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then, the city has spent more than $26 million on art, acquiring nearly 175 pieces, including some that have been donated. While many were created by artists with little widespread name recognition, some are major examples by such widely known figures as Jonathan Borofsky, Fernando Botero, Edward Ruscha, and Donald Lipski. Denver's public-art program first grabbed national attention in 1995, with the opening of the city's new international airport. The city spent S7.5 million on art for the facility, making it, at that time, one of the biggest single public art projects in the world. In conjunction with the Democratic National Convention, for which Denver served as host, the Office of Cultural Affairs took on another ambitious project: Dialog:City: An Event Converging Art, Democracy and Digital Media. Created by Seth Goldenberg and Liz Newton, the innovative nine-day program consisted of interactive, multimedia works by such international artists as Minsuk Cho, R. Luke Dubois, Ann Hamilton,
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and Krzysztof Wodiczko. These offerings ranged from Daniel Peltz's karaoke convention centers to Wodiczko's Veteran Vehicle Project, which used projections to tell the stories of Denver's homeless veterans.
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Although operating on a smaller scale, some of the suburban communities surrounding Denver have public art programs as well. Among the biggest and most established is Aurora's, an eastern suburb with a population of about 310.000. The city began its 1-percent-for-art program in 1993 but did not begin
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ABOVE: Luis Jimenez, Mustang, cast fiberglass, 2008, Denver International Airport, BELOW: Dennis Oppenheim, Light Chamber, to be completed in 2010, Denver Justice Center.
Other projects took place outside of any official purview. Providing an underground, Los Angeles feel was the Manifest Hope Gallery [pictured on pages 56 and 57], a temporary space split be|
tween the Andenken Gallery and a nearby warehouse. Organized
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in conjunction with MoveOn.org, it presented pro-Barack Obama
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works by 125 local and national participants, from blue-chip names
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to skateboard artists. A 25- by 8o-foot rooftop sculpture, created
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by tres birds workshop of Boulder using 180 bike wheels, spelled
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out the word "hope" and became an icon of the convention.
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Text was also the focus of two other temporary public art
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pieces. Robert Indiana showed a new sculptural variation of his
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famous pop rendering of the word Love, using Hope in its place.
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The Brooklyn-based duo of Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese
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focused on the word Democracy, transforming it into a 3- by 15-foot
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ice sculpture outside the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver
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[same project pictured in St. Paul, Minnesota on page 68].
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vention and provided a sense of the broad-ranging boundaries of
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public art today.-Kyle MacMillan
These varied offerings gave an added dimension to the conKrzysztof Wodiczko, Veteran Vehicle Project, August 22-26,2008,1414 Grant Street in Denver.