A (free) night at the museums

In honor of Denver Arts Week, eleven museums in Denver were open for free on Saturday night. I thought that going to a museum for free sounded like a good time, so I asked Dan and Scarlett if they'd be interested in going. They thought it sounded like a good time, too, so on Saturday afternoon we picked up Scarlett and walked down to the 16th Street Mall, took the shuttle, and ambled over to the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, a place I'd never been.



One of the nice things about the MCA is that they have no permanent collection - so every time they change up their spaces, it's with new art and new artists. I really enjoyed seeing the different kinds of art on display, some of which were aural in addition to visual, and I think my favorite things were the amazing paper/ink sculptures by Arlene Schechet.


From there, we took the mall shuttle back up and went to the new building at the Denver Art Museum - new, I say, but it's a couple of years old now, and I'd yet to see the inside of it. So we poked around in an area near the Western Art collection that allowed you to do a lot of hands-on things, and then we went up to the Contemporary Art exhibit. I liked a lot of what I saw, especially the way some of the pieces I had seen before fit into the new (unusual, to say the least) space.

"The studio is a different kind of space for adults accompanying children coworkers friends in-laws blind dates who want to make their own souveniers Watch interactive interviews Touch without fear Open unknown drawers Find strangely shaped rooms Discover artists secrets"

My favorite piece at the Denver Art Museum was a painting by a guy in New York who asks local urban kids to pose for him in the style of classical paintings, chosen by them, but he paints them in their street clothes complete with cell phones and bling. I didn't get the artist's name or take a photo of the painting, but I did get a couple of photos of my favorite exhibit, which is called Fox Games.


Denver has things going on all the time, and we usually don't take advantage of them, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to get in to places I've never been for free. Nighttime museum-going is something I enjoy, as well, though I can't really explain why. When we went to New York City last January, we went to the MOMA in the evening, and I think it was a totally different experience than it would have been had we gone during the daytime.