Denver Art Museum famed for Native American collection
Published: May 21, 2009
Some people visit the Denver Art Museum just to sit and meditate in front of the fine sculptures in the Asian Gallery. They can spend hours gazing at a four-armed bronze Shiva dancing the universe into creation. Others come to appreciate the world-renowned collection of Native American art.
The Denver Art Museum was the first major museum in the county to feature Native American works as art — not just as artifacts.
The 356,000-square-foot museum complex straddles 14th Ave. Parkway, where it edges around Civic Center Park. The North Building houses various collections: European, Asian, Spanish Colonial, Pre-Columbian, American Indian (including a fine exhibit of Northwest Coast sculpture), and Western American Art before 1950. There is a display of Textile Art and Design before 1900, too.
In the much newer Frederic C. Hamilton Building, you'll find Western American, Oceanic and African Art, as well as the Sculpture Deck. Modern and Contemporary Art is spread out on two floors. It's the place to savor the few but fine Impressionist paintings such as Claude Monet's "Waterloo Bridge."
Both buildings house temporary exhibitions. Past displays have included Impressionism and Amish and Mennonite quilts.
Through July 19, the museum features The Psychedelic Experience: Rock Posters from the San Francisco Bay Area 1965-1971. The exhibit takes visitors back in time to the hippie scene in the Haight-Ashbury, where bands such as Big Brother and the Holding Company and The Grateful Dead drew tie-dyed throngs of young people to the Fillmore Auditorium and Avalon Ballroom.
Promoters Bill Graham and Chet Helmes commissioned artists such as Victor Moscoso, Wes Wilson and Lee Conklin to create some 500 spectacular and experimental posters. You'll see some of these here, with their electric colors and big, blocky letters that seem to melt and flow together in a facsimile of the psychedelic experience.
You might even overhear a few aging ex-hippies, their hair now gray and cut short, wistfully explaining to their kids what it was like to live in a wilder but more innocent age.
Not only does this family-friendly place go out of its way to educate kids, it offers gallery games and activities to keep them fascinated. There's vest making and a music-mixing station, where they can learn about African instruments, and young visitors can play Eye-Spy and Western Bingo, too — finding pictures under squares and lining them up to get bingo. It's great way to learn about art.
- by David Zindell, Denver Reporter for HelloMetro
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