The Big Blue Bear

Denver takes its public art seriously. Since nineteen eighty-eight, the city has required one percent of any municipal capital improvement project over one million dollars go toward public art. That policy has installed more than four hundred original works across the city.

Two of the most recognized sit on opposite ends of town. Outside the Colorado Convention Center, a forty-foot sculpture of a blue bear titled I See What You Mean presses its nose to the glass. Lawrence Argent created it after seeing a newspaper photo of a black bear looking through a window.

He had planned earth tones, but a blue mockup he made during the design process won everyone over. It was installed in two thousand and five. Then there is the blue mustang at Denver International Airport: a thirty-two-foot fiberglass horse with glowing red eyes that locals call Blucifer.

Artist Luis Jimenez received the commission in the early nineteen nineties. In two thousand and six, a section of the sculpture fell on him at his New Mexico studio, severing an artery and killing him at sixty-five. His family completed the piece, installed in two thousand and eight.

Both works provoke strong reactions, which is arguably the whole point of putting art where people cannot avoid it.