World Spinning

What Jaime Kopke absolutely gets is how the modern world is like an atom, all neutrons and protons smashing around one another the way those spinning motorcyclists do in a globe at the circus: a place of contained yet constantly moving energy and synaptic explosions that are gone as soon as they appear. You have to look while you can, or you’ll lose it.

Related Content

• Photos: P.T. Barnum's Feejee Mermaid and other oddities from Circus Emporium
  January 10, 2012
• Circus Circus
  January 5, 2012
• Pariah is a moving story of coming of age and coming out
  January 12, 2012
• From Red Rocks to Emos, recreate the exact acoustics of the country's hottest venues
  November 1, 2011
• Gauntlet Hair's self-titled, Dead Oceans debut garners praise from Pitchfork with 7.8 review
  October 20, 2011

More About

• Jaime Kopke
• Denver Community Museum
• Brooklyn (New York City)
• Sciences
• Science and Technology

That’s certainly what moved her to help found the local Pecha Kucha, where cultural movers and shakers encapsulate their ideas into twenty slides, flashed through at twenty seconds each, and perhaps the reason she blogs on the ephemera of the ever-changing design world at http://designklub.blogspot.com, traveling to New York periodically to check up on what’s cutting-edge.

It’s definitely what pushed her to take a chance on the Denver Community Museum, a pop-up gallery of monthly shows of themed artifacts created by anyone who tries; the shows change monthly in a temporary space at 1610 Little Raven Street, Suite 120, at Riverfront. Two discoveries during her New York visits — the Wrong Store installation by design artists Tobias Wong and Gregory Krum, and the City Reliquary Museum in Brooklyn — helped cement the idea by suggesting to her how to combine a community effort with the short-lived element of surprise. Subsequent shows will appear in the Riverfront space for as long as its available; after that, the transient museum might pop up elsewhere for continuing community exhibits, but it’s not destined to last more than a year, at most.

The first exhibit, “The Missing Map,” featured personal portrayals of globes; you’re invited to drop off objects for the next community challenge on a date specified each month. “We’re limiting submissions to people in the Denver-Boulder area in an effort to keep it local and more relevant,” Kopke says; check the website, www.denvercommunitymuseum.org, for updates.
Fridays, Saturdays, 12-5 p.m.; Thursdays, 2-7 p.m. Starts: Oct. 3. Continues through April 25, 2008