In May 2021, Denver Arts & Venues was still sending out releases calling the city's cultural plan "Imagine 2020." Looking back over the past year, who'd want to do that?
In 2014, then-Arts & Venues head Kent Rice and his team, which included current agency director Ginger White, did. At the time, imagining far-off 2020 seemed a little sci-fi, but in a hopeful way. Only a prophet of doom would predict the dystopian hellscape of fascists attempting to do away with democracy, police killings and riots, and mass death from a pandemic that marked the actual 2020.
Last year, we saw mass layoffs in the cultural sector and venues dark as catacombs, some boarding up for good. We couldn't physically escape into entertainment, liberating ourselves — if only for a night — at concerts, either: Even outdoor amphitheater Red Rocks, which generates a massive amount of the cultural agency's revenue, sat mostly empty.