Most people who walk into the Joint Public Safety Facility at 2460 East Quincy Avenue are there to renew a business license or handle some other piece of city business. Few of them stop to look at the walls. Fewer still know that what's about to hang in the Community Room is part of a year of planning by a volunteer board, which considered the calendar, a fiberglass unicorn, and the scale of a Day of the Dead exhibit.
That board is the Cherry Hills Village Art Commission, created by City Council in 2011 to handle public art placement. The Commission's agendas and minutes show its work on public art programming in city buildings. This fall's installment is landing later in September than you'd expect, and the reason says more about how crowded the Village's civic calendar has become than anything about the art itself.
The Room Behind the Front Desk
The venue is the Community Room at the Joint Public Safety Facility, where residents also handle routine paperwork. City records list past shows there covering photography, botanical illustration, and children's art, including a botanical exhibit by 2023 graduates of the Denver Botanic Gardens' School of Botanical Art and Illustration that previously ran from April through June of 2024. None of it is ticketed. None of it is marketed as a gallery. The shows rotate on a schedule set by Commission members, who also have day jobs.
Planning the 2026 Calendar
Planning the 2026 calendar exposed how tight that schedule really is. Staff told the Commission plainly not to schedule anything in July, since that's when residents travel, and flagged that staff bandwidth would also be tight around September because of a Public Works reaccreditation review. Then came the harder problem. September also includes three other Village events: the CHVPD Car Show, the Cherry Hills Land Preserve's Barn Party, and the High Line Canal Conservancy's annual fundraiser. Staff's advice, recorded in the agenda packet, was to use September for a show rather than an event, to avoid competing for the same Saturday and donors as three established fundraisers.
That advice reshaped the whole year. The Commission had been developing an ambitious Catrina and Calaveras-themed exhibit for the fall, built around a curator who stages similar Day of the Dead displays at the airport and downtown Denver, with talk of flying in artists from California and a possible tie-in screening of the movie Coco. At its December 2025 meeting, the Commission pulled that version of the show, dropping what its own minutes call "the major fundraising event" from the 2026 plan entirely. In its place: a smaller, ticketed February Artist Talk built around artist Pard Morrison, priced at $25 a ticket against a $1,000 budget with a $1,000 fundraising goal, and a lower-key show tied to Quincy Farm that lands at the very end of September.
The 2026 calendar includes:
- February: A ticketed Artist Talk featuring Pard Morrison, $25 per ticket
- Summer: An open-house Plein Air paint day at Quincy Farm
- September 29 or 30: A fall exhibit and reception at City Hall showing the Plein Air work
- Possibly October: A second, scaled-down Artist Talk, and a smaller version of the Catrina display idea, both still being worked out
Together, these plans reflect the Commission's effort to fit its programming around the Village's crowded civic calendar.
What Happens at Quincy Farm Doesn't Stay at Quincy Farm
The summer Plein Air day is where the fall show's material actually comes from. The Commission's plan calls for specific invited artists to paint outdoors at Quincy Farm while residents watch, explicitly not a paid class for the public, with light refreshments and nothing more formal than that. The complication came when someone floated the idea of selling the resulting paintings on-site. Farm rules don't allow sales there, so the Commission worked out a fix: bring the paintings to City Hall instead, run them as an art show, and let CHVAC take a commission on anything that sells.
That's the show landing at the end of September, with art consultant Chris Stevens set to moderate the reception. The exact date, the 29th or the 30th, was still being finalized as of the Commission's January meeting, but the reasoning behind the timing hasn't changed: let the Car Show, the Barn Party, and the Canal Conservancy fundraiser clear their weekends first, then hang the paintings.
Mr. Sparkles at City Hall
One example of the Commission's activities is the temporary City Hall display of Mr. Sparkles. Earlier this year, a fiberglass unicorn supplied by Cochair Ortiz-Hill and painted by kids at the city's Winter Celebration spent roughly a month on display inside City Hall before Ortiz-Hill came back to retrieve him. There was no press release. There was a line in the minutes noting the display period and a follow-up line noting he'd been picked up.
The Commission's work also includes planning the Catrina display discussed for 2026.
The Catrina Exhibit Plans
The Catrina idea started big. Cochair Ortiz-Hill brought forward a curator who stages Calaveras en Mi Ciudad-style displays at the airport and downtown Denver, and the Commission discussed a budget in the neighborhood of $10,000, along with the possibility of flying artists in from California and pairing the exhibit with a screening of the movie Coco, either as its own event or folded into the city's existing Movie Night program. The Commission removed that version from its plans in December after the September scheduling conflict became clear. The current proposal is smaller: a scaled-down display, still in conversation with the same coordinator, floated for sometime around October, alongside a possible second Artist Talk that same month. Neither is locked in yet.
The September Exhibit Schedule
The Quincy Farm paintings are planned for a temporary display at City Hall. If the reception lands on the 29th or the 30th as planned, it will follow the Car Show, the Barn Party, and the Canal Conservancy fundraiser. Any further programming will depend on decisions at the Commission's next meeting.
If you've lived in the Village long enough to have opinions about where Mr. Sparkles should have ended up, or you're curious what a Plein Air painting of Quincy Farm actually looks like once it's framed and priced, Niki Collier would love to hear about it. Stop by during studio hours, shop the current collection of felt work, or book a workshop. Conversations about what a neighborhood actually looks like up close are always better in person than on a screen.
