As the Denver Art Museum reopens permanent collections, including Arts of Africa, curators are re-examining the historical context and uplifting contemporary voices.
museums
Posted inBusiness
A facelift has spruced up Colorado’s Pops the Triceratops. Next comes a big reveal back at the fossil’s Weld County home.
Artists in Fruita are putting the finishing touches on the fossil’s new display. The work follows Denver Museum of Nature and Science exam that found Pops may be much older than originally thought.
Posted inColoradans
What do you do if you stumble across a significant dinosaur fossil in the woods? Ask this guy.
Colorado Springs rock hunter went out looking for geodes but found a dinosaur’s tibia instead
Posted inOpinion Columns
Opinion: For Sand Creek Massacre descendants like me, a new exhibit provides a blueprint for moving forward
History Colorado’s opening of a new exhibit on the Sand Creek Massacre helped descendants deal with a disconnect that for many tribal members reflects difficult family history.
Posted inCulture, News
From saddles to washing machines, Colorado has a plethora of niche museums. What does their future hold?
The Lee Maxwell Washing Machine Museum is seen on July 31. Maxwell has a collection of nearly 1,700 machines at his museum in Eaton. (Jessica Gibbs, Special to The Colorado Sun) Lee Maxwell has spent a lot of quality time inside junkyards. What was trash to someone else could have been just the trinket he […]
Posted inCulture, Health, News
Anti-mask anger forces Children’s Museum of Denver to temporarily close
By James Anderson, The Associated Press A Colorado children’s museum is the latest casualty of harassment by people angry over mask mandates designed to curb the spread of the coronavirus. The Children’s Museum of Denver at Marsico Campus, for decades a popular downtown attraction primarily devoted to those age 8 and under, temporarily closed on Wednesday because of […]
Posted inArts, Culture
Rauschenberg show at Museum of Outdoor Arts invites viewers to reflect, literally
Some of Robert Rauschenberg’s early works made him seem a rather dark and brooding artist. His series of black paintings stand out in memory — and his white paintings and red paintings — puzzling panels of solid color inviting deep dissertations on light and the lack thereof. Some heavy intellectualizing greeted each canvas. Rauschenberg later […]
Posted inArts, Coloradans, Culture, Technology, Transportation
Colorado is home to a collection of classic Shelby muscle cars. But are they just bygone relics in the Uber era?
A 6-foot-tall photo of Carroll Shelby looms large over the entrance of the Shelby American Collection. He’s a rockstar in American car and racing culture, and museum president Steve Volk wants visitors to know that. “He put American cars on the map, by winning and showing what an American car can do,” Volk said. “He […]
Posted inColoradans, News
To right historic wrongs, Colorado museums embraced spirit of a law that repatriated Native American artifacts and remains — largely by listening
Behind locked metal doors at History Colorado, Sheila Goff slips between towering rows of movable storage cabinets and opens one compartment that holds several artifacts from one of the state’s Ute tribes. Using green nitrile gloves, she carefully removes a pipe bowl, which purposely has been detached from its stem for storage. This minute but […]
Posted inBook Excerpts, SunLit
Excerpt: How museum collectors exploited Zuni poverty and damaged a civilization
At the end of the dirt road, at the edge of a desolate mesa, we approach the sacred shrine. It looks like a beautiful one- room prison. A windowless building made of heavy burnt-orange sandstone blocks. Sharp steel spikes shoot vertically from the roof, threaded with jagged barbed wire. We park the car and step […]