New Murals Added to Cherry Creek Trail During First Wall Fest

There was a subtle chill and a hint of paint in the air early Sunday, September 14, as seventeen artists positioned themselves along the Cherry Creek Trail to paint new murals, turning beige brick into colorful designs, animals and original pieces.

Artists have been livening up the walls of the popular multimodal trail that spans more than forty miles through metro Denver for well over a decade. Back in 2009, Denver Arts & Venues created the Urban Arts Fund that commissioned murals in graffiti-prone areas, including what was then known as the Cherry Creek Bikepath. In 2018, more than sixty more murals were commissioned by the city’s Public Art program. Last year, local pop-surrealist Chris Haven curated a crew of about thirty artists who painted murals on the part of the trail near Champa and Speer for a Denver Department of Parks & Recreation project.

Now Haven was back with over a dozen fresh and familiar faces for Cherry Creek Trail Wall Fest, a new Parks & Rec project. This year, it commissioned artists to paint murals on the stretch between First and Sixth avenues and Downing Street, with plans to focus on other blank areas of the trail and throughout the city in the future, according to DPR program manager Adam Lind.

“It’s an opportunity to liven up the existing walls that are just plain walls, and a great opportunity to show off the talent of local artists and continue to expand the amount of public art people are able to see and experience during their regular commute or exercise route,” said Lind, who noted that none of the new murals would be painted over existing murals, as often happens, because there’s still so much blank space along the trail.

The goal is for these murals to stay up for five years, and all artists are required to put a graffiti coating on the murals, which makes it easier for DPR to clean them and then reapply the coating if they get tagged, Lind said.

Over thirty artists applied for Wall Fest, and those who were selected each received a $1,500 commission thanks to sponsorship funding from Fonroche Lighting America, HCA HealthONE, East West Partners and Lime Micromobility.

Haven, who lives in Westminster, is known for his pyramid people, but lately he’s been finding inspiration in kitschy knickknacks from antique stores. “I’ve been getting into doing these porcelain objects,” he said Sunday. “I like doing the shine and glare on them.” For Wall Fest, he worked on a mural of a porcelain cat.

“I think it’s just great to have new art down here,” Haven added. “A lot of people take this trail. I think they really enjoy seeing the art on it, as opposed to just blank walls.”

While Wall Fest was a return to the Cherry Creek Trail for experienced artists like Haven and Patrick McGregor, the event gave others the opportunity to create work along the trail for the first time.

Zaida Sever had applied for two other mural opportunities along the trail before getting into Wall Fest, and she attributed this success to her new project, Denver Art Noodle. Sever, a Lakewood resident who grew up in Englewood, has been in the Denver art scene for a while; she got her start through the ArtLab internship program for high school students in RiNo and now works for PlatteForum, which runs the program.

Last year, she completed a residency with the 40 West Arts District and put on House of Medusa, a show about femininity and autonomy. Sever said she discovered her niche after inviting breeders and keepers to bring their snakes to that show; she had just adopted her first snake and wanted to be able to bring it to events, too.

“I wanted to see people get scared and overcome it; I wanted to see people get excited and do something they don’t normally get to do,” Sever explained. She launched Denver Art Noodle in April and integrated her passion for snakes and art into her work. Sever now has three snakes: Ramen, a four-foot-long ball python; Alfredo, a six-foot-long boa; and Macaroni, a western hognose who is the shortest of the three. “I always said, ‘If I’m going to get a pet noodle, it will have a noodle name,'” Sever said. “It takes a lot of the fear and stigma away. It’s hard to be afraid of an animal named Alfredo, Macaroni or Ramen.”

Sever’s Wall Fest mural was inspired by Ramen, who also attended the event, resting in a sack or slithering through Sever’s art supplies and the grass. Sever’s mural depicts a ball python in a bowl of tonkotsu ramen, with pork belly at the bottom and mushrooms and bok choy garnish. She hopes the mural gives people joy as they pass by on the Cherry Creek Trail.

“It’s such an amazing gallery in itself, and not one that people would think of as a gallery,” Sever concluded. “But the potential to cover this entire thing foot-by-foot, and how much it’s been added onto since I was a kid growing up in Englewood, is really, really cool.”