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.

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 inaugural one opens today 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 at least through the end of the year; 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,” features personal portrayals of globes; you’re invited to drop off objects for the next community challenge, on the theme of “Mummify Me,” on October 25 from noon to 5 p.m. “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., 2008