Denver Art Museum

The Denver Art Museum (DAM) is a nonprofit art museum located at 100 West 14th Avenue in Denver's Civic Center Historic District, south of Civic Center Park. Founded in 1893 as the Denver Artists' Club, it is today one of the largest art museums between Chicago and the West Coast, with global art collections representing cultures around the world as well as work by artists from Denver and the Rocky Mountain region. The museum's collections span more than 80,000 works of art across 13 permanent collection areas, including African art, architecture and design, art of the ancient Americas, Asian art, European and American art before 1900, Latin American art, Oceanic art, modern and contemporary art, photography, textile art and fashion, Indigenous arts of North America, western American art, and The Kirkland. The museum's campus is home to two architecturally prominent buildings designed by internationally recognized architects, making the DAM as celebrated for its structures as for the works displayed within them.

History and Founding

The Denver Art Museum originated in 1893 as the Artists' Club, formed "to cultivate and promote a general interest and promotion of the arts." Among the founders were such prominent artists as Henrietta Bromwell, Emma Richardson Cherry, Anne Evans, Henry Reed, Elizabeth Spaulding, and Elsie Ward. The club's main objective was to stage exhibitions in various temporary locations such as City Hall and the third floor of the Museum of Natural History. After the 1910 completion of the Denver Public Library in Civic Center, the Artists' Club found a home and exhibit space on its top floor.

The club renamed itself the Denver Art Association in 1917 and opened its first galleries in the City and County Building two years later. In 1923, the Denver Art Association renamed itself the Denver Art Museum. Two years later, it opened galleries in the Chappell House (1300 Logan Street), the former home of the Delos A. Chappell family. His daughter, Jean Chappell Cranmer, and her brother, Delos A. Chappell, Jr., donated the twenty-two-room showpiece to the museum for use as offices and display space.

Many of the artists displayed at the Chappell House were women, most notably Anne Evans. The daughter of former territorial governor John Evans, she was both an artist and a collector. Her collection of Native American basketry, pottery, and weaving formed the nucleus of the museum's Native American department. Evans also donated her collection of New Mexican Santos as a building block for the museum's Spanish Colonial art.

The museum experienced various scattered, temporary homes and nine directors or acting directors between 1893 and 1944, when Otto Karl Bach became the director for the next thirty years. The son of a prosperous Chicago brickmaker, Bach was raised in a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Evanston, Illinois, and educated at Dartmouth, the University of Chicago, and the Sorbonne. He was determined to make the DAM "a museum in which the cultures of the world were presented," creating Asian (1956) and New World / Pre-Columbian and Spanish Colonial (1968) Departments.

In 1948, the DAM purchased a building on Acoma and 14th Avenue on the south side of Civic Center Park. Denver architect Burnham Hoyt renovated the building, which opened as the Schleier Memorial Gallery in 1949. While the Schleier Gallery was a significant addition, the DAM still sought to increase its space. Additional pressure came from the Kress Foundation, which offered to donate three collections valued at over $2 million on the condition that the DAM construct a new building to house the works. These pressures helped set the stage for the museum's landmark 1971 expansion.

Architecture

The Denver Art Museum campus is defined by two buildings that have each, in their era, attracted national attention for their bold departures from conventional museum design.

The Martin Building (Gio Ponti, 1971)

In 1971, the museum opened what is now known as the Martin Building (formerly the North Building), designed by Italian architect Gio Ponti and Denver-based James Sudler Associates. The eight-story, 210,000-square-foot building allowed the museum to display its collections under one roof for the first time. This architectural icon remains the only completed project in the United States by this important Italian master of modern design.

The Martin Building was an innovative move away from traditional, temple-style museum architecture. More than a million reflective glass tiles and 28 vertical surfaces of varying planes on the building's exterior complement the dramatic windows and pierced roofline of the building's castle-like facade. Ponti himself described his intent memorably: "Art is a treasure, and these thin but jealous walls defend it," said Gio Ponti of the building design.

The Martin Building's interior was completely remodeled in 2019–21 as part of a renovation project that also resulted in the circular glass Sie Welcome Center, designed by Boston-based Machado Silvetti and Denver-based Fentress Architects. In December 2016, the Denver Art Museum had announced this transformational $150 million project to unify the museum's campus and revitalize Ponti's building, including the creation of new gallery spaces, two new dining options, and the new Sie Welcome Center.

The Frederic C. Hamilton Building (Daniel Libeskind, 2006)

Continuing a legacy of bold architecture, the museum commissioned architect Daniel Libeskind to design an expansion that would accommodate growing collections and programs. The 146,000-square-foot Hamilton Building opened to the public on October 7, 2006. In 1999, Denver voters had approved $62.5 million to construct a new DAM wing if the museum could come up with a matching $50 million.

Linking to the Sie Welcome Center on the north side of the campus via the Reiman Bridge across 13th Avenue, the Hamilton Building's design recalls the peaks of the Rocky Mountains and geometric rock crystals found in the foothills near Denver. "I was inspired by the light and the geology of the Rockies, but most of all by the wide-open faces of the people of Denver," Libeskind said. The building is covered in 9,000 titanium panels that reflect the Colorado sunshine.

This project doubled the size of the museum, allowing for an expansion of the art on view. The angular design of the Hamilton Building juts in many directions, supported by a 2,740-ton structure that contains more than 3,100 pieces of steel. One of the angled elements extends 167 feet over and 100 feet above the street below. None of the 20 planes is parallel or perpendicular to another. Due to the distinct configuration of the steel required to produce the building, the Hamilton Building received a Presidential Award of Excellence from the American Institute of Steel Construction's 2007 Innovative Design in Engineering and Architecture with Structural Steel (IDEAS2) Awards competition.

The third and most spectacular structure is architect Daniel Libeskind's angular Frederic C. Hamilton Building. The radically postmodern Martin and Hamilton Buildings became Denver's most talked-about architecture and opened the doors to other daring Civic Center wonders, including the History Colorado Center and the Clyfford Still Museum.

The Kirkland

The Kirkland, formerly the Kirkland Museum, merged with the Denver Art Museum in October 2024. As of 2025, The Kirkland fully integrated into the DAM's campus, with alignment on operating hours and expanded opportunities for visitors of all ages. The Kirkland's 38,500-square-foot building at 1201 Bannock, designed by Jim Olson of Seattle-based Olson Kundig, first opened to the public in 2018. The yellow-clad building includes many signatures of Jim Olson's architecture, including "eyebrow" overhangs, vertical glass "fins," and tall doorframes. The building houses 18 display areas with over 4,000 works on view, including an internationally celebrated decorative art collection, Colorado and regional art, and a retrospective of the life and legacy of its namesake artist, Vance Kirkland.

Permanent Collections

The Denver Art Museum has more than 80,000 works of art across 13 permanent collections. Among the most celebrated of these is the museum's long-standing commitment to Indigenous art.

Indigenous Arts of North America

The DAM is best known for its collection of Indigenous art; it was the first major museum to establish a separate Native American Arts Department (1925) to celebrate such artifacts as art rather than as anthropological and historical curiosities. Featuring more than 18,000 objects ranging from ancient Puebloan and Mississippian ceramics to 19th-century beaded garments and carved masks to cutting-edge contemporary paintings, sculpture, photography, and variable media art, the DAM holds one of the most comprehensive collections from this region in existence—with particular strengths in art from the Plains and the Southwest, as well as works from the Great Lakes, Northeast, and Subarctic regions.

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of its Indigenous Arts of North America collection in 2025, the Denver Art Museum launched a year of programming, including solo exhibitions of leading contemporary Indigenous artists Kent Monkman and Andrea Carlson. The DAM currently dedicates more than 20,000 square feet of gallery space in its Lanny and Sharon Martin Building to its Indigenous Arts collection, which includes more than 18,000 works.

Western American Art

The Petrie Institute of Western American Art (PIWAA) oversees the western American art collection, which encompasses two centuries of paintings, sculptures, and works on paper related to the West. Additionally, PIWAA promotes scholarship in the field through exhibitions, annual symposia, and publications. Established in 2007, the Petrie Institute has helped position the DAM as a major center for scholarship in western American art history.

Other Collections

With more than 7,000 artworks representing 6,000 years of history across the entire Asian continent, the Asian collection is particularly strong in artwork from Japan, Korea, China, India, and the Islamic world. The architecture and design collection consists of more than 18,000 objects dating from the 1500s to the present, comprising one of the preeminent modern and contemporary design collections of any comprehensive museum in the United States. The museum also holds the Herbert Bayer Collection and Archive: it contains over 8,000 works, along with extensive documentary material, and is dedicated to the legacy of the Austrian-born Bauhaus master who lived in Colorado for 28 years. The core of this collection and archive came through the artist's bequest, and scholars visit from around the world to engage the collection for research.

Funding, Access, and Community Programs

The museum is run by a nonprofit organization separate from the City of Denver. Major funding for the museum is provided by a 0.1% sales tax levied in the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District (SCFD), which includes seven Colorado counties — Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder, Broomfield, Denver, Douglas, and Jefferson — in the Denver-Aurora metropolitan area. About 65% of this tax is used to provide funding for the Denver Art Museum and four other major science and cultural facilities in Denver: the Denver Botanic Gardens, the Denver Zoo, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, and the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.

In 2015, following efforts to focus on equal access to the arts and art education for young people, the Denver Art Museum announced its Free for Kids program, underwriting admission for all youth ages 18 and under. The program was created with leadership and support from museum trustee Scott Reiman, and additional support from corporate sponsors. Over the past five years, the Denver Art Museum has averaged more than 600,000 visitors a year.

The museum's stated mission is to enrich the lives of present and future generations through the acquisition, presentation, and preservation of works of art, supported by exemplary scholarship and public programs related to both its permanent collections and to temporary exhibitions presented by the museum. Community engagement programs include artist-in-residence initiatives, monthly accessible programs for visitors with early-stage dementia, and early-childhood programs. The Native Arts Artist-in-Residence program brings Indigenous creators to the museum for extended periods. During their residencies, artists create new work in public spaces, allowing visitors to observe their creative processes. These residencies generate opportunities for direct interaction between artists and visitors, fostering a deeper understanding of Indigenous artistic practices.

References

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