Denver's culture sits in the gaps between its famous names: a museum holding one artist's entire life, a decorative-arts salon crammed wall-to-wall, jazz plaques along Welton Street, and 300 artists' work packed under a highway flyover.
Michael Graves's 1995 postmodern library stacks sandstone drums beside Burnham Hoyt's 1955 modernist wing, while Civic Center Park's 1919 Greek Theater and the McNichols Building close the axis on the Capitol.
Nine-tenths of the Abstract Expressionist's lifetime output — some 3,125 works — sits in Brad Cloepfil's board-formed concrete box, its perforated ceiling filtering Colorado light. Rotating hangs mean no two visits repeat.
Vance Kirkland's 1911 studio, physically moved eight blocks in 2016, now fronts a mustard-yellow terracotta gallery holding 3,500 decorative-art objects — Bauhaus, Art Deco, Pop — salon-hung against Colorado modernist painting.
Twin 210ft French Gothic spires, 75 Munich-made stained glass windows and Italian marble altars, completed 1912. Walk on down Pennsylvania Street past the Molly Brown House to Capitol Hill's row of 1890s mansions.
Five floors running from Ancestral Puebloan Mesa Verde to the Sand Creek Massacre and the Amache incarceration camp, over a glass-floor scale map of the state. The Borderlands of Southern Colorado gallery is the strongest room.
Denver's 1892 triangular sandstone-and-granite hotel wraps a nine-storey atrium beneath a stained-glass ceiling of roughly 2,800 panes; among the cast-iron balcony panels, two were installed upside down and never corrected.
David Adjaye's first completed US building — a smoked-glass box on Delgany Street — runs five gallery spaces of commissioned contemporary work, topped by a rooftop café bar looking across the Platte Valley to the Front Range.
Ten stages under an 80ft glass arch: Boettcher Concert Hall's in-the-round symphony seating, the Ellie Caulkins Opera House for Colorado Ballet and Opera Colorado, and the Tony-winning DCPA Theatre Company in the Space and Ricketson.
Once called the Harlem of the West, Welton Street's Rossonian Hotel hosted Ellington and Billie Holiday. The museum occupies Dr Justina Ford's relocated 1890 house, covering Black cowboys, homesteaders and Denver's first Black woman doctor.
A dozen blocks of galleries and Chicano muralism along Santa Fe Drive: Museo de las Americas for Latin American art, Su Teatro in a restored 1930s cinema, and CHAC's long-running community gallery at the north end.
Four floors of immersive installation from around 300 artists, over a third of them Colorado-based, wedged beneath the I-25 and Colfax flyover. The narrative threads four collided worlds, unlocked by scanning QDOT terminals as you go.
Denver's jazz room since 1997, now in the 1890s Baur's confectionery building on Curtis Street. Two sets nightly across hard bop, Latin and vocal jazz, run under a listening-room policy that keeps the talkers in check.