Best of Denver 2025: Meet the Winner of Cover Contest

The Best of Denver is a year-round obsession. No sooner do we finish one edition than we're on to the next, filling our phones and pockets with notes on new finds as well as old-school favorites we've rediscovered, all inspiration for the awards we'll announced next year.

But the best idea we had for our 42nd Best of Denver, which hit the streets on March 27, became much bigger than one award. Working with the Visual Arts department at the College of Arts & Media at the University of Colorado Denver — right in the heart of the city that this issue celebrates — we designed a contest to create the cover image for the 2025 Best of Denver.

Faculty members embraced the concept, sharing the details with students: the deadline, the prizes and the very flexible design rules. We wanted their view of the city, with cows welcome, but not required. (That's a symbol we've used for more than four decades, since the days when Denver boosters were paranoid about this city being labeled a cowtown.) The contest closed at the end of January, and in early February, we opened the best package ever, filled with 25 entries — all fun, fresh looks at this city.

The winner? A variation on the Big Blue Bear, officially "I See What You Mean," the beloved statue outside the Colorado Convention Center that was created by the late Lawrence Argent and installed in 2005, before many of the students who entered this contest were born.

Growing up in the suburbs of Denver, Alejandro Rodriguez-Gomez always knew that bear. As a kid, he and his brothers "would go downtown to explore," he recalls. "We had a lot of fun just venturing out," catching a parade or visiting Elitch's or just hanging out around the 16th Street Mall...and always paying a call on the Big Blue Bear. "When I had friends come from other states, they would almost specifically set a time and date to visit the bear, too," he adds. "It's a great sculpture, with meaning: how everyone is just kind of curious to look inside."

Hearing about the contest, he got the idea of replicating that image, but with a curious cow. "It was a funny image in my mind," he says.

In some ways, it was funny that Rodriguez-Gomez even entered the contest, which was open to any CU Denver student.  Although he has always liked drawing and enjoyed art classes in high school at Martin Luther King Jr. Early College, he's a mechanical engineering student, about to graduate. "I'm not stingy about where I end up," he says, "but I would like to work at an engineering firm here in Colorado."

That way, he can keep going downtown, to enjoy concerts at Ball Arena, explore other hot spots and visit the Big Blue Bear.
Rodriguez-Gomez is emblematic of so many CU Denver students. "They're very active in Denver, getting out and about, working either on campus or off campus," says Charles Valsechi, director of Illustration at the school. "But they're also working very hard in their classes," getting a "high-level education without the high costs."

The illustration program he oversees "is a very healthy program," he says, with 124 students and more joining every year. "Our students are very dedicated, very engaged."

And they were very engaged with this project, which in many cases was their "first experience doing professional work, getting their work in front of people and being paid for it," Valsechi notes. In fact, the entries were so impressive that our section openers in this issue feature the work of six more students who entered the contest: August Blackmer, Hattie Boyd, Lauren Henderson, Euridice Garduno Estrada and Adrian Kinyon. And we wish we had room for more.

"We don't like to brag, but I don't have to convince my students to try to do the work," Valsechi adds. "I don't feel like I have to motivate them. I can meet them with their excitement."

Even so, he and the other faculty members involved with this project were surprised by the enthusiastic response to the contest and the work that resulted. Says Valsechi: "I think we have a really special school."

We do, too...and so will you as you look through this year's Best of Denver, filled with hundreds of awards and some great art. We can't wait to see what the students come up with in next year's contests; plans for that are already in the works.

We've begun filling our phones and pockets with potential awards, too. If you have any suggestions, send them to [email protected].