Background on Boulder’s Public Art Program:
Boulder’s Public Art Policy was created in 2018
Before that, the city did not have a formal plan for public art. Some of Boulder’s public art from before 2018 was donated or loaned, often with unclear terms. Some was purchased by city departments, each with its own policy for acquiring, maintaining, and cataloguing public art.
Boulder’s Public Art Collection
Public art is art in the public realm. But not all art in the public realm is part of the City of Boulder’s official Public Art Collection. The pieces in our collection were acquired or commissioned in line with our Policy. They are owned and maintained by the city and on public property and they’re intended to be permanent. Some of the pieces on this tour are part of the official collection. Others are privately owned, temporary, or don’t meet our criteria for public art.
Commissioning New Public Art
Boulder has a 1% for Art Policy: any City construction project over $100,000 sets aside 1% of its budget for new public art made for that site. To pick the artist, we put together a panel of community members, artists, and arts professionals. Artists apply with photos of past work, a resume, and a note on why the project interests them. The panel chooses three finalists to develop full proposals, then reviews them, interviews the artists, and selects one to receive the commission. The Boulder Arts Commission and City Manager give the final sign-off.
How to get involved
Reach out to us at publicart@bouldercolorado.gov if you’re interested in serving on an art selection panel. We also appreciate people letting us know if they see an artwork that needs cleaning or repairs.
Take photos and tag us @boulderartsculture
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Start at 17th & Pearl at Los Seis sculpture
Title: El Movimiento Sigue
Artist: Jasmine Baetz
Installation date: 2024
Materials: Concrete, ceramic tiles
Location: 17th & Pearl
This memorial honors Los Seis de Boulder, six Chicano activists and students killed in two car bombings here in 1974. The name was given to them afterward. The mosaic draws on Juan Espinosa's 1973 photographs of a Black Student Alliance protest at CU.
It's the second of two sculptures. In early 2019, CU students, community members, and surviving family created the first, with portraits of all six, and installed it on campus. In 2020 many of the same people made this one, its tiles laid by artists Jasmine Baetz and Carlos Sandoval, and it was installed here in 2024. The inscription points to 28th and Canyon, the site of the second bombing a mile east. It's now part of the city's official public art collection.
Start walking west down Pearl St. towards 16th St.
Title: Strength from Within
Artist: Melanie Yazzie
Installation date: 2020
Materials: Powder-coated steel
Location: 16th & Pearl (in front of Organic Sandwich Co.)
This powder-coated steel piece is about the strength it takes to heal and carry on. Yazzie calls it “a self-portrait of my state of mind when I am working on fixing things from inside myself,” drawing on her recovery from a 1997 head-on collision with a drunk driver. Her work grows from her Diné (Navajo) identity, responds to her own life events, and reflects how she sees the artist's role: as an agent of change. This piece is part of the official Public Art Collection.
Title: Bear Hugs
Artist: Scy Caroselli
Installation date: 2019
Materials: Bronze
Location: 15th & Pearl in front of Illegal Pete’s
This is Bear Hugs: a mama bear with two cubs, one clambering up her back, the other tucked under her neck. Caroselli made it to be touched, so it's become a favorite photo spot on Pearl Street. The bronze was cast in 2016, the fifth of ten in her Bear Hugs series.
Scy Caroselli grew up around fine art but came to sculpture later in life, encouraged by her mother, Marianne Caroselli, an accomplished sculptor herself. She trained in Italy and in workshops across the U.S., and has been sculpting since 2001.
This piece was donated to the city in 2019 and is now part of the official Public Art Collection.
Title: Green Harmony
Artist: Austin Zucchini-Fowler
Installation date: 2022
Materials: Paint
Location: 1400 block Pearl St. Mall (next to Pedestrian Shops)
Just beyond Bear Hugs in a nearby side alley is Green Harmony. This mural went up during the 2022 Street Wise Mural Festival. Murals are technically temporary and not part of the city's collection, but this one's worth a look. It's about living in harmony with the earth through renewable energy: the figure is Gaia, the Greek personification of Earth, and the artist swapped the wind-turbine blades for columbines, Colorado's state flower. Look closely and you'll see it's built from dots of color, a pointillist technique Austin uses often.
Title: Snail, Rabbit, Frog, Beaver
Artist: David Sosalla
Installation date: 1977 (the year of Pearl Street Mall’s dedication)
Materials: Bronze, marble
Location: 1400 block of Pearl St. Mall
Step into the enchanting world of David Sosalla's timeless, larger-than-life sculptures, located just to the left of Green Harmony.
Sosalla was commissioned to create these four animals in 1977 for the creation of the Pearl Street Mall. The snail and rabbit are marble and the frog and beaver are bronze, and all of them are meant to be touched, which is why generations of kids have climbed them.
Sosalla found sculpture while earning his MFA at CU, then went to Hollywood, building stop-motion puppets and miniatures for films like Return of the Jedi and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. He won a 1989 BAFTA for Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. He retired from film in 2010 and still paints and sculpts at his home in California.
Sundial
Installation date: 1983
Materials: Bronze
Location: 1400 block of Pearl St. Mall
To your right, Pearl Street’s bronze Sundial glistens in the sunshine with its weathered patina. The City of Boulder Landmarks Preservation Advisory Board installed Sundial in honor of William D. Carter. Bill Carter, a longtime Boulderite, was the president of the United Bank of Boulder in the 50s and 60s. This banking institution, formerly known as the Mercantile Bank and Trust Co., first established its presence along Pearl Street in 1913 with the city’s first ever fireproof structure at 1201 Pearl Street.
Dedicated in 1983, Sundial features a 60 cm brass plate gnomon (timekeeping device) with a centered slit. The slit allows light to fall on the inscribed hour lines beneath the plates, indicating the time of day. There's no artist on record for this sundial, and it’s not part of our Public Art Collection.
Boulder County Courthouse & Sculpture Garden
Location: 1300 block of Pearl St. Mall
To your right is the Boulder County Historic Courthouse, built in 1933 and one of the few Art Deco buildings in Boulder. Notice the geometric forms and symmetry.
It's also where Boulder made civil-rights history. In 1975, decades before same-sex marriage was legal nationwide, County Clerk Clela Rorex issued the first same-sex marriage license in the country here, to two men who had come up from Colorado Springs. She went on to issue six in all before the state ordered her to stop. In December 2024, the courthouse was named a National Historic Landmark for its role in that story.
The lawn holds a sculpture garden honoring Civil War veterans. It's all county-owned, so the sculptures aren’t part of our city collection, but worth a look.
Title: Little Bug Bridge
Artist: Julie Maren
Installation date: 2002
Materials: Limestone
Location: 1200 block of Pearl St. Mall
Up next is Little Bug Bridge. Julie Maren, a local sculptor, carved these limestone columns at her outdoor studio in Eldorado Springs in the summer of 2002. The insects that visited her while she worked, crickets, monarchs, dragonflies, honeybees, all made it into the stone. So did the plants she saw on long walks through Boulder's meadows, mountains, and marshlands: mariposa lily, yucca, prickly pear, cattails, mountain sunflower, and wild grasses.
Title: Hearts on a Swing
Artist: George Lundeen
Installation date: 1988
Materials: Bronze
Location: Broadway & Pearl
Hearts on a Swing shows a woman in bronze resting on a fragmented bench, the swing's rope tied at the back left. Look at the bench slats: Lundeen cut hearts into them out of negative space. He cast her dress mid-motion, as if the wind just swept through, one arm draped along the back, one leg kicked out from under the fabric. Look at the base, too: the whole sculpture touches down at just two points.
This beloved piece embodies the care and attention that George Lundeen gives to his bronze sculptures. Lundeen, a native of Holdrege, Nebraska, was a Fulbright scholar at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence before setting up his studio in Loveland. He's drawn to human emotion, which pulls him toward living subjects, people and animals alike. Hearts on a Swing won the Helen Gapen Oehler Memorial Award in 1990.
This one isn't part of the Public Art Collection. The city doesn't own it; it's on long-term loan from a private property owner.
Metamorphic Rock I
Installation date: 2002
Materials: Migmatitic rock
Location: 1100 block of Pearl
Just beyond the sandstone bridge is a visual reminder of the origins of Boulder’s name: Metamorphic Rock I. Walk between the two halves of this boulder, it's about 1.7 billion years old. It's a migmatitic rock, part of the deep crystalline “basement” rock that underlies much of Colorado. The pink tint comes from feldspar, one of several minerals in it along with mica and quartz. It was found near Fairplay, then cut with a diamond quarry saw into thirds weighing about 15 tons each, with a third portion a block west at 11th St. As you pass through, look at the swirling veins, a record of the heat that once softened the rock.
There is no artist associated with this work, so it’s not part of our collection.
Sandstone Fountain (“The Weeping Rock”)
Installation date: 2002
Materials: Sandstone
Location: 1100 block of Pearl
Just beyond and to the left of Metamorphic Rock I is a sandstone fountain, nicknamed "The Weeping Rock." It was installed by Parks and Rec to bring a bit of nature to the mall. It's lovely, but there's no artist behind it, so it isn't part of our public art collection.
The fountain is often the site of improvised, temporary art installations: mall-goers use the fountain’s wet surface to plaster petals and leaves into mandala or floral compositions. The plant material easily adheres to the surface and remains vibrant and well-preserved due to the constant moisture.
Title: Face Fountain
Artist: David Sosalla
Installation date: 1977
Materials: Bronze
Location: 1100 block of Pearl
Just beyond the Weeping Rock is Face Fountain, located in the corner of a raised brick garden bed. This is another David Sosalla piece, the same artist behind the animals we saw earlier on the Mall. In summer, water gushes from the wide-eyed man's puckered lips. Look at the top left of his head, tucked in the curls, and you'll find where Sosalla signed his name and dated it '6-77.' The bronze has weathered to a deep brown, with hints of aqua and green settling into the wrinkles of his face and hands.
Title: Monarch of the Plains
Artist: Stephen LeBlanc
Installation date: 2015
Materials: Bronze
Location: 11th & Pearl in front of Billabong
New Mexico artist Stephen LeBlanc made this bronze bison, which watches the mall from its perch. At 50 inches tall and 90 long, it's not quite life-size. A real bull can stand 72 inches tall and weigh over a ton. The name 'Monarch' speaks to the grace of the bison that once roamed these plains. The buffalo is the University of Colorado mascot, and the plaque calls it 'a symbol of the enduring friendship between the people of Boulder and the University of Colorado.' The first casting of this bison went up at CU's Folsom Field in 1995, where fans rub its horns for luck before games. You can see how many hands have turned the horns to a golden sheen.
Metamorphic Rock II
Installation date: 2002
Materials: Migmatitic rock
Location: 11th & Pearl in front of Billabong
Here's the other half of the split boulder we walked through just a few minutes ago!
Walk to 9th & Pearl, turn left down 9th St
Penfield Tate Mural
Artist: Detour
Installation date: 2020
Materials: Paint
Location: North side of Boulder Public Library
Visible along the intersection of 9th St. and Canyon, the vibrancy of the Penfield Tate II mural invites onlookers to gaze at the portrait of Boulder’s first and only black mayor. Commissioned in 2020, following a resolution on race equity by Boulder City Council, artist Thomas "Detour" Evans was chosen to celebrate and memorialize Tate and his impact on local politics and civil rights.
Penfield Tate II is fondly remembered as a trailblazer in local politics. During his mayoral term beginning in 1974, Tate advocated for equality and supported humanitarian efforts. He focused on the civil rights of underrepresented communities, including Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) as well as the local LGBTQ community. His efforts culminated in the controversial human rights ordinance that led to his failure to be reelected. After his mayoral term, Tate continued his legal practice, establishing various firms, with his last being Tate & Tate – a partnership between Penfield Tate II and his son, Penfield Tate III.
In 2020, Boulder also chose to honor Penfield Tate II by renaming the municipal building after him. Murals are technically temporaary and not part of the Public Art Collection.
Cross Canyon north to Sculpture Garden
The Charles A. Haertling Sculpture Park:
Welcome to The Charles A. Haertling Sculpture Park, created in 1984 to honor a beloved local architect and politician Charles Haertling. He came to Boulder in 1953 to teach and practice architecture, designed more than forty buildings around town, and served on city council as Deputy Mayor in the 1960s. His son, sculptor Joel Haertling, still lives here, and Joel's own piece 'Continuous Form' is in the city's collection over at Scott Carpenter Park. None of the pieces in this park are part of the official Public Art Collection.
Title: Untitled
Artist: Robert Mangold
Installation date: 2002
Materials: Cor-ten steel
Location: Haertling Sculpture Gallery
When entering the Charles A. Haertling Sculpture Garden, you may first discover the mesmerizing geometry of Robert Mangold's untitled sculpture. Its intersecting corten-steel bars lean and seem to hover, defying gravity, and the steel has weathered to a deep reddish-brown.
Mangold was a Colorado sculptor who taught at the University of Denver and then helped build the art department at Metro State, where he taught for nearly three decades. He's known for kinetic, wind-driven metal work. BMoCA donated this piece to the city.
Title: Correspondence
Artist: Dennis Yoshikawa Wright
Installation date: 1986
Materials: Marble
Location: Haertling Sculpture Gallery
Towards the edge of the sculpture garden is the serene Correspondence by University of Colorado Boulder alum, Dennis Yoshikawa Wright. Wright carved the piece from marble in 1985. It's three beams: a curved horizontal one balanced at a slight slant on two uneven verticals, with patches left rough to show the stone's natural state.
Wright is a Japanese-American stone sculptor known for site-specific work, waterfalls, and fountains, with commissions across the country and abroad, most from the West Coast. His style is a Japanese Zen simplicity; as one critic put it, his work “captures that quality of true artistry, the appearance of total effortlessness.” He meant this one to be studied up close, so take a look.
Title: Human Glyph Series
Artist: Bill Vielehr
Installation date: 2001
Materials: White bronze, manganese bronze, various aluminum alloys
Location: Haertling Sculpture Garden
In the sculpture garden, five free-standing steel sculptures circle one another. Bill Vielehr welded these five figures from white and manganese bronze and aluminum alloys. They circle one another on the slope, cool-toned and fragmented. The idea was to turn his 2D sketches of abstracted human figures into three dimensions, what he called “3-D drawings,” with shapes that nod to cave paintings and hieroglyphics. Look closely: see the etchings and writing on the surfaces? That isn't vandalism, it's Vielehr's own hand, part of treating each piece as a 3-D sketch. Part of the point is that the work isn't meant to be polished or pretty; the rough, handmade quality is deliberate.
Vielehr grew up right here in Boulder and studied art at CSU. He started out in classical, realistic figure sculpture, then moved away from that toward this looser, more experimental metalwork. He became a nationally known sculptor and spent his whole career in Colorado.
Title: Giddy Up
Artist: Gary Alsum
Installation date: 2005
Materials: Bronze
Location: Haertling Sculpture Garden
Gary Alsum is a Colorado native who grew up in Denver and settled in Loveland, where he learned from established sculptors like George Lundeen, whose Hearts on a Swing we passed earlier on Pearl Street. For years he worked as a trim carpenter by day and sculpted at night while raising four kids, until his work landed in galleries and he could go full-time. He started out sculpting children, then branched out to people of every age, and even dogs and cars.
Title: Double Arc
Artist: Jerry Wingren
Installation date: 1987
Materials: Marble
Location: Haertling Sculpture Garden
Jerry Wingren carved Double Arc from white marble and installed it in January 1987. Both sides are hollowed out just enough to create an optical illusion, a sphere that isn't really there. Wingren is fascinated by the math in nature and by how a flat plane becomes a three-dimensional form.
He first studied art at the University of Washington in 1959, then went to Germany to study German drama at the University of Bremen, and that's where he developed a passion for sculpture. He started in timber, apprenticed under two master stone carvers there, and later worked in steel, marble, and granite back in the U.S. His style leans on Scandinavian and Japanese aesthetics.
Title: Chief Niwot
Artist: Thomas Miller
Installation date: 1985
Materials: Sandstone
Location: Haertling Sculpture Garden
Thomas Miller carved this figure of Chief Niwot of the Southern Arapahoe from red sandstone in 1985, resting it on a natural granite boulder. As the plaque reads: “Chief Niwot of the Southern Arapahoe used the area along Boulder Creek, near the foothills of Boulder, for his winter campground. The Southern Arapahoe and Chief Niwot were forced from this area by gold seekers in 1858. He always strove for peace. He was killed at the Sand Creek Massacre November 27, 1864.”
Take 9th St. underpass to stay on creek path
Title: Corvids of Colorado (Streetwise Mural)
Artist: Robert Martin
Installation date: 2020
Materials: Paint
Location: Creek path & 9th St. underpass
This is another mural, so not part of our Public Art Collection, but a beautiful addition to the path. Robert Martin grew up around romanticized rural wildlife art, the kind with deer in snowy fields and pheasants in the corn, beloved in rural homes even if the art world never took it seriously. Here he uses that same style to celebrate Colorado's corvids, our jays, magpies, crows, and ravens, in vibrant, flamboyant scenes. As a queer artist, he reimagines wildlife art to make room for both queerness and rural life, and to invite in people the art world often overlooks.
Title: Diversity Supports the World
Artist: Ken Bernstein
Installation date: 2012
Materials: Ceramic tiles
Location: Under the Library, visible across the creek path
To your right, visible across Boulder creek is Diversity Supports the World, a tile mural project. Ken Bernstein created these mosaics with students from Fairview High School for the pillars and a wall under the Main Library. The mosaic wall worked with nature imagery, leaves, butterflies, and other flora and fauna, some of it in relief so it stands out in three dimensions. Woven through the desert-like scene are geometric forms and human figures that carry the diversity theme. Bernstein likes art that's both decorative and useful, and he often builds nature into his architectural and landscape designs. This piece is not part of our collection.
Title: Fifty Five Degrees
Artist: Adam Kuby
Installation date: 2020
Materials: Cor-ten steel
Location: East of Boulder Public Library
Adam Kuby made these three Cor-ten steel frames for the Civic Area. Each opening works like a window, a picture frame, or a gateway. Kuby matched the Flatirons exactly, the same 55-degree slope and north-south orientation, so the frames echo the peaks in the distance. His background is in landscape architecture, urban forestry, and even zoo design, and his work usually responds to a place or an environmental idea. This one is definitely in our collection and exists thanks to our 1% for Art policy--when this park was redeveloped in 2018, that policy funded the commission.
Exit creek path and walk east on Arapahoe Ave. sidewalk toward Penfield Tate Municipal building
Title: A Search for Peace (Pilot and Navigator)
Artist: Charles Sturrock
Installation date: 2019
Materials: Stainless steel
Location: East side of Penfield Tate II Municipal Building
This kinetic stainless steel sculpture turns in the wind. Boulder Rotary member Gordon Gamm donated it to the city in 2019 and it was adopted into the official Public Art Collection. Also called “Pilot and Navigator,” it's part of the Infinite Walk of Peace, marking the Boulder Rotary Club's centennial. The artist put it this way: “As the wind moves the circles within circles in search of balance, the interplay of the wheels reflects our hope for peace in our hearts, peace in our homes, peace in our community, and peace throughout the world.”
The “Infinite Walk of Peace” also includes five peace poles which provide the names of Boulder’s ten sister cities: Dushanbe, Tajikistan; Jalapa, Nicaragua; Kathmandu, Nepal; Kisumu, Kenya; Lhasa, Tibet; Manté, Mexico; Nablus, Palestine; Ramat HaNegev, Israel; Yamagata, Japan; and Yateras, Cuba.
Walk south to return to the Boulder Creek Path. Follow the path under the Broadway underpass. Turn right to cross the bridge.
Title: Gilbert F. White Memorial Flood Level Marker
Artist: Mary White
Installation date: 2013
Materials: Recycled glass, steel, and stone
Location: Boulder Creek Path, east of Broadway underpass
Mary Bayard White and Christian Muller designed this flood marker beside Boulder Creek, unveiled in 2011. It's an 18-foot obelisk of recycled glass, steel, and stone, over 1,450 pounds, and it's really a teaching tool: the glass is marked with the 50-, 100-, and 500-year flood levels. A fourth mark, 16 feet up, is the 1976 Big Thompson flood, roughly a 1,000-year event.
It honors Gilbert F. White, the pioneering “father of floodplain management.” Fittingly, his daughter, Mary Bayard White, co-designed it. Her work often centers on ecological themes, water, renewable energy, habitats for wild birds, and she builds her sculptures from salvaged materials.
Glen H. Huntington Bandshell
The Glen H. Huntington Bandshell, named after the structure’s architect, has been a fixture in downtown Boulder’s Central Park since 1938. The bandshell has been a place of community pride, public gatherings, and civic events. This structure is one of two remaining bandshells from the early to mid-1900s and remains as one of the few examples of Art Deco architecture in Boulder. Due to its historic significance, the bandshell received landmark status in 1995 to ensure it remains for years to come.
Being born in Denver guided Huntington’s choice in education and later, his career path, all based in Colorado. Huntington pursued studies in Civil Engineering from the University of Colorado. After graduating, Boulder became his homebase for his practice after World War I. Architectural projects throughout his career include churches, houses in University Hill and Chautauqua Heights, the Boulder County Court House, and Boulder High School. Glen H. Huntington continued the architectural legacy of his father, Glen W. Huntington, who is remembered for his designs of single-family homes and public structures in Denver.
Dushanbe Teahouse
In 1987, during his first visit to Boulder, Mayor Maksud Ikramov announced that Dushanbe planned to present Boulder with a Teahouse to celebrate the establishment of sister city ties. From 1987-1990, more than 40 artisans in several cities of Tajikistan created the decorative elements of the Teahouse, including its hand-carved and hand-painted ceiling, tables, stools, columns, and exterior ceramic panels. Often these skills are handed down from generation to generation within families. Lado Shanidze served as chief architect.
After creating the teahouse in Dushanbe, the structure was dismantled, shipped, and reassembled at its location along 13th Street near the Civic Area. Two master woodcarvers, Manon Khaidarov and Mirpulat Mirakhmatov, supervised the reassembly operation and then celebrated the building’s completion by carving their names into the wood panel ceiling. If you take the time to encounter the magnificence of the teahouse, make sure to survey the ceiling, looking for their signatures.
As you wander around the exterior or the interior, reflect upon the magnificence of the Dushanbe Teahouse which is the product of a 2,000 year old tradition of woodcarving, cultural practices, and Middle-Eastern design. Appearing throughout the building are traditional Persian designs which involve nature motifs as well as the repetition of patterns.
Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA)
To the right, just beyond the Dushanbe Teahouse along 13th Street is the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA). In 1972, artists founded the art institution to provide a physical space for locals to commune and exhibit their work. BMoCA’s status as “non-collecting” guides its mission to display contemporary artists by frequently rotating the exhibitions.
BMoCA’s current structure is another cornerstone of Boulder’s architectural history through its designation as a 1906 historic landmark building. Due to the building’s age and its inability to be altered, certain artworks cannot be supported if they exceed entryway dimensions or the max-load capacity for the floors. BMoCA is in the process of designing and constructing a new campus which includes gallery spaces that can support heavier or oversized pieces. The art institution attracts over 100,000 visitors annually and presents inclusive, free access educational programs in six counties as well as exhibitions at six satellite locations.