Author: Anne L'Ecuyer

When the landscape shifted from the Rockies to high desert, I went from being on the road to being almost home. The sky expanded and a certain objectivity vanished. The people, territory, and aesthetic got closer and closer to my own.

I’ve long had a hunch that expansive thinking comes naturally to people who live amidst such vast territories of land, sky, and heritage. Albuquerque, once a dusty outpost, has become a new ground in cultures and the environment.  In a recent talk, organizational guru Peter Senge argued that climate change is a symptom of a larger problem. What we truly need to do is change our way of living.  The open space in Albuquerque made me think that it might just be possible.

What do Wittgenstein and the Hula Dance have in common? Not much, actually. That’s the point of Mixed Tastes: Tag Team Lectures on Unrelated Topics.  “Culture has expertise in all its forms,” says Adam Lerner, director and chief animator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver.  He seeks out people who know things and arranges them in unexpected pairs.

After the meeting at MCA, I stopped at Art+Anthropology, then went on to lunch at an organic cafe attached to an old taxi hub turned mixed-used creative complex.  My afternoon visit to the RINO Cultural District included a tomato farm tucked in between railyard warehouses. “Industrial nature,” is how local artist-entrepreneur Tracy Weil described it.  Interesting intersections between people and places were at happily play throughout Denver.

It’s not surprising that creative types would find new ways to work together, indeed they always do.  What struck me about Denver was how pleasantly they were going about it.  Friendly competition had gone one step further into citywide collaboration, and these interactions defined a new standard for how the creative industries operate.