In 2025 we worked on projects that speak to the history of a place and it’s people, engage communities, illuminate transit hubs, and temporary projects that breathe new life into public spaces.
Leafy Wader, Donald Lipski, 2025
The new Downtown Federal Way Sound Transit Station serves a town of 100,000 people located between Seattle and Tacoma. As part of the Sound Transit Federal Way Link Extension project artist Donald Lipski created a two-story tall glass desk lamp that graces this new station.
The sculpture entitled Leafy Wader, is a nod to the Puget Sound area as the historic center of the contemporary Glass Art movement in the USA. This was largely driven by the life’s work of Dale Chihuly and the glass world he created in his wake. Lipski has been an Artist in Residence at both Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, WA (1990), and the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, WA (2014). Lipski has worked with glass in one way or another for half a century, but this is his first substantially glass outdoor public artwork. The title Leafy Wader is an anagram of Federal Way.
The Dreams We Carry, Kipp Kobayashi, 2025
For the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport (MSP) in St Paul, Minneapolis, artist Kipp Kobayashi has created an immersive, suspended installation that represents travelers’ responses to the question, “You’re offered a one-way ticket wherever you’d like to go. Who knows when you’ll return? What three things would you take along?” The final artwork entitled The Dreams We Carry, consists of various items made from wire mesh, both practical and slightly outlandish for air travel, including house plants, a grand piano, stuffed animals, a rocking chair, various items of clothing, a teapot, a cast iron pot, and various suitcases some with objects inside.
In the artist’s words, “Inspired by the diverse and temporal nature of the airport community and how it is inclusive of travelers and airport staff as well as the people of the surrounding neighborhoods and cities, I began to think about how these worlds intersect, what ties them together and most of all, how does it add up to make this place unique?
Through public outreach and in-person events, we asked the question: You’re offered a one-way ticket wherever you’d like to go. Who knows when you’ll return? What three things would you take along? In total, we spoke with over 1,000 individuals and received written feedback, stories, and images from hundreds of participants, whose responses revealed those cherished possessions that define the profound aspects of our identity. They are reimagined here into a cloud-like composition of floating suitcases and bags swirling in the center of the rotunda, carrying within them the pieces of the multiple narratives that tell the story of the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport and the people who pass through it.”
RISING TOGETHER, Matthew Mazzotta, 2025
RISING TOGETHER is a programmable social space for the National Western Center (NWC) and the surrounding neighborhoods. NWC historically held stock shows for the booming cattle industry that thrived off the central location of Denver. The project takes the iconic architecture of The West and elevates the community aspect of it—the barn raising, where people contribute their strength for a common good. RISING TOGETHER is a dedicated space for local people to come together for new and creative activities like poetry readings, classes, music, dancing, and anything else that the community desires.
This participatory installation has four cantilevered walls illustrating a barn raising in action. The open walls allow for free flow of pedestrian traffic while the hanging seats provide multiple seating options. The painted roof, entitled Sacred Threads, is a collaboration between artist Matthew Mazzotta and local mural artist Bimmer Torres, celebrating the aesthetics and traditions of the community. It is a landmark, shade structure, and multi-use venue. The programmed events are a collaboration between the NWC and local community leaders.
This project is part of the the long-term culmination of Public Art Services’ work over the span of three years to develop the Public Art Master Plan for this site.
To Let the Sky Know / Dejar que el cielo sepa, Ana María Hernando, 2025
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 and at the Cloud Nine Park at 9+CO Denver in June of 2025.
To Let the Sky Know at 16th Street Plaza at Riverfront Park. Image courtesy of Mowry Studio.
The installation at the 16th Street Plaza features 5 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. While the installation at Cloud Nine Park features 3 components.
To Let the Sky Know at Cloud Nine Park at 9+CO. Image courtesy of Mowry Studio.
The piece consists of a field of floating circles made of tulle in orange, white, and pink. 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.”
Taking Stock, Cliff Garten, 2025
Image courtesy of Jeremy Green
As the focal point of the main campus plaza at the National Western Center artist Cliff Garten created Taking Stock. In the artist’s words,
“The sculpture is in one sense what one would expect to find in a place whose main annual event celebrates cowboys, cowgirls, horses, and cattle. On approach from the east and west the viewer is confronted with a traditional sculpture of a cowgirl with a rope on one side and a bull on the opposite side. Characters like these signify the romance of the West and are a persistent image in film and TV, so as to become part the American psyche. However, when approaching the sculpture from the front, the sculpture destabilizes these traditions as one figure stretches and melts into the other. At about one and one half, life scale the heroic cowgirl locks eyes with a bull, as she is startled in the moment of his aggression. The sculpture’s traditional heroic allegory unfolds in a cinematic sweep, commingling, stretching and distorting human and beast. The viewer is asked to step into another vision of the American West where the figures of the past and present merge and their romantic forms are challenged, as they become part of a different narrative.”
This project is part of the the long-term culmination of Public Art Services’ work over the span of three years to develop the Public Art Master Plan for this site. If you are in the Denver area please join us for the dedication of this artwork on Wednesday January 21st at 3:30pm. Tap here for more event details and to RSVP.
Trestle, Paula Castillo, 2025
Paula Castillo was selected to create three iconic sculptures for the shared Denver Art Museum and Denver Central Library Campus in Denver, Colorado. The first sculpture in the series entitled Equis was installed in May 2024 outside of the Denver Central Library near the intersection of West 14th Ave. and Broadway. The second sculpture in the series, entitled Glyph, was installed in September 2024 outside the entrance to the Denver Art Museum’s Ponti building at the corner of West 14th Ave. and Bannock Street. The final sculpture of the series entitled Trestle was installed on the plinth at 12th and Acoma facing the Denver Art Museum’s Hamilton Building in November 2025.
For this site, Castillo designed a truss-like gateway to illustrate how global actions build community and intertwine us. In this sculpture, a railroad bridge is used as a metaphor to remind the viewer that the railroads transformed Denver from a small town to a large and vibrant city. Thousands of hummingbird feathers fabricated out of stainless steel are welded to the hummingbird-inspired trusses to reference the psychic link between the arc of Mexican labor and immigration on the railroads and the story of Denver’s emergence as one of our great American cities. The hummingbird-inspired vision connects the last piece of the story with the first through an Indigenous reference to the hummingbird—revered as a healer and associated with critical community-building traits like harmony, persistence, and integrity.
