Denver Art Museum

And it's because the New York art museums, you know, are kissing cousins with the art market.

And a lot of the artists that the Denver Art Museum is showing in its native and contemporary galleries are not descended from the market, from the European-American market.

So, yeah, I've always thought getting around and getting around as broadly as I can was really important.

And if you're driven by these questions that artists are asking, right, it sounds like maybe you're doing the same for institutions.

Art is history.

Denver Art Museum is looking to tell the story of the American West through a more realistic lens.

Remember that movie 101 Dalmatians? It was crazy, because there were so many dogs.

I mean, 101 of anything is just, it's a ton.

Charles M. Russell was one of the most prolific artists of the American West.

His work helped to shape the way that many of us think about our area.

100 years after his death, the Denver Art Museum is taking a look at his work with a fresh perspective.

in the Blackfoot language, there is no word for art like we have in English.

This was, uh, found by, uh, two young brothers, Jesse and Liam Fisher, and their dad at a place called the Hell Creek Formation.

And that particular T. rex is gonna be on display, uh, real soon at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, which is super cool.

A, a T. rex fossil.

And, and Pat, you have a tribute to this, Pat?

And it, it moves around the room as well.

um that's a really memorable one the i mean the denver museum had a special exhibit that was uh an entire floor of in contemporary indigenous artists

yeah

uh and i very moving yes it was compelling it was moving and i think it's something that a lot of museums are starting to incorporate into their uh they had a really

And his work has been commissioned by companies such as Chipotle, BMW, Toyota, Budweiser, and others.

He's also exhibited in museums, including the Denver Art Museum and the New Orleans Museum of Art.

And he's been collected by well-known celebrities and art enthusiasts around the world.

He's also active in raising money through his art for charitable organizations like the YMCA, the American Cancer Society, and several others.

It's going to be a lot of fun.

Over at the Denver Art Museum, we have another Charlie Russell show.

This one is also open now.

It runs through January at the Denver Art Museum.

This one is called Storytellers, the Blackfeet Nation and Charlie Charles M. Russell.

So when Charlie Russell went to move to Great Falls at that time, the Blackfeet were still camping nearby.

He had people that he was painting.

He he did all kinds of things there in Great Falls.

I'm just like,

really? It took us this long? Well, I think the collections – and not just, of course, at Mesa Verde, but we've seen it at the Denver Art Museum, at the Museum of Nature and Science – You see it across the country that so many things were taken from these sites before they were nationally protected.

So Mesa Verde has been a national park for 120 years, I think, but people were excavating and taking plunder, really, from it long before that.

You figure a place has to find the provenance.

But at the same time, as a visitor of Mesa Verde, these are things that I would want to know about.

Like, yes, where did these come from? Because I find that interesting.

Like, we saw this with, you know, the controversy of the items that were acquired and shown at the Denver Art Museum, like you were mentioning.

that were taken under terms that, I mean, this is the story of a lot of these artifacts, right? Bought and sold by people that have no business buying and selling them, ending up in these institutions, which often are funded by things like taxpayer dollars, and also presented in interesting contexts that don't necessarily explain anything.

By the 1980s, he was ready for a fresh start, so he moved his family to Colorado.

He continued painting, and in 1989, the Denver Art Museum hired him to create a huge mural about the Chicano civil rights movement, right inside the building.

He called it the torch of Quetzalcoatl.

An estimated 89,000 people came to watch him work on it over four months.

For a while, a 22-foot statue of Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead, really did stand outside the terminal.

Photos of it still circulate as proof that something occult is going on there.

It went up in June of 2010, and it was an ad for the King Tut exhibition running over at the Denver Art Museum.

It came down when the exhibit left town.