One week before the opening of the year’s fourth Downtown Aurora Visual Art exhibition, students were bustling around their brand new media room inside the art education nonprofit on East Colfax, carrying rolls of thick black paper and yards of black Velcro tape.
“We’re going to premier our films that we made over the summer in here, and so we need to seal out all of the light from the windows and the skylight to create the right atmosphere,” said Adrian Gomez, 13, who attends Aurora West. “It’s great that we have this space now because the old building was cramped and hard to get around in. It’s so much better.”
The nearly $2 million expansion of Downtown Aurora Visual Arts — DAVA — wrapped up earlier this year after about four years of fundraising efforts to take the aging, inefficient building and add modernizing it with more space and functionality.
DAVA began providing free art classes to middle school and high school students from North Aurora in 1993. Back then, the center was just a single storefront that was renovated from a deteriorating strip mall at 1419 Florence St. Over time, other storefronts next door became vacant, and DAVA snapped them up and stitched them into the building.
All of the spaces that form DAVA today were purchases that were incorporated into the gallery and public art education space by around 1996, said Susan Jenson, executive director of DAVA.
“It’s incredible to see after years of living in a 1950s building that it has been transformed from the ground up,” Jenson said. “We all feel more creative as a result … and we are more focused and we are more productive.”
The building’s former space was about 7,300 square feet. The addition added and repurposed 1,000 square feet, allowing for a new ceramics studio, new industrial design space, a media room, larger classrooms and administrative offices.
“It’s great to have all of this extra room and creative space,” said Rudi Monterroso, a program Leader for DAVA’s job training program in visual studio arts “Especially all of the light. There are more kids joining these classes this year, too.”
So far this year students from DAVA’s staple job training program have produced three art shows, 13 films and designed a robot. Their newest exhibition, “Transit.” opens at 4 p.m. today and includes mobile, pop-up home prototypes that were designed and fabricated by the job training program’s visual studio students and well as films interpreting transportation directed and produced by the program’s digital arts kids.
Geoffrey Chadwick, assistant production and post-production professor at the Colorado Film School and some of his students worked with DAVA students over the summer on the conception and production of their films.
“This is our third year hosting Film Camp for Kids (which DAVA students attend), but we’ve worked with DAVA for several years before that as well, helping their kids make films,” Chadwick said. “We do a few workshops the first week – get a little teaching in, then the kids write, shoot, edit and/or animate their own movies. It’s really pretty amazing what these kids can learn and do in just a short amount of time.”
David Klein, professor of industrial design at Metropolitan University of Denver also collaborated with DAVA visual studio students for the upcoming exhibition. Some of his students will also show pieces in the show.
“We came out before they started their projects and did a couple of lectures on introduction to industrial design toward the end of the summer,” Klein said. “The main benefit is for the students, because it’s where they first learn about industrial design. For us, it benefits our outreach to the community and helps familiarize a new generation of potential industrial design students. This is great way to form those early partnerships.”
Growing participation and a more flowing, conducive art space, will also influence the development of more programs and collaborations.
“DAVA is always changing because young people have a voice in determining the content and direction of our work. They inform and inspire everything we do,” Jenson said. “We understand that for the next six months we will still be settling in and that we are growing stronger in our resolution to do all we can to ensure that kids continue to define a creative workforce and make their ideas come to life.”