.
We land at Denver International Airport without incident and despite how much I’ve talked up the absolute weirdness of it—from the subterranean reptiles dwelling in the bunkers underneath to the Flat Earth propaganda in the murals to the resident ghosts—I’m too tired to even look for the famous gargoyles. I am, in fact, desperate for two things: to get more coffee and to get to the Uber that arrived roughly a minute and a half after I ordered it. Once on the road, we gaze unblinkingly out the windows, anxious for a glimpse of Blucifer, but we’re on the wrong side of the highway.
It’s too early to check in, and I don’t want to visit the Cherry Creek Art Festival until we talk to PR head Bryant Palmer, so we drop our bags at Hotel Clio—briefly admiring the art in the lobby on loan from Clayton Lane Fine Arts, which we’ll visit tomorrow—and head away from the long line of artists’ booths just around the corner. By now, we’re exceedingly hungry, but our first stop is Masters Gallery, which has a fun mix of bronzes and other sculptural works, paintings and glass art. We were particularly taken with Lawrence Feir’s fantastical metalwork wall sculptures that rendered the human form in something like chainmail (but make it sci-fi). Lunch is hand pies from the nearby Pasty Republic.
In the early afternoon, after checking in and refreshing ourselves—that’s bath number one—we have a quick meet and greet with festival PR head Bryant Palmer, who gives us the Media tags that will get us into the daily festival VIP lunch and hopefully make it less awkward when I ask artists if I can record them. During our brief chat, he tells us that last year’s participants sold $4.4 million worth of art, averaging out to about $18,000 per participating artist, which probably accounts for the popularity of this festival with artists.
Still, Palmer says, it’s a pretty accessible event, which is reassuring for us to hear, as our art buying budgets are relatively small. “You don’t have to spend fifteen thousand dollars to get something fantastic. You can if you want, it’s perfectly doable here, but you also can purchase original art for a lot less, too.”
As we start down 2nd Avenue, the festival’s main thoroughfare, I am already grappling with how I will write about all this. There’s the by-the-numbers approach: the festival showcases the work of 250 artist exhibitors selected from among 1,942 artist applicants, with twenty returning award-winners from last year’s festival and five specially selected emerging artists, and so on. Booth 1 is a real eyecatcher, hung with the colorful, vintage-photo-inspired paintings of Signe and Genna Grushovenko. One large work, Picture in Picture, stands out: in it, two women browse artworks displayed on a city street. Very meta.
From there, it’s a mad dash to see as much of the work of those 250 artists as we can while attempting to stay cool in the afternoon heat. My friend is immediately taken with the glass and ceramic art, and I can’t blame her. It’s not really my thing—I’m a painting person—but there are people here doing absolutely amazing stuff with glass and clay, from Amber Marshall’s modular pouffes to Randy O’Brien’s crackled wall pillows. Meanwhile, I gravitate toward the minimalist paintings of Ezra Siegel and similar works (I have a type) but nothing really has me overcome until I see Darryl Cox, Jr.’s striking amalgamations of frame and driftwood that are unlike anything I’ve seen before.
Other booths that stand out on our first walkthrough of the festival include those of Amy Flynn, who builds whimsical robot sculptures out of found materials, Brice McCasland’s visually immersive collage paintings and Glory Day Loflin’s paintings inspired by fiber art and quiltmaking and based in her grandmother’s textile practice.
“Every festival is different,” she tells us when we ask about her Cherry Creek experience thus far. “One thing I’ve noticed about this one is I’m seeing a lot of traction with specifically what I’m creating: the color saturation and the high key colors. That’s really drawing people in.”
All told, we spend about four hours roving from booth to booth, for both the artworks and the shade, but we have other places to be. First, the Toro Denver x Relevant Galleries kickoff cocktail event featuring drinks and small bites inspired by David Yarrow’s El Toro, during which I eat too much because everything is so damn good—including the company.
“You really shouldn’t wait if there’s something you want to buy at the festival,” a gallerist warns us as we nibble. “I fell in love with this painting but decided to wait. When I went back, I got there just in time to see a couple walking away with it.” My friend and I briefly consider heading back out into the still-glaring sunshine to panic buy several things that had caught our eyes earlier in the afternoon, but by then the El Toro-inspired cocktails are working their magic and we strike up a conversation with a local art collector who, in one of those random coincidences, has friends who work at a distillery in my friend’s town.
Our next stop is Toro proper to make a late-ish dinner reservation that now feels a little too early given how much we’ve accidentally eaten. But I’m a completionist, so I gamely dig into scallops with pork belly and pepita rosemary butter and a plate of sweet corn empanadas. Let me tell you something: should you find yourself in the neighborhood of Hotel Clio, have dinner at Toro. And when you have dinner at Toro, order the sweet corn empanadas. And when you eat the sweet corn empanadas, do not—I repeat, do not—neglect the accompanying chimichurri.
For the rest of the night, I gush about the Toro chimichurri—to our waiter, to chef de cuisine Tracey Todd and to Hotel Clio concierge George Maresh when I need his help figuring out how to access our museum tickets. I’m a little tipsy, and I’ve got chimichurri on my mind as I enjoy bath number two.
Day 1
After exhausting all the coffee pods in my room, I persuade my friend to grab to-go coffees in the Hotel Clio lobby and join me on my morning stroll. While I wait, I browse the Hotel Clio art collection on my phone—I am trying to have as many art experiences as possible, after all. Artists whose work is scattered around the hotel include Hannah Ehrlich, Kim Knoll and Jared Rue, and the common curatorial thread, marketing manager Christopher Polys tells me later, is “an appreciation for Cherry Creek’s past at the confluence of the Cherry Creek and Platte River where gold mining was prevalent.” Something I’ve noticed about art in Denver is that a lot of it is very much geographically grounded. Folks in the West really like Western art.
The festival doesn’t open until 10 a.m., and I’m interested in seeing more of the neighborhood anyway. We knew Cherry Creek was a little tony—there’s the country club, the independent pasty shop, the lovely little store specializing in Versace kitchenware, the new Vespas everywhere—but I find out just how tony when I look up the asking price of the townhouses with For Sale signs in the yards.
Thoroughly caffeinated with muscles warmed and ready, our first stop of the day is not the festival but the single-artist Clyfford Still Museum, which opened in 2011, the culmination of Still’s wish that his body of work (much of which he retained until his death) would remain in storage until an American city built a museum to house his art “exclusively.” That city turned out to be Denver, and that museum in its beautiful building designed by Brad Cloepfil now holds more than 3,000 paintings and works on paper—roughly 93 percent of his lifetime output—in 30,000 square feet. Still once said seeing his work in its entirety was akin to “a symphony,” and I can’t disagree. I was only passingly familiar with the artist before this trip, and I find myself moving from painting to painting in rapt fascination. As it turns out, I really like Still’s monumental canvases and how the Clyfford Still Museum preserves and presents them—particularly how it makes every effort to incorporate the stories of both the women who launched his career and the women who were creating art at the same time but were excluded from the Irascibles.
(Please forgive this digression, but Denver is weird. It’s obviously a city, but where are all the people? It’s a beautiful Saturday and the streets and greenspaces around the museum are practically empty. Our Uber driver tells us there’s been a population boom that started with the legalization of recreational cannabis and has since attracted tech companies to the region, but I’m not seeing it.)
We drop back in at the hotel for tacos in the VIP lounge with plans to tour a few of the local art galleries in between visits to the festival. The forecast says the high will be roughly ninety degrees in the late afternoon and I gratefully grab two of the branded paper fans I’d seen people the day before. Thank you, CherryArts! For the rest of the day, my maniacal fanning will prompt my friend to ask repeatedly if I’m okay, but it’s just hot and I’m starting to think Jason Horowitz was right about Denver and dehydration. Luckily, there’s an afternoon Arnold Palmer station (with syrups!) in the Hotel Clio lobby, where we stop after more time at the festival and before heading back to Relevant, where we meet with consultant Melissa Batie.
RELEVANT PHOTO
It is, she tells us, one of a veritable fleet of galleries operating under the umbrella of AD Galleries, a mini empire of fine art dealers built by Paul Zueger. Two other AD Galleries are right here in Cherry Creek: Masters Gallery, which we’ve already visited, and Clayton Lane Fine Arts, which is our next stop. “Each gallery has a different vibe,” Batie says. “If you walk into Masters Gallery over, you’ll see lots of bronzework and glass. We’re representing a lot of photography right now.” And so they are, with large-scale works by Yarrow, along with pieces by photographer and printmaker Russell Young (who works with diamond dust left behind by Warhol—look it up). Their roster also includes the estate of modern American bronze master Gib Singleton, painters like Earl Biss and others, whose works are rotated through the various galleries. While Relevant doesn’t bill itself a gallery of Western art, the thread of inspiration is certainly there.
Clayton Lane Fine Arts, just three doors down Clayton Street, couldn’t be more different, with its focus on Pop Art and Surrealism along with works by Old Masters like Rembrandt and, surprisingly, limited edition lithographs and serigraphs of the art of Dr. Seuss. There are works by Salvador Dali and Joan Miró, as well as pieces by rising stars in an eclectic mix of works that gallery director Carrigan Sherlock rearranges depending on the season. “It’s summer now” she says, “and I wanted something kind of fun and fresh so I put the Hamilton Aguiar ocean pieces up in the front windows.” She’s worked in Aspen and Vail but tells us she likes Denver, and this spot in Cherry Creek more particularly, because of the international collectors who come through.
CLAYTON LANE PHOTO
There are still at least two short block’s worth of art festival we haven’t yet checked out. We do our best to take it all in from the relative quiet of the center of the street, but my friend and I are both suffering from acute art fatigue. Almost nothing stands out—imagine you’re at a wine tasting on your fifth vintage and you’re a little buzzed and suddenly it’s all just wine. I do stop and buy a bright Pop-y rooster print by Kenneth Kudulis. I almost buy a print by Tanya Doskova, who as far as I’m concerned dominated the festival with her deeply political and deeply weird works of magical Surrealism, and I’ll be forever sad I didn’t when I had the chance. We also pause and talk with painter Janina Tukarski Ellis, who tells us she landed on crowds as her primary subject because she likes the unity. “We may not know each other and we may not be interacting, but we’re all there for a similar purpose, whether that’s an adventure or an art show,” she tells us, and it feels like the perfect ending to our festival experience.
I optimistically have two more gallery visits on the agenda, but Abend Gallery’s Cherry Creek outpost closed not fifteen minutes earlier. It’s small and has big windows, though, so I peer in and am taken with Patrick Nevins’ Playtime is Over, which I would buy in a heartbeat if I had the means. We briefly step inside Fascination St. Fine Art, which is worth a visit but much larger than it looks from the street—suddenly we’re traversing a Tardis-like maze of hallways and staircases that eventually dumps us back onto the sidewalk via a wholly different entrance.
We hurry along to Cucina Colore, an Italian place founded by Venanzio Momo that is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. Though tempted by the pastas and mains, we opt for cocktails and a pair of pizzas—the Bergamo and the Carne—since Signor Momo’s first restaurant in Colorado was a pizzeria. The quality was top-notch; the quantity, too much. Unless you’re absolutely ravenous, one pizza and a shared app or salad will be plenty enough for two people. We do look at the dessert menu, but I order an after-dinner coffee as a balm for my uncomfortably overstuffed belly.
Back at Hotel Clio, George the concierge has sent two jars of Toro’s chimichurri to my room and the gesture has me feeling oddly emotional, which is how I know that this overtired art lover should probably go straight to bed. Instead, I go down to the hotel’s fitness center and do a mixed routine of strength, stretching and cardio, because I can’t resist the siren call of an on-site gym.
Day 2
After my morning bath, I spend some time gazing out my room’s window at the sun-kissed Rockies, which seem both loomingly close yet so far away. Striding along the squeaky clean and utterly empty sidewalks of Cherry Creek—yes, I have convinced my friend to go on another morning walk—you wouldn’t even know the mountains are out there. As we sip and stroll, we discuss our plans for our final half day in Denver.
Do we want to go back to the festival after our final meal at Hotel Clio? Not really, we decide together. The Cherry Creek Arts Festival is great, but we’ve seen everything we wanted to see (in some cases more than once) and talked to everyone we wanted to talk to and bought everything we’re going to buy. And while there are other art galleries in Denver we could check out, it’s Sunday and some are closed and gallery hopping doesn’t sound particularly appealing after more than a day and a half of near-continuous art exposure.
We settle on a relaxed visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, a 27,000-square foot, environmentally sustainable institution housed in a Sir David Adjaye-designed building (the first U.S. museum commission for the now disgraced architect). We bring our luggage, and the people at the admissions counter are super chill about storing my bag and my recently purchased art.
Currently on at MCA Denver are “Gala Porras-Kim: A Hand in Nature” and “Critical Landscapes: Selected Works from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection.” The latter gives me space to hold forth about Ana Mendieta and the controversy surrounding her death and how Carl Andre was a piece of shit. The former wows me and my friend both. My only previous exposure to the work of Colombian-Korean-American artist Gala Porras-Kim was in a brief Observer writeup about last year’s Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art, but I suggest you look her up. (In the words of my friend, Porras-Kim “is so smart and so driven to pursue fairness and justice for historically marginalized peoples.”)
The exhibition, which is focused primarily on climate change, is thought-provoking, but what stands out are the works in which Porras-Kim directly challenges the collecting practices of museums through letters and corresponding artworks. Leaving the institution through cremation is easier than as a result of a deaccession policy pairs a letter to Alexander Kellner, director of the National Museum of Brazil, which suffered a devastating fire in 2018 that destroyed much of a 12,000-year-old fossil nicknamed Luzia, and a tissue with a handprint rendered in ash from the fire that Porras-Kim calls the “closest thing to a cinerary urn” as she encourages Kellner to recognize Luzia’s personhood.
After seeing everything there was to see, we navigate MCA Denver’s narrow and echoing stairwell to the top floor where there is a small but engaging display of works by the museum’s staff. There’s also a rooftop garden cafe overlooking the quiet and strangely empty street, which is exactly what we need in that moment. I’m about to Uber back to the airport, which is sure to be busy given that this is the tail end of a holiday weekend. My friend tells me she’s thinking she’ll do a little more exploring before checking out the Denver Botanic Gardens, having dinner with a local acquaintance and finally returning to the east coast on a red eye. I order my usual latte. And my friend, because Denver is Denver and she is smarter than me, drinks more water.
