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Gift cards may be redeemed onsite for tickets, memberships, or merchandise within the Shops in the Hamilton Building and Sie Welcome Center. Not valid for online purchases.

Gift cards should arrive within 5-10 business days.

Limit 1 per transaction. To purchase multiple gift cards, call 720-913-0130 to speak with an associate.

We look forward to your visit!

Gift cards may be redeemed onsite for tickets, memberships, or merchandise within the Shops in the Hamilton Building and Sie Welcome Center. Not valid for online purchases.

Gift cards should arrive within 5-10 business days.

Limit 1 per transaction. To purchase multiple gift cards, call 720-913-0130 to speak with an associate.

We look forward to your visit!

Gift cards may be redeemed onsite for tickets, memberships, or merchandise within the Shops in the Hamilton Building and Sie Welcome Center. Not valid for online purchases.

Gift cards should arrive within 5-10 business days.

Limit 1 per transaction. To purchase multiple gift cards, call 720-913-0130 to speak with an associate.

We look forward to your visit!

Gift cards may be redeemed onsite for tickets, memberships, or merchandise within the Shops in the Hamilton Building and Sie Welcome Center. Not valid for online purchases.

Gift cards should arrive within 5-10 business days.

Limit 1 per transaction. To purchase multiple gift cards, call 720-913-0130 to speak with an associate.

We look forward to your visit!

*Price includes a $30 Studio Fee for all materials provided.

Class Description:

Whether using paper or fabric, collage has long been practiced by women, people of color, and those without access to a formal art education. In this class, we will examine the history of collage as an outsider art – how women and people of color used material at hand (paper and fabric scraps, for example) to create visual expressions that resonate powerfully today. Students will be asked to channel the spirit of these artists (many of whom remain unidentified) in creating their own works of art from the materials of daily life. The instructor will bring her expertise in history and collage to help students explore this vibrant and accessible art form.

What to Expect:

This class begins with a short presentation of the history of collage as an outsider art, and will include a visit to the Art of the Ancient Americas gallery for inspiration. Students will be asked to find three elements from pieces in the collection to inspire their collage composition. We will examine Enrique Chagoya's Borders of the Spirit in the Art of the Ancient Americas gallery as a way to consider how collage is a powerful medium for exploring identity.

Class Cancellation Policy:

If a class or workshop needs to be cancelled due to inclement weather or teacher illness, a “make-up” day will be scheduled on a FRIDAY or SATURDAY as the educator’s schedule allows.

Materials:

All materials will be provided for this workshop and are included in the Studio Fee of $30.

Educator:

Teresa Cribelli started her art career in the archive; inspired by the historical documents she used in her academic research in Brazil, she became interested in the ways that collage can bring the past and the present together. While living in Brazil she was also inspired by the wheat paste street art of Rio de Janeiro. Part of Rio’s vibrant street art culture, wheat paste posters (graphic art printed on paper and pasted to walls) became a type of open-air collective collage she watched for on her daily commute. Inspired by the outsider artists who make street art, she began collecting and then experimenting with vintage papers to make her own collages. Bringing her training as a historian to her practice (she taught Latin American History at the University of Alabama for 11 years) Teresa uses her small-scale analog collages to make visual statements about power, gender, and the environment told through the lens of history. Her work has been shown at Kolaj Fest in New Orleans and Paperworkers Local in Birmingham, Alabama among other venues. Her pieces are held in private collections and in the Doug and Laurie Kanyer Art Collection. Street art pieces based on her collages can be seen in Tuscaloosa and Birmingham, Alabama; Denver, Colorado; Barcelona, Spain; and São Luís, Brazil.

Class Description:

This class will focus on sound as a healing force through cross-cultural perspectives. Students will learn about meditation and sound bathing with the use of various musical instruments. Breathing techniques and body movements for healing will also be explored. Students will investigate how sound can be used in everyday life to release stress and to calm the body and mind.

What to Expect:

Students can expect to find a deeper understanding of how sound can help to heal the body and mind. No prior knowledge needed. The beginning of class will focus on discussion of the musical instruments used to help us heal. Then, we will experience sound bathing and meditation as a group. Time in galleries will explore instruments used in ceremonial practices and as healing tools by our ancestors. Lastly, students will be led through yoga positions, breath work, and mantras for healing.

Class Cancellation Policy:

If a class or workshop needs to be cancelled due to inclement weather or teacher illness, a “make-up” day will be scheduled on a FRIDAY or SATURDAY as the educator’s schedule allows.

Materials:

n/a

Educator:

Cal Duran is an artist and art educator focusing on connecting with his ancestors from an Indigenous and Latinx background. His work often explores parallels between hybrid identities found in myth, religion, and ritual. Duran has shown altars, installations and artwork in museums and galleries throughout the Denver Metro area and beyond. He continues to honor his ancestors and recently created a room at Meow Wolf in Denver, honoring the indigenous tribes of Colorado and the Americas.

https://www.artbycal.com

*Students will purchase their own materials and should expect to spend $20-40.

Class Description:

Craftivism is simply craft + activism. In this class, we will use textiles to create our own soft sculptures, protest tapestries about a cause that matters to you, and positive affirmation embroideries. Students will learn sewing and embroidery techniques to create works about things you care about. The textile collection of the Denver Art Museum has several works of craftivism and we will also look at those to understand what craftivism is and how simple it is to do! Beginners are welcome. Don't be intimidated by sewing. This course will make it simple and meaningful.

What to Expect:

During class, we will mostly be creating. We will be making 3 different artworks: soft sculptures of the word "No" to help remind us to keep healthy boundaries in our lives, fabric tapestries about a cause or topic that matters to you personally, and hand embroidered positive affirmations. After this class, you will know 3 new ways of creating work that is personal and meaningful to you using fabric and sewing techniques. Beginners are welcome. No prior experience necessary.

Timeline:

Class 1: introduction to soft sculpture and creation of our own soft sculptures

Class 2: Look at the work of Aram Han Sifuentes in the textiles collection of the Denver Art Museum, and begin creating our own protest tapestries

Class 3: Finish tapestries and begin embroidery

Class 4: Finish embroidery

Class Cancellation Policy:

If a class or workshop needs to be cancelled due to inclement weather or teacher illness, a “make-up” day will be scheduled on a FRIDAY or SATURDAY as the educator’s schedule allows.

Educator:

Charis Lillene Fleshner is a conceptual mixed media artist who completed her MFA in studio art at the University of New Mexico. Fleshner currently teaches art at Aims Community College and shows work nationally. Before starting graduate studies, Charis Lillene Fleshner used her BFA in art education from University of North Texas to teach junior high and elementary art for seven years. Her studio practice currently focuses on painting, soft sculpture, Craftivism, and the intersections of Feminism and art.

charismakesart.com

*Students will purchase their own materials and should expect to spend $50-100.

Class Description:

In this course, students will explore both expressive and representational techniques in watercolor, ink, and gouache. Using seasonal, botanical subjects such as branches and flowers, students will complete drawings that include texture, color, and depth. Students will learn a variety of water media techniques including stretching paper, creating washes, and building transparent vs. opaque layers. We will make connections to work in the DAM’s Asian Art Collection, including the use of value to create depth in the ink painting Bamboo by Chinese artist Zhou Zhenyue, or the use of texture and brushwork in the piece White Herons and an Old Willow by Japanese artist Kikuchi Hobun. We will also look at contemporary uses of watercolor in the Denver Art Museum collection, including watercolor drawings by Enrique Martinez Celaya and Laura Ball.

What to Expect:

This class welcomes both beginners as well as students who have some drawing or painting experience. We will visit the galleries together to discuss water media work in the DAM's collections, and then spend time learning new techniques in small studies in the classroom. Students will then use these new approaches in a larger, finished drawing from observation of botanical subjects. We will have the option to work outdoors from life in the Sensory Garden or focus indoors on our favorite houseplants or branches.

Timeline:

Class 1:

Gallery Visit to the Asian Art Collection

B&W Mark making in Ink

Stretching Paper

Class 2:

Look at images from the exhibition "Drawings from Vicki and Kent Logan Collection"

Expressive Washes in Watercolor

Layering Washes to Create Depth

Class 3:

Observational Drawing and Composition

Opacity Vs. Transparency with Gouache

Saving Whites

Class 4:

Studio Time to Finish Larger Drawing

Reflection and Conversation

Class Cancellation Policy:

If a class or workshop needs to be cancelled due to inclement weather or teacher illness, a “make-up” day will be scheduled on a FRIDAY or SATURDAY as the educator’s schedule allows.

Materials:

Students will purchase their own materials and should expect to spend $50-100.

GET THE MATERIALS KIT AT MEININGER’S ART SUPPLY or purchase the items individually.

Educator:

Mindy Bray is a painter and muralist based in Denver, CO. Her works examine the intersection of natural and built environments. The images are reduced and transformed to create complex visual fields of shape and pattern. Based on photographs of locations such as city parks, wilderness trails and residential landscapes, the works present liminal places that trace the complex relationship between people and their habitat. Mindy earned her Master of Fine Arts in Painting from the University of Iowa in 2005 and has taught drawing and foundations at the University of Denver and Metropolitan State University. Her work has been exhibited nationally at galleries including Goodwin Fine Art, Rule Gallery and Ironton, and her work has been featured in New American Paintings, The Denver Post, Modern in Denver magazine, art ltd., and Luxe Interiors and Design. Mindy’s public commissions include permanent works at the Westin Hotel at Denver International Airport and the Colorado Convention Center, and her private commissions can be found in commercial and residential spaces throughout Denver.

www.mindybray.com

*Students will purchase their own materials and should expect to spend $30-70.

Class Description:

In this class we will explore drawing fundamentals in an accelerated form. We will use the fundamentals to explore within the museum as we sketch from art within the galleries. We will conclude with creating individual pieces from the skills built and research sketches. The intent of this class is to bring each artist through the entire process of researching and creating a completed piece of work.

What to Expect:

Artists will learn or in some cases relearn fundamental skills mixed with some tricks of the trade to help them work within the museum to sketch and generate ideas as well as take those ideas in to the studio to complete a finished project.

Timeline:

Week 1 – Learning the fundamentals

Week 2 - Learning the fundamentals

Week 3 – Gathering sketches and ideas in the museum’s galleries

Week 4 - Gathering sketches and ideas in the museum’s galleries

Week 5 – Drawing in the classroom

Week 6 - Drawing in the classroom

Class Cancellation Policy:

If a class or workshop needs to be cancelled due to inclement weather or teacher illness, a “make-up” day will be scheduled on a FRIDAY or SATURDAY as the educator’s schedule allows.

Materials:

Students will purchase their own materials and should expect to spend $30-70.

GET THE MATERIALS KIT AT MEININGER’S ART SUPPLY or purchase the items individually.

Educator:

Born in Denver in 1972, Michael Dowling spent much of his early life as a typical kid apart from being an obsessive drawer. It wasn’t until the age of 25, and after several years studying various subjects as well as working in many fields, that Michael started painting. With that late beginning, Dowling dove full in and began studying extensively. At 28, he decided to sell a burgeoning art sales company and moved to Florence, Italy to focus on painting. He has since returned to his native Denver where he lives and works.

Michael Dowling's work has been characterized as a combination of traditional practices in realism and his explorations of mark, pattern, and color to disrupt that reality. In many compositions, figures presented as portrait, morph into their surreal self, and lone objects tell stories through their subtle positioning. These objects and characters sit in bizarre spaces with intentionally disrupted atmospheres in order to find further meaning within the imagery.

https://m2lr.com/artists/72-michael-dowling/

COMPOSING COLOR: THE WORLD OF ALMA THOMAS

American artist Alma Thomas once wrote “Love comes by looking.” In this multi-session course, take a closer look at the artist, her art, and her world. Learn about Thomas’s creative philosophies and inspiration, fall in love with her eye for color and pattern, and dive into the deeper context of her long life and impactful career.

Session #1 – Alma Thomas: The Creative Age

September 14th, 2024 - 2:00 PM

Alma Thomas’s long life and late-career breakthroughs prove that creativity gets better with time. Like other artists who were prolific well into older age, Thomas’s creativity dynamically evolved in her later decades. In this course session, we’ll celebrate Thomas’s vibrant abstractions from the 1950s-1970s and consider her journey and others’ who worked well into their seventies, eighties, and beyond.

Session #2 – Alma’s World

October 19th, 2024 - 2:00 PM

Alma Thomas’s life was as rich and complex as her paintings. The third session of this course focuses on the larger context in which Thomas lived and worked, paying particular attention to the artistic, social, and political movements that influenced Thomas’s development as an artist.

Session #3 – The Meaning and Making of Color

November 16th, 2024 - 2:00 PM

For Alma Thomas, the “spirit and living soul of the world” was manifest through colors. She used art’s most luscious resource brilliantly, concentrating on what she called “beauty and happiness,” rather than urgencies of “inhumanity.” This session offers deep context for how and why artists throughout history have found, manipulated, coded, and celebrated color to achieve staggeringly diverse ends. It’s the ultimate shape-shifter. Color produces happiness—and it also registers power, privilege, spirituality, symbolism, technologies, emotion, and reason. With color at the forefront, artists create endless pathways to expression and offer us inexhaustible insights.

Presented by Stella Paul, writer and educator, author of Chromaphilia: The Story of Color in Art

COMPOSING COLOR: THE WORLD OF ALMA THOMAS

American artist Alma Thomas once wrote “Love comes by looking.” In this multi-session course, take a closer look at the artist, her art, and her world. Learn about Thomas’s creative philosophies and inspiration, fall in love with her eye for color and pattern, and dive into the deeper context of her long life and impactful career.

Session #1 – Alma Thomas: The Creative Age

September 14th, 2024 - 2:00 PM

Alma Thomas’s long life and late-career breakthroughs prove that creativity gets better with time. Like other artists who were prolific well into older age, Thomas’s creativity dynamically evolved in her later decades. In this course session, we’ll celebrate Thomas’s vibrant abstractions from the 1950s-1970s and consider her journey and others’ who worked well into their seventies, eighties, and beyond.

Session #2 – Alma’s World

October 19th, 2024 - 2:00 PM

Alma Thomas’s life was as rich and complex as her paintings. The third session of this course focuses on the larger context in which Thomas lived and worked, paying particular attention to the artistic, social, and political movements that influenced Thomas’s development as an artist.

Session #3 – The Meaning and Making of Color

November 16th, 2024 - 2:00 PM

For Alma Thomas, the “spirit and living soul of the world” was manifest through colors. She used art’s most luscious resource brilliantly, concentrating on what she called “beauty and happiness,” rather than urgencies of “inhumanity.” This session offers deep context for how and why artists throughout history have found, manipulated, coded, and celebrated color to achieve staggeringly diverse ends. It’s the ultimate shape-shifter. Color produces happiness—and it also registers power, privilege, spirituality, symbolism, technologies, emotion, and reason. With color at the forefront, artists create endless pathways to expression and offer us inexhaustible insights.

Presented by Stella Paul, writer and educator, author of Chromaphilia: The Story of Color in Art

Give to the Denver Art Museum's Annual Fund

Your 100% tax-deductible contribution supports inspiring art connections, powerful artist collaborations, community-minded programming at the Denver Art Museum. During these unprecedented times, your donation helps the museum reimagine how we connect in person and online through a series of new opportunities for visitors of all ages. Thank you for your support of the Denver Art Museum's annual fund.

Access for two to lectures, programming and exclusive enrichment events.

The Museum Friends membership add-on offers DAM members an opportunity to deepen their support and broaden their horizons with a community of like-minded art aficionados. Denver Art Museum Friends take part in educational activities, lectures, exclusive tours, and more.

Access for one to lectures, programming and exclusive enrichment events.

The Museum Friends membership add-on offers DAM members an opportunity to deepen their support and broaden their horizons with a community of like-minded art aficionados. Denver Art Museum Friends take part in educational activities, lectures, exclusive tours, and more.

This is an in-person ticket.

To purchase a virtual ticket click here.

This presentation complements the exhibition The Life and Art of Tokio Ueyama, on display in the western American art permanent galleries on the 7th floor of the Martin Building until June 1, 2025. Curator of the exhibition JR Henneman will provide an overview of the artist and his life, including his studies at prestigious American institutions and his travels abroad. She will also consider his artwork, which features landscape, portraiture, and still life, and acknowledge the incarceration of Japanese people in the US during World War II between 1942 and 1945. At that time, Ueyama was forcibly removed from his home in southern California and sent to the Granada Relocation Center, now known as the Amache National Historic Site, in southeast Colorado. This presentation will consider how the DAM discovered and interpreted the artwork of this overlooked American artist and how we sensitively tell this challenging World War II history.

Indian culture attributes a range of aesthetic, sensory, and divine qualities to the natural environment, as documented in literary and religious texts dating as far back as the early centuries BCE. In this broad-ranging lecture, Tushara Bindu Gude will discuss the ways in which ideas regarding beauty, romance, character, and divinity can be read in artistic renderings of flowers, trees, and gardens. Dr. Gude received her Ph.D from the University of California, Los Angeles. She has served as a curator of South and Southeast Asian Art for over twenty years, first at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and, until recently, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

This is a virtual ticket.

To purchase an in-person ticket click here.

This presentation complements the exhibition The Life and Art of Tokio Ueyama, on display in the western American art permanent galleries on the 7th floor of the Martin Building until June 1, 2025. Curator of the exhibition JR Henneman will provide an overview of the artist and his life, including his studies at prestigious American institutions and his travels abroad. She will also consider his artwork, which features landscape, portraiture, and still life, and acknowledge the incarceration of Japanese people in the US during World War II between 1942 and 1945. At that time, Ueyama was forcibly removed from his home in southern California and sent to the Granada Relocation Center, now known as the Amache National Historic Site, in southeast Colorado. This presentation will consider how the DAM discovered and interpreted the artwork of this overlooked American artist and how we sensitively tell this challenging World War II history.

Donations to this fund are invested by the DAM foundation with the intention to grow the fund in value over time. This fund provides an annual distribution based on the Foundation's policy.  Distributed funds are used to acquire new artwork for the DAM.

The Museum regularly reconciles expenditures made from distributed funds to ensure that they are allocated as intended.

The basic benefits including unlimited free general admission for one for an entire year, plus two complimentary one-time use general admission guest passes.

Please select the date you would like to visit the Denver Art Museum. Your tickets will be valid for the entire day.