Arts & Artists

Anne Evans (1871–1941) was a Colorado civic leader and patron of the arts who transformed the Denver cultural community. Among her numerous activities, Evans started and helped guide the Denver Art Museum to national prominence, assisted in the development of the Denver Public Library , led the...

Charles Burrell (1920–) is a classical and jazz musician who first joined the Denver Symphony in 1949 and played bass with the group for decades before his retirement in 1999. Sometimes called the “Jackie Robinson of classical music,” he was not actually the first Black classical musician in Denver...

Harry Tuft (1935–) is a Denver businessman, music promoter, educator, and proprietor of the long-standing Denver Folklore Center . As one of Denver’s enterprising musicians in the 1960s and 1970s, Tuft brought the genre of folk music and its culture to Denver and was responsible for some of Red...

Herbert Bayer (1900–85) was an artist, architect, and designer best known in Colorado for his work in Aspen during the decades after World War II . Born in Austria and trained at the Bauhaus, Bayer brought to the United States a modernist belief in simple, stripped-down design, evident in...

Jeff Campbell (1970–) is a Denver rapper, playwright, performance artist, and activist. Born in Alabama and raised along the Front Range , Campbell worked for a hip-hop label in California before returning to the Mile High City in the early 1990s and joining hip-hop group Kut-N-Kru. The group was a...

Kent Haruf (1943–2014) was a novelist best known for Plainsong (1999). Set in the fictional town of Holt in northeast Colorado, Plainsong and Haruf’s other novels examine the lives of ordinary people on the high plains . Often praised for his unadorned style and humane outlook, Haruf is generally...

Mari Sandoz (1896–1966) was a popular author in the early- to mid-twentieth century whose works of both fiction and non-fiction focused on life in the Rocky Mountain West. Sandoz’s work represents some of the most widely read literature concerning the American West and has done much to influence...

Albert Wilbur Steele (1862–1925) was an early twentieth-century artist and editorial cartoonist for Denver newspapers. The first American cartoonist to appear daily in a newspaper, Steele drew front-page cartoons that appeared above the fold in The Denver Post for nearly thirty years. Celebrated by...