The story
The Denver Art Museum is as much about its buildings as its pictures. Its older wing, from 1971, is one of only two buildings in North America by the Italian designer Gio Ponti, a strange 24-sided tower faced with more than a million glittering glass tiles and meant to read like a fortress. Beside it, from 2006, stands Daniel Libeskind's Hamilton Building, a jagged pile of titanium-clad angles that echoes the rock crystals and peaks of the Rockies behind the city.
Inside, the museum's real distinction is its Native American art. In 1925 it began collecting the work of Indigenous peoples as art rather than anthropology, unusually early for an American museum, and that collection now runs to tens of thousands of pieces from across the continent.
Around it the galleries range widely, through Western American painting, Spanish colonial art, Asian holdings and a substantial spread of modern and contemporary work.
