This four-year, $150 million project adds 30,000 square feet of exhibition space to the high-rise building of the Colorado Museum

Fifty years after the Denver Art Museum (DAM) first opened, its high-rise Lanny & Sharon Martin building looks more or less similar to 1971: a modernist castle-like exterior, thin asymmetric windows and semicircular carvings from it The roof comes out.

However, internally, the recently completed $150 million renovation has created the seven-story building of the Colorado Museum. According to a statement, workers refurbished the building from top to bottom, adding a roof space, a protection center and an additional elevator shaft to support the crowds flocking to the fast-growing state capital. (As Hilarie M. Sheets reported for the art newspaper, the number of visitors to DAM has more than doubled in the past ten years, with approximately 900,000 visitors each year.)

All in all, Jennifer Castor wrote for Rocky Mountain PBS that the project adds more than 30,000 square feet of exhibition space to the Martin Building (formerly known as the North Building). Italian architect Gio Ponti designed the original structure together with Denver architects James Sudler and Joal Cronenwett.

The museum’s campus also has a new 50,000-square-foot event space surrounded by 25-foot-high curved glass panels. Known as the Sie Welcome Center, this circular structure connects the Martin Building with another architectural gem of the DAM campus: the Frederick C. Hamilton Building, which is a silver, spaceship-like structure with The pointed "bow" seems to hover over 13th Avenue in Denver.

According to CBS4’s Mekialaya White, staff have been reimagining the museum’s galleries and educational spaces for the past four years. The curator intends to inject works of modern and contemporary artists into all galleries. According to Joanne Ostrow of the Colorado Sun, about 20% of the contemporary works currently on display have been collected before.

The expansion allowed the museum to display more encyclopedic collections (approximately 70,000 artworks in 12 collections). For example, DAM’s Latin American art collection now occupies the fourth floor of the Martin Building. Highlights include portraits of women wearing pearl earrings, painted by Luis García Hevia during the Colombian colonial period around 1850, and "The River Mom" ​​(1952), a Chilean painter Abstract fog gray and bright pink swirls by Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren.

On the floor dedicated to the art of the American West, museum visitors can explore the various ways artists have rendered the vast American West, from Theodore Waddell's abstract depictions of bison to Albert Bill The idyllic 19th-century vision of Albert Bierstadt, to Ethel Magafan's abstract expressionist mountain spring (1961). Visitors can then walk outside and enter one of the two newly built roof terraces, where they can enjoy uninterrupted views of the Rocky Mountains.

"This is something new, something new," Adrian H. Molina, an artist involved in the redesign process, told CBS4. The new gallery "[brings] you to a real space, connects you with art, and places yourself in the place and time of artistic creation," he added.

Of particular note is the North American Native Art section on the third floor. The statement stated that it has a gallery called "Home/Land", exhibiting works by local artists from the Arapaho, Chey'an and Ute tribes. The exhibition recognizes that the museum is located on the land of these indigenous peoples.

Outstanding artworks from the third floor include Roxanne Swentzell's giant mud girl roll, a site-specific sculpture commissioned by DAM. In the work, a series of otherworldly sitting positions embrace each other, arranged from large to small like a Russian doll.

"The mother holds the eldest child, who holds the next child, who holds the next, and so on," Swenzel wrote in the artist's statement. "I like to understand that we are all from the earth, generation after generation; an endless family of life is delivering seeds."

In Ross Simpson's "Warrior" (2012), a standing red clay statue is decorated with ropes, markers, mugshots and other symbolic "tools" used by the artist to protect himself. At the same time, Canadian Kerry artist Kent Monkman's "Scream" (2017) argues that the Catholic Church often violently treats indigenous children, many of whom are separated from their families and deported to boarding schools.

Ray Mark Rinaldi of The New York Times reported that because the themes in some of these works may trigger a traumatic reaction from the audience, the museum created a "calm room" where visitors can be Rest and think. The reflective space is decorated with an excerpt from the poetry of the American poet laureate Joy Harjo, a member of the Muskogee (Crick) nation, as noted by Daliah Singer, 5280.

Throughout the gallery, viewers can watch short films of contemporary indigenous artists and read label texts written by the artists themselves.

The curator John Lukawicz told 5280: “We are able to allow visitors to directly contact the artist and listen to the artist’s first-hand account of what they are trying to convey in art.”

Lukavic added that in this way, the re-suspended gallery “contains indigenous voices. It focuses on indigenous perspectives and focuses on social justice issues.”

Nora McGreevy is Smithsonian's daily correspondent. She is also a freelance journalist in Chicago, and her work has appeared in magazines such as Wired, The Washingtonian, The Boston Globe, South Bend Tribune, and The New York Times. She can be reached through her website noramcgreevy.com.

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