Ok, wow. DENVER!
This place is DENSE with street art. I have a ton to show you, and I didn’t even get all of it. I mean, I doubt that I ever get 100% of this stuff, but I at least try to exhaust everything that I am aware of. But I have never knowingly left so much on the table as I did in Denver. There were lots of incredible murals that I saw out the window of a car, or when I didn’t have my camera with me, and I was never able to circle back to capture them. So as much as I have for you, this does not NEARLY cover it.
In fact, I think it’s time that we introduce a new unit of measurement to serve as a KPI for how we evaluate a city’s street art scene: “Murals Per Capita.” We’ll call this MPC for short. So, do cities like Mexico City or Los Angeles have more street art from a numerical perspective than Denver? Certainly. But these are also MUCH bigger places. Denver, I think, has the highest MPC of any city I have visited to date. Of the places where I have been, I think only Asheville could give it a run for its money, given its small size.
How authentic is this art to the identity of Denver? That is a question that I am less qualified to answer. Much of what you are about to see was created relatively recently and is correlated (in part) to the ongoing gentrification of this city. However, my local experts (a.k.a., my friends that have been living in Denver for the past 6-9 years) tell me that much of this art does feel like a reflection of the community that conceived it. However, just like any other city-on-the-rise, Denver is not without a handful of tasteless corporate knock-offs. I have done my best to control for that, and have omitted anything that felt more like commerce than art from the gallery below.
ANYWAY, without a doubt, the most heavily concentrated cluster of street art is in a neighborhood called the River North Arts District, or “RiNo” for short. So if you only have a few hours and you really want to see a bunch of street art without too much exploration, this is where you should take your walk. However, this gallery also contains some beautiful finds in the Five Points, South Wash, Capital Hill, and Colfax neighborhoods, which are all very cool as well. Dig in!
Seriously—some of my favorite murals I’ve yet seen are in Denver! And an article like this one would not be complete without an attempt to credit all of the incredible artists who conceived and painted these murals. I spent some time trying to track all these people down, but I definitely have not been able to find everybody—so if you see a name that is missing from this list, please let me know. I’d love to be able to add them here, for whatever it’s worth. Which is probably not much… but hey!
GAMMA (@gammagallery)
Lucid Street Dreams (@lucidstreetdreams)
Chris Clark (@cooli_ras_art)
Ozjuah (@ozjuahsepia)
Víctor Domingo (@ogmr23)
Luis Valle (@el_chan_guri)
Low Key Creative (@lowkey_creative)
Rtd Railheads Ba (@return_to_dust)
Abram ALEO Bebo (@aleoart)
I’m not sure when the next street art post will arrive, or where it will come from—but rest assured that it is on its way. Stay tuned. In the mean time, here’s a song that has nothing to do with Denver, but will always be associated with it in my mind.
St. Louis, Missouri. In the previous article, I opened by talking about how I didn’t have much more than a vague awareness of this place before fate landed me here for a long weekend. And that is true, BUT—since I have become obsessed with doing these articles where I compile collections of murals in a particular place, I have had my antenna up for information about where I can find the best street art. And I had heard that St. Louis was actually one of the street art capitals of America. Who knew!