Artists: Carlos Frésquez, Kelly Monico, Joel Swanson, and Frankie Toan
Curated by Black Cube
Located in various alleyways next to the 16th Street Mall in Downtown Denver: Between Stout & California, Champa & Stout, and Curtis & Champa
Summer 2018-May 30, 2022
Admission: Free
Some people are made for cities; but are cities made for people? Between Us: The Downtown Denver Alleyways Project attempts to answer that question. Four local alleyways—five when the exhibition opened in 2018—are public venues for Carlos Frésquez, Kelly Monico, Joel Swanson, and Frankie Toan to create pieces that teeter between art and urban planning. The easy analogy for this open air exhibition is city-as-museum, but the apt analogy is city-as-curator. Downtown Denver does more than provide infrastructure to house the works—it shapes the viewer’s entire experience according to its own whims. The pieces will remain on view until Spring 2022.
View of Kelly Monico, Alley Cats, 2018, three-hundred cat sculptures installed in the alley between 14th and 15th Streets and Larimer and Market Streets. Images by Parker Yamasaki.
While Between Us is arguably the most accessible art exhibition in the city, alleyways are notoriously prohibitive places. Kelly Monico’s work, Alley Cats, is flanked by signs that read: “Alley Closed To Public.” [1] It’s a world of delivery drivers and cigarette breaks where I feel out of place. Until I see the cats. Monico has perched 300 cat figurines on windowsills, breaker boxes, and special cat shelves that line the alley.
For a few moments I forget about the smokers and the security guards. I’m observing the cats, trying to find as many as I can. “It took me about three years to find all 300,” a security guard who patrols the area tells me. “The last one I needed was the one in the tree.” Monico intended to toy with humans’ “long standing fascination with felines,” [2] but this guard, in particular, is not a cat person. He mimics the way that cats purr by blowing a raspberry with his lips and motions the way that they rub up on his leg. “It makes me feel weird,” he says, backing away from the imaginary cat at his feet. I agree with him and drift into thoughts about cats I’ve known. It’s spring in Denver, though, and a cold wind bursts into the alley, ushering me along.
Carlos Frésquez, Alley Freshener, 2018, located in the alley off of the 16th Street Mall between Champa and Stout Streets. Image by Parker Yamasaki.
By the time I walk seven blocks from Alley Cats to Alley Freshener by Carlos Frésquez, it has begun to snow. People with possessions in shopping carts stop pushing and take shelter under awnings. When I reach the alley between Stout and California Street, I slow my own stroll and look up into the snow. A multi-colored cluster of oversized air fresheners (the pine tree variety) hover two stories above the alley.
What grabs my attention is the familiarity (gas station imagery), what holds my attention is the size (absurd). Frésquez seizes the pause to dangle a question overhead: what is the difference between the way we treat private spaces and the way we treat public spaces? One answer is: we wouldn’t urinate in the hallways of our homes. Public space, however essential, is often treated as less valuable. What if we took ownership of our public spaces? Spruced them up, so to speak? For a moment I am convinced I can actually smell the pine-fresh of the artwork, but the moment passes as quickly as the breath itself, and I’m immediately punished with a reminder that this is not, in fact, a private home.
Joel Swanson, Y/OURS, 2018, located in the alley off of the 16th Street Mall between Curtis and Champa Streets. Image by Parker Yamasaki.
Joel Swanson, Y/OURS, 2018. Image courtesy of the artist and Black Cube. Photo by Third Dune Productions.
I’m left thinking about the differences between public and private spaces as I continue on to Joel Swanson’s Y/OURS. It’s snowing hard now. The street is as empty as I’ve ever seen it except for a boisterous group of women, harsh weather unable to extinguish their joy in one another’s company. In private spaces we have the opportunity to choose our company, in public spaces we don’t. One important component of urban planning is creating desirable places for strangers to be together. In Swanson’s Y/OURS, neon purple letters hang above the alleyway, spelling out the title. As the “Y” blinks on and off, the space beneath it oscillates between “Yours'' and “Ours.”
Though the lights are cool-colored, they provide a kind of warmth. The shouting group has disappeared up the street, and I’m left alone with the silent snow and the blinking piece. With the alley all to myself, I feel a contrast between the space I keep private and the space I share with the city. I’m soaking in the luminosity and quiet in this unlikely place, when a window bursts into pieces just above the work and shattered glass falls to the alley floor. I’m reminded that I’m not so alone, after all.
Frankie Toan, Public Body, 2018, located off of the 16th Street Mall between Stout and California Streets. Image by Parker Yamasaki.
While Frésquez and Swanson reinforce the differences between public and private spaces, Frankie Toan’s Public Body merges the two. Inspired by a Judith Butler speech, Public Body is a streak of vibrant, cartoon-like body parts painted and mounted on a black alley wall. Butler argues in her speech, and Toan articulates in the artwork, that the very act of appearing in a mass changes the space a person is in. [3] The elements of Toan’s piece animate the alleyway, turning it from essentially “dead space” into something very much alive.
In a lot of ways the alley is the perfect exhibition space: accessible yet private, imbued with quiet yet vibrating with the city throughout.The playfulness of this exhibition—bright colors, larger-than-life scale, 300 cats—persuades the viewer to enter into uncomfortable places. In doing so, a new space emerges that was always there.
[1] Alley Cats by Kelly Monico was removed on April 30, 2021 due to alleyway construction. It was located between 14th & 15th Streets and Market & Larimer. The other three works remain on view until Spring 2022.
[2] From the wall text for Alley Cats by Kelly Monico. Between Us: The Downtown Denver Alleyways Project, Summer 2018-Spring 2022.
[3] Judith Butler, “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street” in Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard University Press, 2015), pp. 66-98.
Published in DARIA: Denver Art Review Inquiry & Analysis (June 2021).