September 2025. After Oscar came to London in June 2024 and I joined him there for a day, I’m now going to his hometown of Denver in Colorado. My second trip to the United States in 2025, after visiting my uncle and aunt in Wilmington, North Carolina. No, Denver is is not on foreign tourists’ mind when travelling to the US. But that doesn’t bother me. Quite the contrary. 

Denver being the capital of the State of Colorado, it is home to many large institutions such as the Denver Art Museum. 

Denver Art Museum

The Denver Art Museum, situated in the heart of Denver’s Civic Center, is one of the largest art museums between Chicago and the West Coast. Its encyclopaedic collection numbers more than 70,000 works from across the globe and throughout history. The museum is especially recognised for its holdings of Native American art, as well as the Western American works overseen by the Petrie Institute of Western American Art.

The museum’s story began in 1893 with the creation of the Denver Artists Club. Renamed the Denver Art Association in 1917, it opened its first public galleries two years later in the City and County Building. 

By 1923, it had formally become the Denver Art Museum. Over the decades, it steadily expanded its presence, moving into new spaces, including the Chappell House in 1922 and the Schleier Memorial Gallery in 1949. A turning point came in 1954 with the opening of the South Wing, which allowed the museum to accept major collections from the Kress Foundation.

In 1971, the museum unveiled a bold new North Building designed by Italian modernist architect Gio Ponti in collaboration with Denver’s James Sudler Associates. 

With its castle-like twin towers, angled façades and more than a million reflective glass tiles, the building broke with conventional museum architecture and became Ponti’s only completed project in the United States. In recognition of its importance, the structure was renamed the Martin Building in 2019.

The museum grew again in 2006 with the opening of the Frederic C. Hamilton Building, designed by Daniel Libeskind in partnership with Davis Partnership Architects. 

Clad in glass and titanium, the angular, 146,000-square-foot structure echoes both the jagged peaks of the Rocky Mountains and the crystalline geology of the region. It doubled the museum’s size, added dramatic new exhibition spaces and became its main entrance. Sculptures in the surrounding plaza, including works by Claes Oldenburg and Beverly Pepper, further establish the museum’s architectural and artistic presence in the city.

A major transformation of the campus began in 2016 with a $150 million renovation designed by Machado Silvetti and Fentress Architects. This project revitalised Ponti’s Martin Building, created new galleries, improved visitor amenities and introduced the Sie Welcome Center, a striking round glass pavilion that now serves as the main entrance. 

The Welcome Center includes The Ponti restaurant, a café and the Sturm Grand Pavilion, one of downtown Denver’s largest event spaces.

The Martin Building’s renovation also introduced the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation Galleries and new design-focused exhibition areas, created in collaboration with the architectural firm OMA. These additions expanded display capacity and modernised facilities for a museum that now welcomes close to a million visitors annually.

Collections

The collections of the Denver Art Museum are among the most wide-ranging in the United States, representing cultures, traditions and movements from across the world. Organised into specialist curatorial departments, the museum preserves and presents works of art that span continents and millennia, from ancient objects to contemporary creations.

The African art collection, numbering around a thousand works, is particularly strong in 19th- and 20th-century pieces. Sculpture, textiles, jewellery, paintings, prints and drawings are represented, with a concentration on West African traditions, but with examples drawn from across the continent.

Art of the Ancient Americas forms one of the museum’s most distinctive departments. Established in 1968, it brings together over four thousand years of artistic achievement from Mesoamerica, Central and South America, the Caribbean and the Southwestern United States. Central American ceramics, jade and stone sculpture are particular strengths.

The Architecture and Design department, founded in 1990, charts design history through Italian furniture of the 1960s and 1970s, American graphic design from the mid-20th century onwards, and post-war product design from both Europe and Japan.

Asian art has been part of the museum’s holdings since 1915, when early gifts of Chinese and Japanese objects laid the foundation for what has become a significant collection. Today it includes works from India, China, Japan, Tibet, Nepal, Southeast Asia and Southwest Asia, ranging from the fourth millennium BC to the present.

European and American art created before 1900 is another cornerstone of the museum. Important acquisitions began in the 1930s and were greatly expanded by the Helen Dill Bequest, which enabled the purchase of Impressionist masterpieces by Monet, Pissarro, Sisley and Renoir, alongside works by American painters such as Winslow Homer and Thomas Hart Benton. The collection includes paintings and works on paper by artists ranging from Corot and Courbet to Degas, Arcimboldo and Thomas Cole.

Several major private collections enhance the museum’s holdings. The Berger Collection focuses on British art and includes around 200 works spanning six centuries, with portraits by Holbein, Nicholas Hilliard and Thomas Gainsborough among its treasures. 

The Hamilton Collection, donated by Frederic C. Hamilton in 2014, brought 22 Impressionist works, among them Van Gogh’s ‘Edge of a Wheat Field with Poppies‘ and paintings by Cézanne, Manet and Morisot.

Indigenous arts of North America are central to the museum’s mission. Historic works are complemented by pieces from leading contemporary Native artists, including Jeffrey Gibson, Kent Monkman, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Roxanne Swentzell and Cannupa Hanska Luger.

Latin American art is another highlight, with the museum holding the largest collection in the United States of works created between the 1600s and 1800s. More than 6,000 objects from Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean and the American Southwest make up this department, including Spanish Colonial paintings by Cristóbal Villalpando and Juan Correa.

The Modern and Contemporary collection features works by Picasso, Duchamp, Matisse, Georgia O’Keeffe and Robert Motherwell, among others, and documents major post-war movements from abstract expressionism to conceptual art. A particular strength is the Herbert Bayer Collection and Archive, containing more than 8,000 works and extensive documents from the Bauhaus master’s 28 years in Colorado.

Highlights of the museum’s contemporary holdings include John DeAndrea’s hyperrealistic sculpture Linda and Lawrence Weiner’s conceptual installation ‘AS TO BE IN PLAIN SIGHT‘. Other once-prominent works, such as Red Grooms’ controversial ‘The Shootout‘, have been retired from display.

The Oceanic art department encompasses around 1,000 objects, with significant examples of New Guinea and Polynesian traditions. The Photography collection, established as a separate department in 2008, ranges from early Western landscapes by William Henry Fox Talbot and Timothy O’Sullivan to European and American modernist photography.

The Textile and Fashion collection spans centuries and continents, with more than 5,000 objects from archaeological fragments to contemporary haute couture.

Western American art, presented through the Petrie Institute of Western American Art, preserves a celebrated tradition of painting and sculpture that interprets the landscapes and peoples of the American West. 

The collection features works by Charles M. Russell, Frederic Remington, Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt. Major gifts, including the Harmsen Collection of over 700 works and the Roath Collection of more than 50, have made the institute one of the leading centres for the study and display of Western American art.

Together, these collections make the Denver Art Museum a cultural institution of national and international importance, where global artistic heritage meets the creativity of the American West.

A visit

The museum is vast. While the spiky Frederic C. Hamilton Building is mostly nice from the outside, the Martin Building offers an enormous amount to see. It’s not that the halls and galleries are overloaded with works, there are just so many halls and galleries. 

You really need several hours, of focus on some specific sections. 

Colorado 2025

1. REVIEW | Lufthansa Airbus A380 in business class from Munich to Denver, return.
2. DENVER | RiNo Art District – Coors Field – Lower Downtown – Union Station.
3. REVIEW | Catbird Hotel in Denver’s RiNo Art District.
4. REVIEW | Forney Transportation Museum in Denver.
5. DENVER | 16th Street Mall.
6. COLORADO | Boulder ft. Chautauqua Trail, Boulder-Dushanbe Teahouse and Pearl Street Mall.
7. DENVER | Visit of the Colorado State Capitol.