MUST RUN 11/ 16

MCA DENVER’S SUSTAINABLE FACILITY OPENS WITH ‘STAR POWER’ no cuts!!

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DENVER, COLO. — The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (MCA Denver), has inaugurated its new environmentally sustainable facility designed by David Adjaye with an exhibition, “Star Power: Museum as Body Electric,” and three permanent commissions.

The opening exhibition, “Star Power,” curated by Cydney Payton, MCA Denver’s executive director and chief curator, features seven emerging and established artists from seven countries: Carlos Amorales, Mexico; David Altmejd, Canada; Candice Breitz, South Africa; Rangi Kipa, New Zealand; Wangechi Mutu, Kenya; Chris Ofili, Trinidad; and Collier Schorr, United States. The exhibit is on view through next spring.

Four permanent commissions feature three by Colorado-based artists — design for The June S. Gates Garden by landscape architect Karla Dakin, newly commissioned ceramic topiary sculptures by Kim Dickey for the Café, and exterior site-specific work by artist Clark Richert — and one by London-based art duo Tim Noble and Sue Webster.

“The Inaugural exhibition, ‘Star Power: Museum as Body Electric,’ reveals a Twenty-First Century figurative and neohumanistic language,” says Payton. “The new MCA challenges conventions about creation, interpretation and presentation. Adjaye’s design for the building is centered on the museum’s request for intimate spaces for direct exchanges between artists and their audiences.”

“Star Power,” while exploring the body and its relationship to architecture, marks a new direction for MCA Denver by featuring work by individual artists in an artist-centered program. The subtitle, “Museum as Body Electric,” is a direct homage to Walt Whitman’s poem “I Sing the Body Electric,” as well as Whitman’s American spirit of innovation and creativity.

“Star Power” also reflects a conceptual brief that was designed by Payton to bring forward the site conditions for the building as a golden proportion, the ideal spatial model for the convergence of architecture, humanity and nature. The brief illustrated the museum’s desire for an architectural program that crated balance between five principles: art, architecture, light, nature and human experience.

To further support this concept, the new MCA Denver contains five exhibition spaces, including Paper Works, Large Works, New Media Photography and Projects, for multilevel curatorial possibilities. The artists contributing work to the inaugural exhibition integrate the museum and the exhibition together as one.

Colorado-based artist Clark Richert’s “Riemiannian Tangencies” is a commission for MCA Denver that he designed to cover the ground surface of the entire 107-by-23-foot lane that runs alongside the museum, turning it into an active plaza space for visitors. Using classical geometry, Richert devised a nonrepeating pattern that is interrelated through the lens of the golden proportion.

MCA Denver is a cornerstone of the city’s revitalized Lower Downtown historic Union Station neighborhood. The design for the 27,000-square-foot facility supports rather than defines the museum’s mission and demonstrates the museum’s commitment to sustainability.

Payton comments on Adjaye’s building’s design: “As a noncollecting institution, the new MCA is a museum without a front door, an open invitation to our growing participatory culture. The exterior curtain wall is clad in a gray glass that is etched on the inside and evokes ‘black milk.’”

When complete, MAC Denver’s new facility will be an environmentally sustainable building, seeking to gain the distinction of Gold Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED). This will be the nation’s first Gold LEED-certified contemporary art museum, putting MCA at the forefront of the sustainability movement.

“It became apparent to us early in the process that we needed to be on the cutting edge of green building in order to be true to our mission of innovation,” said Karl Kister, president of MCA’s Board of Trustees.

Sustainable features of the new building include: using 40 percent less energy than a similarly sized non-LEED building, reducing the amount of waste sent to landfills before, during and after construction and providing a rooftop garden to decrease the heat island effect (the trapping of heat by concrete structures raising the temperature in surrounding areas).

MCA Denver is at 1485 Delgany on the corner of 15th Street. For more information, www.mcadenver.org or 303-298-7554.