To Let the Sky Know / Dejar que el cielo sepa, Little Raven, Ana María Hernando, 2025

SERVICES PROVIDED: Budget management, Lighting, Installation services and oversight, Scheduling, Project close-out.

Ana María Hernando’s temporary public art installation To Let the Sky Know / Dejar que el cielo sepa was installed at the 16th Street Plaza in Denver’s Riverfront Park in May of 2025. This installation features five components of the fifteen-part public piece originally commissioned and installed at the Madison Square Park in New York City to inaugurate the 20th anniversary year of the Madison Square Park Conservancy’s art program, launched in 2004.

The installation, on view through October 2025, now marks the 25th anniversary of the Riverfront Park Community Foundation. 

“Important works such as these are integral to our mission to foster excellence, diversity and opportunity in the downtown Denver community, primarily in education and the arts, and to making Denver a better place to live.” said Mark Smith, Founder and President of the Riverfront Park Community Foundation.

The piece consists of a field of floating circles made of tulle in orange, white, and pink tulle that have been installed at the base of the Millennium Bridge. The flare of colors is intended to “let the sky know” that our longing for birds, flowers, and one another is always within us, and that this longing makes us stronger.

Hernando has other goals for To Let the Sky Know / Dejar que el cielo sepa. She has inserted tulle sculptures of vibrant coloration and buoyancy as symbols of hope, growth, and fluidity. Her sculptures beckon with their seeming fragility and evanescence; ultimately, their durability takes hold of our memories.

“I’d love for my work to be in conversation with these inhabitants, to be close through color, the movement of tulle in the wind, and the surprise of an unexpected newness. This project is an invitation to seeing with the body and seeks to nurture the visitor in that primal need of moving with life,” says Hernando. 

“Installing tulle sculptures outside brings the work in full conversation with the elements, to be fluid amid the inevitable changes, with a sense of surrender and curiosity about how the work might be transformed. It opens a true relationship with the will of the outdoors. For me this is the most vulnerable part of the project, and its beauty and wildness. My sculptural pieces are directly aligned with the notion of abundance, and the unstoppable force that transforms living things and moves them forward. In love with the natural world and often informed by it, my work has always provoked within me a desire to converse beyond the formal, to show wonder at the aliveness of being.”

Select text courtesy of the artist and the Riverfront Park Community Foundation.

Images courtesy of Mowry Studio.