What does community mean to you?

¿Qué significa para ti la comunidad?

A public art installation for Friendship Alley in Denver’s Westwood neighborhood designed in collaboration with students from Munroe Elementary School.

In the spring of 2021 I, along with a group of local artists, was invited to attend a walking tour of the Westwood Denver neighborhood with the Denver Street Partnership. During this walk, we were invited to think about how temporary public art installations could improve the walkability of this community. As we headed toward Munroe Elementary School we were first shown Friendship Alley, an alleyway improvement project that was headed up by the local neighborhood organization Westwood Unidos in 2016. When you approach the alleyway from the west you are greeted by two large, wrought iron signs on both sides, one reads Friendship Alley and the other in Spanish reads Callejon de la Amistad. This alleyway leads directly to Munroe Elementary School and has become a safe space for students to walk and bike to and from school. I immediately fell in love with this space, created by the community for the students, and it got me thinking about how a public art installation could build on this concept of community. I was connected with Maggie Latorre, Munroe’s incredible art teacher, who along with the students in her after school art club has painted multiple murals along Friendship Alley over the years.

In early 2022 I began working with students in the classroom, ranging in age from 3 - 11. Over the course of four weeks, we explored public art and through the experimentation of different mediums, the students responded to the question “What does community mean to you?” (“¿Qué significa para ti la comunidad?”). I designed a structure, similar to a little library, that would later showcase these scenes celebrating community, inspired by the students. Students started by drawing and writing out their ideas. They then moved on to expressive stances that would communicate what was happening in the scene. A student whose scene focused on soccer might lay across a large piece of paper and strike the pose of someone who was kicking a soccer ball. Their partner then traced their outline and they moved on to decorating their figures with markers and paint. These silhouetted figures and the poses students captured provided inspiration for the final design of these multi-layered scenes, and also decorated the school’s hallways.

A special thank you to Munroe’s incredible art teacher Maggie Latorre for welcoming me into her classroom and providing support throughout the project.

I then partnered with a local fabricator, Elmendorf / Geurts to engineer and fabricate a series of six sculptures that would line the way through Friendship Alley, all the way to Munroe’s front entrance, highlighting a safe path for students. Each sculpture contains a unique scene inspired by the student’s thoughts on community in the form of layered, water jet cut, stainless steel panels. The house like structure that houses each scene features open doors as a welcoming sign as well as a nod to retablo folk art sculptures. Solar panels and interior LED lighting allow the sculptures to emit a soft glow in the evening, providing a unique day to night viewing experience.

In late October 2022, a group of my amazing friends volunteered their time to help refresh the murals along the alleyway in advance of the sculpture installation. Thank you to Alsne, Erin, Roxann, Avery, and my mom for spending a Saturday painting and to my good friend, studio mate, and incredible artist Sandra Fettingis for donating paint from her years of mural work around Denver and across the country. 

The sculptures were installed in November 2022 and a community celebration is in the works for Spring of 2023.

This project was made possible thanks to funding from the Colorado Arts Relief Fund, the INSITE Fund and Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Colorado Creative Industries, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Denver Arts and Venues P.S. You Are Here Grant and Denver Streets Partnership.