Denver Art Museum

About this Museum

Established in 1893 as the Denver Artists’ Club, the Denver Art Museum boasts a collection of over 70,000 works of art divided between ten permanent collections, including African, American Indian, western American art, photography, and textiles. Former director Lewis Sharp founded the institution’s architecture, design, and graphics collection in 1990, which, at time of writing, contains over 12,000 objects dating from the 16^th century to the present day. It boasts Italian design from the 1960s and ’70s, American graphic design from the 1950s to the present, postwar  American and Western European furniture and product design, and contemporary Western European and Japanese design, among others. Highlights include: the AIGA (the American Institute of Graphic Arts) Design Archives; architectural drawings by Frank Lloyd Wright; graphic design by icons such as Saul Bass, Milton Glaser, Massimo Vignelli, and Michael Bierut; as well as works by the likes of Marcel Breuer, Ettore Sottsass, Joe Colombo, Tom Dixon, Charles and Ray Eames, Finn Juhl, George Nakashima, Gio Ponti, Hans Wegner, among many others.

DAM was originally housed in the city’s public library, before moving to a downtown mansion, then the Denver City and County Building, and, in 1949, to its current location on 14^th Avenue Parkway. In 1971, the museum opened a 24-sided North Building designed by Gio Ponti [link: /designers/gio-ponti] in collaboration with James Sudler Associates. In 2000, architect Daniel Libeskind and Denver-based Davis Partnership Architects added the 146,000-square-foot Frederic C. Hamilton Building directly south of Ponti’s building.