Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Denver, CO

Did you know that Denver has a contemporary art museum? Not many people do. The city has an art museum, the Denver Art Museum (DAM) with has contemporary art displayed but Denver also has a contemporary art museum called MCA Denver (www.mcadenver.org) It’s located at the corner of 15th Street and Delgany in LoDo.

MCA Denver was founded in 1996 and has a really great three floor building with lots of class and white walls. There are five galleries and they perform in a “rotation sequence” which means every couple of months the old exhibits go out and a new one come in.

My mother is an artist and has wanted to go to the MCA Denver for awhile so my sister and I took her there for Mother’s Day. Two things really stuck out on this visit. First of all, there was hardly anyone there! I think I saw six other people in the entire museum (not including the two staff at the front desk and two volunteer/staff roaming exhibits. The second thing I notice (which may have contributed to the firs thing) is that the majority of the exhibits were small (as in five pieces of works). A lot of the walls were bare. There is so much room for so much more work!

Contemporary art might not be everyone’s cup of tea. One display was a dark room with a small television screen showing the mouth of talking woman reciting the late Irish dramatist and writer, Samuel Becket’s Not I, which is the consists of a woman trying to recount the memory of a tragic breath.

The MCA Denver may not have the money to do any PR or advertising but unless I knew of a specific exhibit I’d want to see, I probably wouldn’t return. This is kind of sad because a city like of Denver should have this type of culture. It seems like there are local contemporary artist that could fill the space, and it’s really beautiful space. Too bad.