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Taking Stock, Cliff Garten, 2025
SERVICES PROVIDED: Selection panel coordination, Design coordination, Budget management, Project management, Engineering coordination and oversight, Scheduling, Project close-out
The expansion of The National Western Center (NWC) in Denver, CO has added more than 2.2 million square feet of new indoor and outdoor spaces. This new campus is designed to host innovation and research labs, farmers markets, international conferences, outdoor festivals, and everything in between. In partnership with the City and County of Denver, Public Art Services coordinated the artist selection process for the NWC Main Campus Plaza project. Cliff Garten was selected to create public art for this new plaza.
Taking Stock is a focal point in the central plaza of the NWC complex. 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.
Images courtesy of Jeremy Green. Copyright Cliff Garten, Cliff Garten Studio. Select text courtesy of Cliff Garten Studio.