Loveland: The Sculpture Capital of the West

Loveland is a city that turned an industrial accident into an art movement. Nestled at the base of the Front Range where the Big Thompson River spills out of the foothills, it is a town that began as a railroad depot and reinvented itself, over several generations, as one of the most unusual art destinations in the American West.

The town was platted in eighteen seventy-seven, its name honoring William Loveland, the president of the Colorado Central Railroad whose line through the Big Thompson Valley made the site viable. The Great Western Sugar Company opened a processing plant here in nineteen oh one, drawing in beet farmers from across Larimer County. For most of the first half of the twentieth century, Loveland was a quiet agricultural and light-industrial town with rail connections to Denver and Fort Collins.

The transformation began quietly in the early nineteen seventies. Bronze foundries that had originally been established to cast industrial metal components, including airplane propellers during the war years, began attracting sculptors who needed to cast their work. In nineteen seventy-two, Art Castings of Colorado opened. When an artist walked in and asked whether they could pour a sculpture, the answer changed the town's identity.

By nineteen eighty-four, a small group of local artists and patrons organized an outdoor sculpture show in a downtown park. That modest first event became Sculpture in the Park, now the largest outdoor juried sculpture show in the United States, drawing hundreds of artists and tens of thousands of visitors each August. The show does not merely display finished work; it connects buyers with sculptors on-site, making Loveland one of the most active markets for original bronze sculpture anywhere in the country.

Today more than a dozen foundries operate within the city and surrounding area, and the streets are lined with over one hundred publicly sited sculptures. The Benson Sculpture Garden alone holds nearly one hundred pieces on a landscaped site along Boyd Lake. The city estimates that more than ten million dollars in public and private sculpture installations now anchor its downtown and parks.

Loveland named itself the sweetheart city partly because of a long-running Valentine's Day remailing program that has sent stamped mail from Loveland to destinations around the world since nineteen forty-seven. But it is the foundries and the shows that have made it genuinely distinctive: a small Colorado city where you can watch a sculptor's model go from wax to bronze within city limits.