Road Trip Report: Inside the New Denver Art Museum

The redesigned and expanded Denver Art Museum is a road-worthy new destination on Colorado’s cultural map, featuring the new, high-profile, landscape-altering 50,000-square-foot Sie Visitor Center, reconstructed galleries and redesigned in the 50 years of the museum. the old Gio Ponti building, a new industry-leading education center for youth programs, a new sensory garden, two new restaurants, etc. pandemic delay).

Yes, $ 175 million still goes a long way for a museum expansion.

But for Aspenites and Bauhaus enthusiasts and Herbert Bayer from Aspen, the first stop must be the new design gallery on the 2nd floor and the interactive design studio.

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It includes “Herbert Bayer’s Earthworks,” an exhibition devoted to Bayer’s earth sculptures in Aspen that began in the 1950s, “Earth Mound” and Anderson Park, as well as his last Mill Creek Canyon Earthworks Park in Washington.

The exhibit features 16 unseen Bayer pieces for public consumption, including pastel drawings and pencil renderings of the original mound, sketches of the mound of land surrounded by water, photographs and sketches, and collages by what would become Anderson Park as well as a 1982 three-dimensional model of plaster and other materials for an “environmental mound” during preparations for Mill Creek.

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“I don’t think these have ever been shown,” said Darrin Alfred, the museum’s curator of architecture and design. “To be able to have this opportunity, to browse the archives and find these works in particular, it’s incredible.

Steps away in the Design Studio, an interactive display – combining traditional boxes behind glass with sliding drawers that can hold much more – is one more Bayer treasure being shown to the public for the first time. The collections are divided into three large drawers, divided into “Colorado Ski Country,” sharing some of his more familiar early Aspen ski marketing work, “Landscapes,” a fascinating group of works on paper inspired by ‘Aspen which depicts mountain landscapes, Hallam Lake and studies of flowers and plant life, and “Native Plants” which brings together pastel drawings of various pods, plants and driftwood dated to 1947, which would have been Bayer’s first summer in Aspen. It’s Bayer as an outdoor artist – showing us what he’s seen here, including a flock of sheep in his early days as an Aspenite.

The Design Studio also prominently displays maps of the early to mid-1970s ski runs of Aspen Mountain, Buttermilk and Snowmass by John Rieben, who introduced the International Typographical Stye to the ski area and defined the map of ski.

Aside from the widely expanded design collection where I found Bayer’s corners, the highlights of the reopened galleries are the massive Native North American collection – excitingly mixing historic pieces with contemporary works – and the collection Western art on the top floor of the new Martin building.

The Western art collection flows onto new balcony spaces – built by Ponti with dramatically curved turrets, but previously inaccessible to the public – that offer panoramic views of Denver and the mountains to the west. It’s a touch of conservation that’s as funky as it is obvious, placing West American art in its most appropriate setting where the actual Rockies compete for your attention against their artistic representations.

“It’s an extraordinary platform for looking at the landscape to connect the collection from the American West to the American West,” said architect Jorge Silvetti, whose Boston-based firm shares architectural credit for the new project. with Colorado Fentress Architects.

When I broke up with my designated guide and my group of journalists at a media preview in mid-October, I stepped out onto one of the terraces and found Silvetti alone, staring at the horizon. “Oh. My.God,” he said to himself, an appropriate response to the setting if there is one, before turning to greet me.

Herbert Bayer reappears in the Western Art collection. His “Green Center Over Horizon” (1970) gets pride of place here among four large-format works exhibited on freestanding walls – an Agnes Martin, an Ethel Magafan and Andy Warhol’s “The American Indian (Russell Means)” complementing this Bayer signature.

The Bayers are one of the countless works from the proverbial mothballs in the museum’s collection and brought to light for the public in the reinvented museum.

“When you work on a new building, you work on new galleries, you become really energetic and inspired to bring in new art, new collections and new gifts,” said museum director Christoph Henrich.

Or as Lanny Martin, the donor whose $ 25 million started this project, said: “It’s not just a renovation, it’s a re-imagining of the way we show art objects. reviews that we present to all of you.

atravers@aspentimes.com