Denver Art Museum
Encyclopaedic art museum in two landmark buildings by Gio Ponti and Daniel Libeskind.
The Denver Art Museum traces its origins to 1893 and holds more than 70,000 works across the Americas, Asia, Africa, Europe and Oceania. Its first purpose-built home, now the Lanny and Sharon Martin Building, opened in 1971 to a design by the Italian architect Gio Ponti with James Sudler Associates. The seven-storey fortress-like block is faced in around a million grey glass tiles and was the only completed building by Ponti in North America. It reopened in 2021 after a thorough renovation.
Across the plaza stands the Frederic C. Hamilton Building of 2006, designed by Daniel Libeskind with Davis Partnership, whose titanium-clad angular volumes were inspired by the nearby Rocky Mountains. The museum is particularly known for its collection of Indigenous arts of North America, one of the earliest such collections assembled by an American art museum, together with strong holdings of Western American art, Latin American art, textiles and design. The Sie Welcome Center links the two buildings.
Highlights
- Gio Ponti's grey glass-tiled Martin Building, his only North American work
- Titanium-clad Hamilton Building by Daniel Libeskind
- Long-established Indigenous Arts of North America galleries
- Western American, Latin American and textile collections
