Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Denver, Colorado, USA, 2014

Art for the south arrival plaza at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science’s new educational wing draws on museum exhibits about light, optics, and minerals, combining them with the dynamic Colorado sunlight to create an embodied aesthetic experience. The main feature, “Iridescent Cloud,” is a suspended sculpture built from hundreds of tetrahedral clear acrylic prisms woven into a web of mirrored stainless steel rod loosely derived from the molecular structure of hexagonal quartz crystals. As sunlight shines on the prisms they sparkle with iridescent colors that move across the sculpture as one walks around it. Leading up to the plaza is a 270’-long glass lithocrete paving arc that transitions through all the colors of the visible light spectrum and terminates in a pyrite specimen set in a blackened bronze “pot of gold,” a treasure for children to discover at the end of the rainbow.

Iridescent Cloud was commissioned by the City and County of Denver’s Public Art Program. Demiurge Design fabricated and installed the cloud sculpture and columns. Silo Workshop meticulously carved a mold to custom fit the pyrite, cast it in bronze, and installed the piece in the plaza.