This summer’s special exhibition at the Denver Botanic Gardens, “Spirit Guides,” dutifully fulfills the primary mission of placing art objects in the city’s treasured urban oasis: It shakes up the routine. The exhibit’s giant and colorful hybrid animal sculptures provide new vistas for garden regulars who have seen the tulips and water lilies a hundred times over and yearn for something fresh. Each of the works is a pleasant surprise to encounter.
They are also engaging and hyper-photogenic, perfect fodder for social media posts, which will allow this show to market itself to the public and accomplish every summer exhibition’s secondary purpose: pumping up the number of paid visitors who pass through the garden’s front gate. DBG has a long record of using art that way during the high season, and it has over the past few decades brought work by global superstars, like Henry Moore and Alexander Calder, to Denver. Those were landmark moments in the city’s visual art history.
The garden set the bar high for itself in those days. This exhibit is not that sort of attention-getter. I saw it last week, just as the garden’s brilliant beds of irises were blooming, and it was a treat — kids, especially, seemed to like it.
But it is not a superstar moment. The artists who dreamed up the work, Jacobo and María Ángeles, who live in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, are well-respected, though many garden visitors in Denver probably never heard of them. The husband-and-wif.