See also: - Taking It to the Streets - Part of the Landscape - Today in Stoke: Photographer Ian Shive's The National Parks: Our American Landscape
GMTD has been organizing the Plein Air festival for six years. This year, it partnered with Denver Mountain Parks and the Lariat Loop Heritage Alliance to organize eleven paint-outs in parks and urban locations that will run through mid-September. "This year we included the Denver Mountain Parks because it's their hundredth anniversary, and so we chose the parks on the Lariat Loop, and that included Red Rocks, Evergreen Lake, the Buffalo Overlook," Lima says. "They've been so excited about the artists coming to the parks and paint that they've asked that they participate again next year."
For the first time, children were also invited to paint in the festival. "I think our youngest artists this year was at the Grant-Humphreys Mansion, and she's five," Lima says.
Artists can still register and then join in the remaining paint-outs, which run from dusk to dawn at the following spots:
Sunday, September 2: Confluence Park
Saturday, September 8: Evergreen Lake in Dedisse Park
Monday, September 10: 16th Street Mall
And from 3 to 5 p.m. on September 16, there's a Wrap-It-Up Reception at the Mount Vernon Country Club.
But the festival won't end there. After the last event, artists can submit one or more of the paintings they created at the paint-outs at one of three locations: the Byers-Evans House Museum, the Native American Trading Company and Gallery 1261, or the Center for the Arts Evergreen. After judges pick their favorites, the pieces will be shown in an exhibit that will run at the Denver Central Library's Vida Ellison Gallery from November 13 to December 31.
All the art will be for sale, with 60 percent going to the artists and 40 percent back to the GTMD's production of the event, "so it's a self-sustaining, grassroots, local effort to promote art and culture," Lima says. "But also this year, we're giving a percentage of the sales to the Inter-Neighborhood Cooperation's dictionary drive, where they provide dictionaries and thesauruses for all the third-graders in the public schools of Denver."
For more information, go to the Golden Triangle Museum District website.
Follow @WestwordCulture