This morning, as I grabbed my morning coffee, I noticed a familiar face on the front page of the NY Times Art Section. Denver’s Big Blue Bear was the cover girl (animal?) for an article about public art in the convention city. A few months ago, we wrote a post about the Big Blue Bear and Denver’s Public Art program on this blog. At the time I was impressed by the city’s public art program, and in particular by a series of installations commissioned for a charter school in Denver (part of which is pictured below).

One part of today’s article stood out:

The sense that whimsy and serious art can coexist, and that a public art program should flirt with that idea, has been pushed from the top down as well by the city’s mayor, John Hickenlooper, an art lover and former beer brewer who joined the board of the Denver Art Museum 12 years ago, long before he entered politics.

“John knows all my curators on a first-name basis,” said Lewis Sharp, a former curator with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York who took over as director of the Denver Art Museum in 1989. “When he was simply a restaurant owner and brewer, he gave beer to all our events,” Mr. Sharp added. “Now when I hear him talk about Clyfford Still, who in my view is the most important American painter of the 20th century, I know that he gets it, right to his core.”

But before you’re start to feel like life on the Denver’s Public Art Committee (or its equivalent) is all peaches and cream, be sure to read about one of the committee’s latest installations: “Mustang” by Luis Jimenez, a 32-foot tall fiberglass horse installed this year at the Denver International Airport. The piece was one of the first commissioned by Denver’s Public Art Program in 2003, but was delayed again and again, and eventually was wrapped up in litigation between the artist and the city. And then, the piece killed him, literally. While working in his studio, Jimenez was pinned beneath a falling section of the horse, and he died on his studio floor. “Mustang” was completed posthumously, and was just installed in February.