Don’t call it a gallery. Yes, there is art hung on mostly white walls, and yes, it’s open to the public for viewing from 4-7 p.m. on Wednesdays and by appointment. But what Amanda Precourt is creating at the Cookie Factory, which opens May 24 in Denver’s Baker neighborhood, is harder to put into words.
“We call it an art space,” Precourt offered on a recent tour.
Part of the reason it’s hard to describe is that it’s an unusual model, one that merges Precourt’s aesthetic sensibilities with her philanthropic tendencies with her upbringing in Denver.
The 5,700-square-foot building itself is a former paper mill turned fortune cookie factory — hence the name — purchased by Precourt in 2017. By the time she bought the building, the cookies had been out of production for a couple of years, and the building had fallen into disrepair. The concrete loading dock was cracking, the roof was sagging, water pooled on the floors.
“The first time we walked in this door you could smell the sugar,” said Andrew Jensdotter, an artist, and Precourt’s life and business partner.
“There were machines everywhere, and fortunes floating around on the floor,” Precourt said. “It was really wild.”
In the eight intervening years, Precourt and Jensdotter knocked out the factory walls and transformed the ground floor into a four-room exhibition space, which will feature two solo shows per year and monthly “activations” — a popular art world term that usually involves some sort of interactive experience with otherwise static artworks. The Cookie Factory’s first activation on June 21 will involve local healers offering yoga and sound baths.
Precourt also built a second story on top of the exhibition space as a personal apartment and home to her expansive contemporary art collection.
“Many people want to show their collection. In fact, most collectors want to show their collection. So they show what they bought,” said Jérôme Sans, artistic director and curator of the Cookie Factory. “But showing what you buy is just showing yourself. It’s a beautiful thing, but that’s not what we are doing here.”
Precourt’s own collection, which began in 2016 when she acquired a mixed media punching bag by artist Jeffery Gibson, will not be open to the public. Instead, Cookie Factory will feature entirely new works, created specifically for the space, that draw inspiration from the Colorado environment.
Precourt, a graduate of East High, insists that the art shown connects to her home state.
“Denver is my hometown, this project represents a gift to the city,” she said.
Collaboration over competition
That gifting mindset is also baked into her business decisions, including the decision not to form a nonprofit with the Cookie Factory, bucking a standard practice in the fine arts world.
“We’re a private institution and we are privately funded. That is specifically to be in the energy of collaboration rather than competition with every other art institution in Denver,” Precourt said. “I don’t feel that fundraising against other organizations is the right way to go to create change. I’d rather work with other institutions and do collaborative events here at Cookie Factory.”
They want to use the space for various organizations to host fundraising events, she added, calling herself a “philanthropist at heart.”
She’s also a philanthropist in practice, having financially contributed to a massive exhibition of contemporary artist Rashid Johnson at the Guggenheim Museum in New York this year, and donated $4 million to underwrite the construction of the Amanda J. Precourt Galleries at the Denver Art Museum.
Precourt and her father also recently opened the Precourt Healing Center, a much-needed mental and behavioral health clinic in the mountain town of Edwards (Precourt splits time between Denver and Vail).
Funding for the Cookie Factory will go toward running the space, as well as supporting artists in making new work, something that Sam Falls, the first artist to open a show there, says is unusual in the art world.
“Having done shows at bigger museums, a lot of times they want to do the greatest hits,” Falls said. “I consider myself a young-to-mid artist now, so I want to make a new album.”
For the show, “Nothing Without Nature,” Falls spent autumn in the Yampa River Valley creating large-scale “drop paintings,” which he makes using local flora and a water-activated color pigment.
“Usually I’m working until 2 or 3 in the morning, because that’s when the dew hits” the pigment, Falls said. The resulting canvases are layered with color and fossil-like silhouettes, arranged to create new forests and figures.
Cookie Factory also has a video installation room, where Falls is showing one of a few pieces not made in Colorado. “Sunrise/Sunset (Golden Hour)” taps into more than 600 publicly accessible webcams from all over the world, half facing east and the other half facing west. The live feeds that a viewer encounters depend on where the sun is rising (projected onto the north wall) and where it’s setting (projected onto the south wall).
“It situates you, but also super expands you,” Falls said. “You wonder, where is the sun rising right now?” (At the moment he asked, it was rising in Israel and setting in Japan.)
When the show closes in September, the artworks will return to Falls and his gallery representation, the ironically named 303 Gallery, in New York. Because, again, this isn’t a gallery.
“We’ll evolve. This is a space that’s made to be constantly changing based on what the city wants and responds to, and what the artist responds to. With each artist we’ll become something different,” Precourt said. “And we’ll have a good time doing it.”