Colfax Canvas Mural Festival to Add Four Murals to East Colfax Neighborhood

The Colfax Canvas Mural Festival is bringing four new murals from ten artists to the East Colfax neighborhood in Aurora September 2 through September 16, culminating with a neighborhood block party that will include music, dance, food and brews on the final day.

Beginning as an experiment by artist/philanthropist Aaron Vega to “create a visual boundary for the art district in Aurora,” Colfax Canvas is now going into its fourth year. As the total mural count for the neighborhood rises to 33 pending this year’s additions, finding a blank wall in the neighborhood, according to Vega, is becoming increasingly difficult.

Vega became the curator of the People’s Building, a nonprofit art hub owned and operated by the City of Aurora, after moving to Colorado from New York over six years ago. Since that time, he has been disheartened by how easily East Colfax, the neighborhood he has grown to adore, has been “written off” or “ignored.”

Seeking a visual reminder of the neighborhood’s significance, in 2020 Vega partnered with the popular Denver muralist Chad Bolsinger to pull off the first year of Colfax Canvas. Vega was delighted to see how the murals not only brightened the walls of surrounding businesses, but also the faces of those living in and visiting the neighborhood.

“Pretty quickly, it became clear that the murals weren’t just about defining the neighborhood — they were about giving a sense of pride to the neighborhood,” Vega notes.
In the festival’s second year, the process was subject to change: Instead of collaborating with a lead artist, Vega set out to make the participating artists more representative of the community they were serving. He created a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility committee with members of the community, who worked to make the muralists’ identities more reflective of the East Colfax neighborhood, reaching more than 50 percent BIPOC representation that year.

The 2023 artists include Koko Bayer and WeyMnky, who will be painting on the Florence Square Apartments; Johnny Draco, Nico Cathcart, Alexandrea Pangburn and David Swartz, who will be collaborating on a wall along Florence Street; and Brutus, Jannah Farooque, Sandra Fettingis and Tessa Fuqua, who will be adorning the front and back of Mango House with two murals.

All of the artists are based in Colorado except for Nico Cathcart, who lives in Richmond, Virginia. Pangburn, who pursues art full-time from her home in Golden, specializes in painting flora and fauna. She and the other three artists collaborating on the Florence Street wall will focus on the local species for their mural, where Pangburn also plans to paint the tallest North American bird, the endangered whooping crane.

“Anybody and everybody can see and interpret [murals] however they want," Pangburn says, "so it’s really important for artists like myself to have a message…and to educate people about what we are doing and how to conserve the species."

The murals from past years can be viewed on a self-guided walking tour accompanied by audio descriptions found on the festival’s website. By orienting themselves on the numbered map, visitors can discover the ways in which murals capture some of the stories of East Colfax: A collaboration between artists AGPNT and RubeZilla from the first year of Colfax Canvas honors the building owner’s Spanish heritage and departed husband; an unscheduled drop-in from legendary street artists Tukeone and Love Pulp remembers Elijah McClain, whose death in 2019 brought a reckoning for communities across the country.
One of the perks of the two-week collaborative endeavor is the creativity that proliferates during it. It is not uncommon, according to Vega, for the East Colfax neighborhood to become a who’s who of locally renowned street artists over the course of the festival.

For example, last year saw a surprise visit from Denver artist Koko Bayer — famous for her rainbow heart project — who became an impromptu, doughnut-devouring model for a fan-favorite mural by the famed Hiero Veiga, leaving one of her trademark hearts on the pink wall in return. While Bayer is now one of the officially invited muralists, Vega expects artists outside of the docket to show up, and he hopes that if they do, they find a wall.

However, he understands and respects the feelings of building and business owners, who he notes tend to get “a little nervous about the idea of spray paint on their wall.”

“A lot of the folks in this neighborhood lived through a time when spray paint on your wall wasn’t a good thing," he explains, adding that Colfax Canvas is an effort at "changing hearts and minds, changing ideas around spray-paint culture and street-art culture. Now Sotheby’s is selling street art, and Denver has one of the best scenes in the world, so we want to bring that to the Aurora, East Colfax area.”

In fact, Vega notes, walls with murals are tagged less often, which, in addition to the stunning murals cropping up around the neighborhood, has become a large selling point with landlords who've been upset by defacement in the past.

“Like any art form, if people actually respect the artist and the work that’s done, they’re gonna leave it alone. I think there’s a bit of a misunderstanding between a tag and graffiti. The bubble lettering you see, that’s usually some kid trying to figure it out; that’s somebody with something to say," he says. "Those are the kids seeing a piece by Detour, MPEK or any of the muralists we have, and they’re trying to figure out how to get there.”

Once the murals are up and the cranes lower down, the neighborhood block party will commence on Saturday, September 16, at noon. Cultural dance performances will take place every hour, and each of the five breweries in the area will be serving beer in Fletcher Plaza, across from the Martin Luther King Jr. library. And, of course, attendees will be able to see the finished art, capping off two weeks of spray paint and the fourth season of the Colfax Canvas Mural Festival.

Colfax Canvas, Saturday, September 2 to Saturday, September 16, The People’s Building, 9995 East Colfax Avenue, Aurora.