Remote Yet Resolute: Planning a New Building’s Worth of Art Exhibits From Home

Despite working from home these last two months, the exhibits team has been busy! We had a long-planned exhibition installation for the new galleries in the Freyer – Newman Center set to begin in April, but due to the threat of COVID-19 these plans had to be postponed. We did not want to leave our gallery spaces empty over the summer, however, so we had quite the task set out for us to quickly plan new exhibits!

Over the last several weeks, the exhibits team came together while working remotely and have successfully planned a new slate of art exhibits for all four new galleries opening this summer. Creating exhibits for a new space with team members scattered throughout the metro area was quite the challenge. There were pieces to research, departments to collaborate with, labels to write, layouts to design and art objects to prepare for exhibition. After relying on the outstanding individual talents and experience of each of our team members, the exhibits team successfully created a brand-new schedule for installing the newest gallery exhibits.

Two local artists, Koko Bayer and Melanie Walker, will be sharing their talents, as well as a selection of illustrators from the Gardens’ School of Botanical Art and Illustration. The fourth gallery space will be filled with an exhibit showcasing some of the weird and odd objects from the art, research and library permanent collections, as well as pieces from the educational collection at Chatfield Farms. These plans will soon be put into action as staff begins to slowly return to the Gardens, all masked up and practicing social distancing of course!

The team wants to show off the new gallery spaces, local Colorado artists, and be able to display some of our favorite oddities from the non-living collections at Denver Botanic Gardens, most of which have never been exhibited. We hope you are all as excited to see these shows as we are to get them installed and open!