- Hi I'm Michael Gadlin.
- And I'm Kate Perdoni.
Welcome back to Arts District on Rocky Mountain PBS.
- You see them everywhere you look.
I've even been commissioned to make them.
Murals inspire us everyday and they're
adding personality to downtown Denver
with colors, character and stories from our city.
- In addition to locals like Michael,
artists from all over the world
have been hired to paint Denver's murals.
Arts District reporter Sebastian Powell
shows us the street art of Mile High
through the eyes of a local connoisseur.
(upbeat music)
- You can find at least one
in every neighborhood of Mile High.
There are more than 100 of them in downtown Denver alone.
A new one seems to pop up every month or so.
No, we're not talking about breweries or dispensaries.
Denver's street art scene has evolved recently
into a vibrant melting pot of eclectic styles,
and absolutely breathtaking murals.
Massive compositions, some of which
belong on a canvas in a museum.
And while some of these murals are privately funded,
the city of Denver's Urban Arts Fund is responsible
for creating nearly 300 new murals since 2008.
It's helped save more than 350,000 square feet
of walls from being vandalized as well.
This fund has been able to draw the help of not only
local artists, creatives from around the world have
come to Denver to transform our city's blank walls
into the magnificent urban canvases we see every day.
The city of Denver's objective for public art
is to enhance our city's identity across the globe
and it's civic pride here at home,
broadening our citizens understanding of
and day to day experience with street art.
The murals that make our city what it is today.
Even with hundreds of unique creations across Denver,
many of them can be tough to find.
Most of these works of art are
tucked away in alleys or in side streets,
hidden from the public view.
Luckily, one woman has carved a path for us.
For anyone willing to get themselves lost,
in the vast landscape of Denver's street art.
Born in Winter Park, Colorado, Cori Anderson
went to school in Boulder before calling
Denver home in 2016.
As a writer for 303 magazine, she tells us
her passion for street art combined with
her knowledge of local art and culture
led to a surprise phone call from the Denver Art Museum.
- The first thing that really happened was
the Denver Art Museum asked me kind of out of the blue
if I wanted to take a bunch of their design
council around Rhino and show them murals.
They had been following me, my writing and my articles
and said that I was someone that
knew a lot about street art.
And so it really took this outsider's point of view
coming around and saying you know,
you're an expert on street art,
we want you to show us around that really sparked the idea
and that was last October and so I realized,
maybe I am knowledgeable enough to do this.
(laughing)
Yeah.
- [Sebastian] Since then she's gone on to create Rebel Tours
and its parent company The Street Art Network.
Cori tells us, prepping for these tours
can be an odyssey in and of itself.
- A lot of my preparing for the tours
is just simply trying to get lost in a neighborhood.
And so I do these tours in three different
neighborhoods in Denver, that's here in Rhino,
the Art District on Santa Fe, and then downtown
where I start at the dairy block.
And so generally every week, even if I don't have a tour,
I'm making sure that I'm going through those neighborhoods
and seeing if there's new art,
seeing if there's tags on art,
just trying to really have a feel for
what the neighborhood is like that week
because that might change what I say on my tour as well.
- [Sebastian] As we join Cori on one of her tours,
through the River North Art District,
you find yourself learning a little more
than you might expect.
- Whose a Denver native, and this piece in particular
I think shows his skill and ability really well
because everything on this wall
that he did was with spray paint.
- [Sebastian] During our interview at Ratio Brewery
and while on tour in Rhino, you can tell
that this is more than a job for Ms. Anderson.
What she gets out of each tour
is a personal and meaningful experience
between the participants and the artwork itself.
- And so what I really hope, and what I've seen
a few times on my tours, are people that might
see someone at the beginning,
or see a piece of work by someone at the beginning,
and then by the end of the tour,
by two hours later, they are recognizing that person's
other work in the neighborhood.
But I think the other thing that
I would really like from my tours
and something that I started to see more often,
is the inspiration for somebody
to become a street artist or graffiti writer.
If I can spark an idea in a child or an adult
to create a piece of art themselves,
whether that be commissioned or just for fun,
I think I've done my job.
- During a time when I was a kid
I thought grafiti artists were bad
but now as time went by and as I look
at some amazing art has just makes me feel
like I want to be an artist too.
- [Sebastian] The Murals of Mile High,
along with works of art across the world,
have been a voice for social awareness
and will continue to break down racial
and cultural barriers for years to come.
Such an instance took place on one of Cori's tours
through the Santa Fe Art District,
an area steeped in latino culture
that murals she adds, ignited a memorable experience
for one man who had grown up there for decades.
- One of my favorite memories was
taking this couple on the Art District on Santa Fe tour
and the man had grown up just basically a block
from where I was starting this tour.
So he'd been, and he was in his late 60's early 70's
so he'd been a Denver native for much longer
than anyone else I'd ever taken on one of my tours.
And at first I was a little bit intimidated by it
just thinking maybe he knows more about
this whole thing than I do
and what if I don't have anything to tell him
that's new or exciting and he was so enthralled
the entire time by what I was talking about
with the neighborhood, how I was connecting
pieces of the Chicano and Latino history
with the street art that we were seeing
and the graffiti that he wanted
to go on the tour again and bring more people.
That was much more important than just
having people say, oh I really liked your tour.
It was this man telling me that he learned something
new about a neighborhood that he lived in for 60 years.
- [Sebastian] For Arts District, I'm Sebastian Powell.
- What an amazing opportunity for artists.
There's so much to see around Denver
and I love to hear all of those stories.
And a tour like that around a city
- I know!
- I wanna go on that tour, don't you?
- How cool, I absolutely do.
- Let's do it together.
- Let's do it.