Denver Art Museum

The Denver Art Museum is the premier art institution in the Mountain West, with a collection of more than 70,000 works spanning 5,000 years across every region and medium of art history. The museum occupies two architecturally significant buildings in Denver's Civic Center Cultural Complex: the original 1971 Gio Ponti-designed North Building, with its distinctive castellated facade of one million gray glass tiles, and the Daniel Libeskind-designed Frederic C. Hamilton Building, opened in 2006, whose angular titanium-clad form has become a landmark of contemporary architecture in the American West.

The collection's greatest strengths lie in its departments of Indigenous arts of North America, Western American art, and pre-Columbian and Spanish Colonial art. The Indigenous arts collection is considered one of the finest encyclopedic collections in the world, with holdings spanning every region and medium of Indigenous North American art making. The Western American galleries present work from the 19th-century Hudson River School painters who were the first to document the Rocky Mountain landscape through the contemporary artists who continue that tradition today. The Spanish Colonial collection documents the artistic traditions brought by Spanish missionaries and settlers to the Americas from the 16th century forward.

The museum's rotating exhibition program consistently brings major international shows to Denver alongside exhibitions dedicated to the history and contemporary practice of Rocky Mountain region art. The recent expansion has added significant gallery space for the contemporary collection, which includes work by major figures from the postwar period to the present. The museum's position in the Civic Center complex, adjacent to the Colorado State Capitol, places it at the center of Denver's cultural life. The Clyfford Still Museum, located directly across the plaza and dedicated entirely to the work of the Abstract Expressionist painter who lived and worked in the Denver area, makes the Civic Center one of the most concentrated museum destinations in the Mountain West.