A city agency is paying more than $625,000 for a temporary art installation that’s meant to prompt downtown Denver visitors — and the central business district’s economy — to look up this summer.
The Skynet Art Series will launch an “aerial art installation” that features multiple, floating kinetic sculptures hanging over the streets, Denver Arts & Venues said in a statement. The colorful sculptures, which undulate with the wind, are designed to create feathery, streaming canopies that highlight and play off the architecture, light and weather in highly visible public areas.
A similar project last summer by artist Patrick Shearn in El Paso County’s Green Mountain Falls attracted more than 100,000 visitors and boosted sales tax revenue by 36% year-over-year during its four-month run, according to the Denver Downtown Development Authority, which is paying for the artwork in Denver. The 6,000 square-foot sculpture, “Off the Beaten Path,” was suspended over Green Mountain Falls’ Gazebo Lake and was created to look like “luminous brushstrokes dancing across the sky,” according to the artist’s website, Poetic Kinetics.
Denver officials cited national media attention and tourism in Green Mountain Falls as reasons for downtown Denver to embrace the sculptures. “This large and spectacular art will be designed to drive immediate foot traffic, visitation, and joy in the city’s urban core,” the partnership said in a statement released in conjunction with two city agencies.
Officials didn’t say where exactly the floating sculptures will be located, only that two or three installation sites will be “connected by RTD routes between Union Station and Civic Center Station, and remain in place for four months.” Neither Denver Arts & Venues nor the artist immediately responded to inquiries about the installations’ locations, size or overall look.
The city of Denver continues to try to bring people back downtown after the COVID-19 pandemic and an ensuing, four-year, $175.4 million renovation of the 16th Street Mall (now known simply as Sixteenth Street); other efforts have included pop-up performances and events scheduled for summer weekends, such as live music, beer gardens and local markets.
Shearn is based near Colorado Springs. Some of his other previous installations across the globe have stretched hundreds of feet long, mimicking natural shapes and colors inspired by butterfly wings, ocean waves, rainbows, tree canopies and abstract shapes.