Keep Westword Free

Wheat-Pasting in Denver: Koko Bayer

Wednesday, February 6, 2019 at 5:30 a.m.

Kenzie Bruce Koko Bayer started adorning Denver's walls with her wheat-pastes in 2015. 1/20

Kenzie Bruce Bayer is working on an ongoing installation for Meow Wolf, decorating the dumpsters at the site where the immersive-arts collective will one day rise in Denver; Meow Wolf approached Bayer to do the work. 2/20

Kenzie Bruce “How often does that happen?" she asks. "Usually when you’re getting a call from someone about something on dumpsters, you’re like, ‘Oh, shit.' It happened so organically. I find that everything good in my life happens that way. The more pressure you put on things to happen, the least likely they are to happen. I’ve been trying to embrace that the last few years, and it’s worked out for me. I’ll put myself in positions where things can happen, but I can’t force it.” 3/20

Kenzie Bruce One piece Bayer is putting up is an image from her grandfather, Herbert Bayer, that was the cover of Harper’s Bazaar in 1940. Bayer believes the piece, “Bright Lips,” later influenced Andy Warhol, based on a sketch of his from 1950; Warhol also did illustrations for Harper's Bazaar. 4/20

Kenzie Bruce Bayer was largely influenced by her grandfather. Herbert Bayer was born in Austria in 1900 and was an artist in every sense of the word; he was a graphic designer, photographer, architect, sculptor and painter. He attended the Bauhaus for four years and then became an art director at Vogue’s Berlin office. In 1937, Bayer was included in the defamatory Degenerate Art Exhibition, which was used as Nazi propaganda against modernist art. Bayer emigrated to New York in 1938. In 1946, he relocated to Aspen, where he co-designed the Aspen Institute. He is also the creator of the “Articulated Wall.” 5/20

Kenzie Bruce “I was lucky to grow up in an environment where being an artist was a viable career,” Bayer says. Since 2014, she has been making a documentary on her grandfather, titled head + heart + hand. She hopes to have the film complete by the end of 2019. 6/20

Kenzie Bruce While the Denver Art Museum has one of the largest collections of Herbert Bayer's work in the world (along with the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Bauhaus museum in Berlin), Bayer keeps his work alive outside of museums with her wheat-pastes around the Mile High City: on walls, on fences, on doors and on dumpsters. “I view it as beautification,” she says. 7/20

Kenzie Bruce Bayer estimates that she goes through two gallons of paste every couple of days, noting that it’s often cheaper for her to buy a dry, commercial paste as opposed to making her own. She prefers her paste to be thicker. "Winter is challenging for wheat-pasting. If it’s below 40 degrees, it’s not happening," she says. 8/20

Kenzie Bruce “Thank God for YouTube — not for wheat-pasting, but for wallpapering,” Bayer says. The artist uses a local printer for small projects and ARC for commercial work. 9/20

Kenzie Bruce While Bayer has advocated for her grandfather’s work, she muses that she has not done too much transgender advocacy work. Bayer says she "came out of the closet" 25 years ago, but she didn't fully transition to being herself until about eight years ago. 10/20

Kenzie Bruce After Donald Trump was elected, Bayer wheat-pasted Shepard Fairey’s “We the People” posters around Denver. "It was great to have wheat-paste to express dissent," she says. "For the trans and gay community, we knew that was taking a huge step backwards. ... It felt good to do something positive — but challenging — and to use my tools." Bayer got to thank Fairey in person at Crush Walls last year. 11/20

Kenzie Bruce Bayer has a wife, Sara, and two teenage stepchildren. 12/20

Kenzie Bruce While Bayer enjoys wheat-pasting, she began her career through a different medium: photography. One of her main photography clients is Tracks, and she says she likes photographing her wheat-pastes as much as she enjoys making them. Bayer, who is excited by conversations about Adobe Photoshop, thinks “everyone thinks of computer stuff as being super cookie-cutter, but it can be as creative as a tool.” 13/20

Kenzie Bruce The artist has used her Instagram account to share photos of her work and to connect with other wheat-paste artists around the world. "I remember I took a photo of one of the hands with an eye in the palm and fell in love with it immediately," recalls Tracy Weil, co-founder of the RiNo Art District, about seeing Bayer's work for the first time. 14/20

Kenzie Bruce “There’s a culture of respect with wheat-pasting,” Bayer says, elaborating that it is not as combative as graffiti and there is a culture of sharing and exchanging prints. Above, Bayer walks into the RiNo Art District office at Zeppelin Station. 15/20

Kenzie Bruce Bayer created this piece at Crush Walls 2018 at Ironton Distillery. 16/20

Kenzie Bruce “Denver’s gotten so tight with uncontrolled spaces. But I do love the collaborative spirit; in the traditional art world, that’s not there.” Above: A collaboration between Koko Bayer and Chris Haven from summer 2018. 17/20

Kenzie Bruce Bayer’s first commissioned piece was at Where Wood Meets Steel, 4903 Washington Street, in 2016. 18/20

Kenzie Bruce One of Bayer's favorite parts of wheat-pasting is the decay. 19/20

Kenzie Bruce Bayer's favorite time to wheat-paste is Sunday afternoons. Above: Bayer in her family's home with her five-month-old Wheaton Terrier, Babette. 20/20

Wheat-Pasting in Denver: Koko Bayer

Denver has embraced street art. There are city grants that celebrate mural-making, intended to enrich communities and prevent graffiti. Crush Walls, RiNo's annual street-art festival, documents much of that neighborhood's wall art for a year, going so far as to map out each mural or installation by intersection. With the rise in love for murals, where does that leave other, non-mural forms of street art?

Wheat-pasting, the act of using a liquid adhesive to put up artworks or posters, falls in that "other" category. The art form, largely popularized by such artists as Shepard Fairey, is accessible; the paste can be made at home, or wallpaper paste can be used. Wheat-pasting has roots in graffiti and often resides in the same gray area as that medium. Koko Bayer started wheat-pasting in Denver in 2015, using her grandfather's photographs as a primary source of inspiration. Here's a look at her approach, the third in a series on wheat-pasting in Denver.

_{Up Next:}