Breaking Ground: A New Chapter in the Rockies
The Shop at Matter building exterior in the Five Points neighborhood, October 2025.
When CAST first launched Breaking Ground, the goal was to share what it looks like to build not just buildings, but trust, opportunity, and belonging alongside artists and community partners. Each chapter has captured moments of learning in motion–ongoing challenges, and our own missteps and recoveries–as we’ve worked to create permanently affordable arts spaces across the Bay Area.
The lack of affordable space for artists and arts organizations isn’t unique to the Bay Area. Across the U.S. and internationally, artists are losing funding sources and getting priced out of the spaces that sustain cultural life. In major urban centers, downtown commercial vacancies have been slow to rebound post-pandemic without outside interventions like arts activations or intentional municipal support.
Since 2018, we’ve been invited by cities like Austin, Boston, Philadelphia, Seattle, Tacoma, Vancouver, Sydney, and London to share lessons learned and creatively problem-solve across public and private sectors to keep arts and cultural spaces affordable. And while our model has been cited as a unique approach to addressing artist displacement by the World Cities Culture Forum, there is still much to learn from other innovative solutions across the globe to inform and enhance this collective work. Expanding into Denver is part of this ongoing effort to build a global community of practice, share knowledge, and develop strategies that stabilize and support artist workspaces.
Now, that learning continues in a new setting. This next chapter of Breaking Ground follows CAST’s expansion into Colorado, where we’re deepening our focus on affordable space for arts and culture in partnership with Louise Martorano, former Executive Director of Denver’s RedLine Contemporary Art Center and now CAST’s Managing Director of National Programs. Louise brings local expertise, trusted community relationships, and years of experience preserving arts spaces, qualities that are essential for CAST’s work as we extend our practice beyond the Bay Area.
Defining Denver
Earlier this month, CAST’s Marketing and Communications team traveled to Denver to visit potential sites, meet with artists, and get a feel for the city’s creative pulse. The trip challenged us to question assumptions and to see how ideas we’ve shaped in the Bay translate when we enter a new ecosystem.
Denver defies easy comparisons. It’s a city of experimentation and reinvention, where the arts have helped define identity across neighborhoods, from historic cultural districts like Five Points and Santa Fe to emerging live/work spaces like the Blue Houses. On our visit, we noticed signs calling Five Points the “Harlem of the West” and the financial district the “Wall Street of the West.” While these comparisons can feel familiar, they also risk obscuring what’s unique about Denver itself, making it harder to truly understand the city’s character and the communities that live and create here. What does it mean to stay true to that identity as new models for space and ownership emerge? How can CAST’s experience in the Bay Area help inform, not dictate, the approach here?
Learning with the City, Not About It
We arrived with more questions than answers, which is exactly where we want to be. Building community-rooted, affordable arts spaces requires curiosity, not certainty. It’s about showing up, meeting people where they are, and allowing the city to tell its own story.
Over the next few posts in this Breaking Ground: Colorado series, we’ll dive deeper into what we’re learning, from how downtown Denver is evolving and responding to commercial vacancies, to creative solutions around artist agency in development agreements, to reflections on live/work models that blur the line between home and creation.
Along the way, we’ll highlight the artists and organizers who welcomed us, like artist JayCee Beyale, Green Spaces CEO Jevon Taylor, artist Ana María Hernando, MATTER founder Rick Griffith, and more. We will also visit some of the spaces that inspired us, like Alto Gallery, the Evans School, and Friend of a Friend Gallery, and share some of the moments that are helping shape CAST’s next steps.
There’s still so much to learn, and we’re looking forward to sharing that journey with you. Stay tuned for Chapter 1, where we’ll explore what it means to create opportunity for artist space in downtown Denver.
