Painting with Hammers
City Park’s Lily Ponds Come Alive
By Georgia Garnsey
For the GPHN
As park-goers throng to City Park these days, there is something new to discover. The Lily Ponds southwest of the Museum of Nature and Science have been activated with an exciting art installation called Color Field.
You will now see the formerly deserted seedbeds of the ponds filled with 6,000 painted gardening stakes of glowing colors that echo the colors of the water lilies in Claude Monet’s paintings. Monet’s lilies inspired City Park’s first Lily Ponds in 1917, which were later reimagined at their present location by Denver landscape architect Saco DeBoer in 1924.
Denver artists Sarah and Josh Palmeri conceived of the Color Field project. They discovered the Lily Ponds when they lived near City Park. Fascinated by the deserted, evocative area and after researching its history, they decided to bring the Lily Ponds back to life The artists partnered with City Park Friends and Neighbors, a Registered Neighborhood Organization that advocates for the park, and received a Denver Arts and Venues’ 2019-20 “PS You Are Here” (PSYAH) grant to implement the project. (PSYAH grants fund short-term projects meant to call attention to city-owned and other outdoor public spaces and to celebrate what is best about our neighborhoods.)
Color Field is intended not only to call attention to the Lily Ponds, but also to build momentum for restoring a garden to the spot that has lately been deserted.
As you circle the seedbeds of the Lily Ponds, you will notice that the colors change as you move around them. The artists painted all the gardening stakes themselves (the onset of the coronavirus pandemic prevented volunteer participation). They also painted two sides of the square stakes in different colors. Once the stakes were painted, a limited number of masked and physically distancing volunteers pounded them into the cement-like soil of the beds. The Lily Pond was literally hammered into the living painting you see today.
The next phase of Color Field will be programming performances (jazz, poetry, dance) at the ponds, which will be filmed and streamed on Facebook and Instagram.
Funders for Color Field are Denver Arts and Venues, City Park Friends and Neighbors, City Park Alliance, Denver Museum of Nature and Science and the Denver Zoo. More donations are needed as programming goes forward. Check out cpfan.org or colorfielddenver.com for more.