Traveler's Notebook | Colorado, Oct 2024
About a month ago, I went to Denver, Colorado for a conference. I was then lucky enough to have some luxurious time to travel on my own after the conference ended. Today, when I tried to recollect my memories from that trip to write this journal, I found out that all the photos in my camera appeared as some unreadable format. I had transferred some of the photos from my camera to my phone, but there were still a lot of photos that were lost. I was sad but not devastated. Insofar as I love photography, I am trying to explore what cameras (or, this ability to take an excessive amount of photos whenever and wherever one wants) enable and disable at the same time. Meanwhile, I am also trying to explore what traveling could be if we (try to) turn away from the consumerist and extractive mode of tourism.
Given all these, I dedicate this journal to my Colorado trip : )
Cherry Creek, Mural Wall, and the Political Undercurrent
I encountered Cherry Creek the first day I arrived in Denver. I took the train from the airport to the Union Station, and then, my Google Map directed me from Union Station to my hotel through the trail alongside Cherry Creek.
The Cherry Creek trail is one of those spaces that once you step into it, you would immediately realize it is packed with history — and in this case, the history of settler colonialism, class division, and gentrification (what a surprise!) Cherry Creek received its name from the indigenous people of the Arapaho tribe because there was an abundance of chokecherries along the creek. The Arapaho tribe historically lived on the plains of Colorado and Wyoming; and within Colorado, a village of the tribe was murdered in the Sand Creek Massacre in 18641. Along with the founding of the city of Denver, colonists arrived at Cherry Creek for the gold rush. Nowadays, the city built walking and cycling trails along the creek for its middle-class urban residents, and put regulaton signs along the trails to drive out unhoused people who camp nearby the creek. The city’s population is fastly growing and so is its division2.
The wall along the Cherry Creek trail has become a carefully regulated space for murals. I was amazed by the murals when I was there, and it was only after I looked up the news later that I realized what has been made invisible is probably more important than what has been made visible. Prior to 2009, the wall was mainly home to graffiti such as letters and tagging, but not murals. In 2009, Denver Arts & Venues created the Urban Arts Fund and begun to put murals in graffiti-prone areas, including the wall along the Cherry Creek Trail. However, since Arts & Venues took a “gallerist” approach to commissioning pieces around Denver that included interviews and applications, a lot of local artists from Denver didn’t get in, while a lot of artists outside the state got in3.
Moreover, even though the history of graffiti was tied with the history of urban resistance, the mural wall along Cherry Creek represents the clearance and repression of such resistance. Earlier this year during Denver’s pro-Palestine protest, graffiti made by protestors that said “Free Palestine,” “Stop the Bombs” and “Arab Lives Matter” were quickly painted over by the Park and Recreation crews4. By depicting the graffiti as “politically motivated”, mainstream news media upholds street arts as apolitical and curated only for the entertainment of the middle-class urban residents. The gentrification of neighborhoods is accompanied by the gentrification of arts. It makes me wonder whether it would be possible to develop a citywalk that does not take the arts around the city at their face value (“The arts are so pretty! The Artists are so creative!”) but digs into what is beneath the paint, what has been covered up layer by layer, and how they tell us a richer history of these urban spaces.
When arts were covered up and made invisible, how should we remember? Where should we look for the traces that are left by the resistance?
I Still Did the Touristy Things But the Rocky Mountain Is So Pretty!
After my conference, I signed up for two day tours on Viator (the tour booking platform). I knew that group tours would not give me the best experience, but renting a car by myself was not going to be cheaper, and I would love to avoid the chore of driving mountain roads as a new(ish) driver.
Here is my photo dump during my Rocky Mountain trip!
On the second day, we started the trip with the Red Rocks Amphitheatre, then went to the continental divide (it divides the water flows — on one side, all the water goes into the Pacific Ocean, and on the other side, all the water goes into the Atlantic Ocean), and a few mining towns on the way. We stopped by the skiing town Breckenridge for lunch and shopping, and it (unsurprisingly) turned out to be my least favorite part of the whole trip. The stores on the main street are all cute and colorful, but everything sold in the stores was boring and looked the same. I don’t think I will ever go back again.
Arts I Loved at the Denver Art Museum
I visited the Denver Art Museum the last day of my trip. I have been trying to reorganize my way of information intake by replacing online scrolling with getting information from physical spaces and in-person interactions: digging deeper into an art project that I see at a museum, asking my friends about their art recommendations, etc. So, this is exactly what I am going to do in this section.
The first exhibition I saw at the museum is Maurice Sendak’s works. I remember watching the movie Where the Wild Things Are as a kid and feeling fascinated by it, but this time, I found myself more attracted to Sendak’s earlier sketches.
Without any background information, I was thinking about the possibility of reading the sketch above as a satirical work on family abolition — the work starts with a typical fairy tale template about a woman projecting her maternal love on an abandoned infant that she rescued and breastfed; then, as the woman felt joyful about what she did, she found out the infant had turned into a pig; the pig bit on the woman’s nipple as the woman appeared to be scared and painful, and the pig eventually ran away from the woman. I read it as a critique on the socially constructed selfless maternal love that was enforced on people who are socialized as women/femme, and the tragedy of the promise of such love, since the mother can never control the child, and the child can turn out to be — a pig. The transformation of a human infant into a pig is also an interesting one, since in the fariy tales and local legends, the plots seem to be more often the other way around — an animal was raised as a human baby, an ugly beast was loved and turned into a handsome prince… and in all of these stories, the women’s/femme’s (maternal or romantic) love is pictured as the force that facilitates such transition from a being of the “lower kind” to a being of the “higher kind”. But in Sendak’s children’s book illustration, the plot was flipped.
After I started to dig online for more information and commentaries on Sendak’s works, I realized that most of the commentaries see Sendak’s art as about the children’s fear and desire — which definitely makes more sense since he was a children’s book illustrator (You see, this is why I like arts but cannot do cultural/media/literary analysis as my academic pursuit lol! Because I don’t know how to interpret and always go in a weird direction!) An article published in the journal Pscyhoanalytic Review analyzes this work in relation to a child’s desire and fear to destroy by eating (eating and being eaten is another fascinating theme in Sendak’s work that I don’t have the energy to unfold in this piece) — “both the wish for rescue and for sucking here develop rapidly into the fear of making a ‘pig’ of oneself and harming the mother”5. Nevertheless, I believe that an art work does gain its own agency after it was produced and put into cultural, economic, and political circulation. So, I see the different ways of interpreting this work as proposing another question about “whom the audience identifies with when they are viewing an art work”. Such identification process is by all means gendered. Do you identify with the woman or the infant? Do you see the child as male or female? Do you see gender or the absence of gender?
After seeing Sendak’s exhibition, I walked around the museum to see their regularly exhibited art works. I came across Barbara Kruger’s collage works. Kruger is well-known for repurposing found images and juxtaposing them with short, pithy phrases painted in bold black, white, and red text bars. I love this quote from the artist herself: “I try to make work that joins the seductions of wishful thinking with the criticality of knowing better.” I found some more works of Kruger online:
Maybe my favorit art piece of the whole museum is this untitled work by British Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum. Hatoum transforms everyday household objects into uncanny, unexpected, and even dangerous versions to embody certain conflicts and contradictions. The piece that is exhibited is a reassembled wheelchair. You can see from the image below that the wheelchair has four small wheels and an unpadded seat that would tilt its occupant uncomfortably forward. The wheelchair demands a second person to push it to go forward, but the handles are sharpened as a knife. The contradictions and struggles of both care-giving and care-receiving/being the disabled/ill/aging body were then concretized in this wheelchair.
Lastly, can we talk about how awesome is the bathroom sink? There is (at least) one bathroom sink that is an art work called “Singing Sinks” by Jim Green. Your magic dream would come true when the music comes out the same time as you reach out for the water.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arapaho#:~:text=The%20Arapaho%20(%2F%C9%99%CB%88r,with%20the%20Lakota%20and%20Dakota. Also see: https://verbs.colorado.edu/ArapahoLanguageProject/RMNP/history/history.htm.
More on Denver’s urban inequalities: https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/map/CO/Denver/context#loc=12/39.7104/-104.9694; also see: https://www.urbandisplacement.org/maps/denver-gentrification-and-displacement/.
https://www.westword.com/arts/denver-street-artists-transform-stretch-of-cherry-creek-trail-20595888
https://kdvr.com/news/local/crews-clean-up-large-amount-of-politically-motivated-graffiti-along-cherry-creek-trail/.
https://www.proquest.com/docview/1310158453?accountid=15159&fromopenview=true&imgSeq=5&parentSessionId=QeojypTmnKRpTGlePLKseEobXAQ23gYi9HQsUF%2BvsP4%3D&parentSessionId=lhbYCVZSYJ84PmJ7BDkQQUImFPvlY5x7iuslItnqThQ%3D&pq-origsite=gscholar&sourcetype=Scholarly%20Journals