Colorado is a looker. Which is to say this state has got a lot to see, and for decades, if not centuries, artists have known as much.
Whether it’s the petroglyphs of Ancestral Pueblo, people on the rock walls at Mesa Verde, or the contemporary responses to climate change taking artistic forms on the Eastern Plains, there is something of Colorado that makes its way into nearly all of the art made here. Each of the sites, spaces and organizations selected below has not just taken inspiration from the state, but made a mark of its own.
That said, the list below leaves out plenty of my favorite artists and institutions. For instance, I can almost guarantee I’ll enjoy whatever’s happening at the MCA Denver, the same goes for the Museum of Art in Fort Collins. The A.R. Mitchell Museum of Western Art in Trinidad is a damn good time. The creative districts in Carbondale, Paonia and Breckenridge are always up to something interesting. And then there are the print makers of Matter Design Studio, the broom crafters of Victor Trading Co. & Manufacturing Works, the Denver artists making it work despite a shrinking supply of studio spaces, and the seemingly endless roster of talented artists taking up residence at Anderson Ranch in Snowmass Village.
So yeah, there are plenty of arts and artists who didn’t make the first cut — which means I’ll have to settle for shoehorning them into an intro. As always, if your personal faves and must-sees aren’t on the list, send them in and we’ll add them to our growing collection of reader submissions.
Parker Yamasaki | Reporter
Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center
Founded in 1936 as an expansion of the famous Broadmoor Art Academy, the Fine Arts Center at Colorado College is both a keeper of history and a showcase of today’s fine artists. In 2025, the center overhauled its first-floor display of the permanent collection to better reflect the region’s woven histories of Ute people, Spanish colonial powers, Mexican settlers and European migrants that crossed paths in the shadow of Pikes Peak throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The result is an expansive visual story any Colorado arts or history buff should have on their list.
Clyfford Still Museum
Two years before abstract expressionist Clyfford Still died, he signed a last will and testament promising roughly 3,000 works from his estate to any American city that would build an exclusive space for them. After more than 20 years and two attempts, Denver landed the collection and opened the Clyfford Still Museum in 2011. Still’s works are found in major museums all over the world, but Denver is the only place where you can see the full breadth of the artist’s life on permanent display, beginning with early agrarian drawings from the Canadian farm where he grew up, all the way through his final pastel drawings made on construction paper.
The Range
There’s an old adobe warehouse on Fourth Street in Saguache that has been a lot of things: an antique shop, a ranch supply, a coroner, a saloon, a bank, a newspaper HQ. Since 2015 the building has been The Range, a homegrown artist and exhibition space with an extensive collection of local and regional archives. Digging into the San Luis Valley’s rich, if incomplete, histories is a task that The Range has taken on over and over again, through contemporary shows by local legends and legendary ramblers who’ve tied themselves to Saguache in many unique ways over the years.
Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum
Black Cube’s projects are unpredictable and ephemeral, they vary from compact, single-day experiments to massive installations, created to decay slowly over many seasons. While technically this nomadic nonprofit is not bound by Colorado’s borders, having mounted site-specific shows all over the country, the core team behind these large-scale public projects is based just south of Denver, which means at any given time, there’s a high likelihood you’ll be able to see something in the Centennial State, including occasional indoor shows at their Englewood headquarters.
Thomas Dambo’s Trolls
Thomas Dambo, the whimsical Danish reclamation artist, has built trolls all over the world. Colorado is home to two of these larger-than-life creations (although, who’s really to say the life size of a troll): one in Breckenridge and the other just outside of Victor. Dambo’s unofficial tagline, “the world is running out of resources and drowning in trash,” is at the heart of his mission, and the trolls are just one part of that, acting as a way to bring people together outdoors, and to recognize the awesome power that nature has over what he calls “us little people.”
American Museum of Western Art
The works collected at the American Museum of Western Art, also known as the Anschutz Collection after Denver businessman Philip Anschutz, range from Albert Bierstadt’s 1870 painting of “Wind River, Wyoming” to Edward Hopper’s “Mount Moran,” painted in the late 1940s. Charles Marion Russell and Frederic Remington are represented, and so are Georgia O’Keefe and Maxfield Parrish. And that’s just scratching the surface. Each of the museum’s three floors features walls full of works in a salon-style display. There’s also an actual salon outfitted in period furniture, and more art facing Tremont Place in Denver.
MARBLE/marble
By far the most hands-on of our visual arts recs, the MARBLE/marble annual symposium in the mountain town of Marble has attracted carvers, sculptors and shapers from all over world since the 1980s. During three, eight-day summer sessions, artists attend daily workshops and chip away at their own projects made from marble out of the nearby quarry, where the silky, bright Colorado Yule marble is sourced (fun fact: The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., is made of Colorado Yule marble). The quarry itself is active and closed to the public, but its product is found all over town.
Powers Art Center
The Powers Art Center holds the private collection of John and Kimiko Powers, patrons and friends to some of the most prominent artists of the midcentury, including, but not limited to, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Christo and Jeanne-Claude and Issey Miyake. The collection just outside of Carbondale is always free to visit, and is studded with personal notes, elevating it from an impressive contemporary art collection to a glimpse into an intimate art world. The building was designed by Tokyo-based architect Hiroshi Nanamori and Glenn Rappaport of Basalt, and is itself a work of art, with an L-shaped reflecting pool and latticed columns that frame views across the Roaring Fork Valley.
Prairie Sea Projects
“If emptiness has a view, it’s on the eastern Colorado prairie, out near Joes, population 72,” Sun reporter Tracy Ross wrote in 2023. And nowhere is that aesthetic harnessed quite like it is at Prairie Futures, Ross continued, describing an ecological endeavor that bridges art, community engagement, rural culture and collaboration run by arts organization Prairie Sea Projects. Lately, much of the programming has moved to Fox Ranch, just southwest of Wray, where they continue to host youth film showcases, dark sky events, marketplaces, concerts, storytelling circles, community gardens, book clubs and whatever else the artistically-inclined bring with them to the High Plains.
The Emanuel Project
In the 1960s and ‘70s, Denver’s La Alma Lincoln Park neighborhood was the hub and heart of the state’s Chicano civil rights movement, the remnants of which can still be viewed on the neighborhood’s sun-bleached walls. That the stories survive as murals is thanks, in part, to The Emanuel Project, an arts nonprofit that launched Chicana/o/x Murals of Colorado in 2018 to protect the early murals from fading into obscurity. The organization, named for Denver muralist Emanuel Martínez, has preserved more than 20 community murals around the state, and continues to raise awareness about both historic and contemporary Chicana/o/x muralists of Colorado.