Call (888) 786-7243Another year, another Summer Art Mart. Summer Art Mart has to be one of my favorite Denver festivals. It marks the beginning of summer. It shows off the work of the wonderful students from the Denver Art Students League. It shows off Grant Street to an average of 12,000 visitors (some years, I think we may have had more!). But I always have a problem after the Summer Art Mart, and that is, storage. I can’t resist buying art. This year I have two paintings and a ceramic sculpture and no place to put them in my oh-so-cluttered living room.
Surprisingly enough, a solution sprang quickly to mind. I finally did what I am always advising people to do: curate their own homes with their own art collections. To really appreciate art (in my opinion) you have to see it with some space around it. You can’t just put an entire collection on display all hodgepodge, pushing one sculpture on a coffee table a little to the left to make room for another one. It’s hard to appreciate a work of art that way. Well, I say that, but I must admit I had no trouble appreciating my sculpture when it was shoehorned into a booth at the Art Mart with about 50 other pieces…
Still. I started by cleaning my living room. I recycled all the old magazines, put all the socks in the laundry, and vacuumed. That’s a pretty major clean-up around here. Then I took out all of my art, including the paintings from last year’s Art Mart that were still leaning up against the wall in my closet. I came up with an arrangement of art that I think looks lovely to start with. Then I bubble wrapped, boxed, and organized to my heart’s content. All the art that I am not keeping out went, neatly labeled, in my self storage unit — ready to rotate in when I get tired of the current arrangement and need a little change.