The DAM Renovations Are Finally Done...

After three years of work, the new visitor's center and renovation of the North Building of the Denver Art Museum have finally been completed. This past Friday, as a card carrying member of the museum, I was able to take a tour of the new facility before the doors opened to the general public on Saturday. I must say, I was very impressed with the new visitors center. It really is quite an improvement over the previous incarnation. The photograph on the left shows the view of downtown Denver from the new lounge area.

I took the photograph on the right of the new entryway, which is quite snazzy indeed. I was happy to see that the first floor on the main level of the renovated building now houses art galleries, unlike before. It seemed like an awful waste of space having a large ballroom and lecture space instead of art, and it was wise of the museum to have rectified this.

While the new visitors center is a major change, the galleries on the 2nd through 7th floors are more or less the same, but repainted and given a few modern touches, including more video presentations. I was happy to see that the photography gallery is now much larger, although the first exhibit in the expanded space is called Curious Visions: Toward Abstract Photography, which is not my favorite example of that medium. I always like to recognize what I am looking at when I see a photo, but that's just me.

As can be expected, there were a lot of VIPs at the museum's Friday preview, including my friends Linda and Darrel, the former Accounts Payable Supervisor at the University of Denver Bookstore, whom I met leaving the museum as I was arriving. They both were very impressed with the remodel, although since the galleries on floors 2 through 7 were not altered that much, they wondered why it took three years to complete, as do I. Plus, in the Hamilton Building, which remained open during the remodel, galleries on three of the four floors are now closed for art installations, several of which won't be ready until next year. Was the remodel just an elaborate ruse to avoid hosting a buffet table on Untitled Final Fridays every month for the past three years? And will the DAM once again return to providing that buffet table, starting this Friday evening, now that two restaurants have returned to the museum? I, for one, intend to find out this coming Friday night, and if there is no free food to be found, I shall demand to know the reason why.