DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY

WELCOMING We make our resources, services and expertise accessible for all, recognize the inherent dignity in each person, and provide safe places where everyone can be themselves... In designing Denver's Central Library, which opened in 1995, the architect Michael Graves included a sculpture made from the reclaimed beams of a Western sawmill to be installed in the center of the Western History and Genealogy unit which, together with the African American Research Library, operates within the Special Collections and Digital Archives Department. With enormous beams rising dozens of feet above the floor, held together with wooden pegs, the work dubbed "Symbol of the West" dominates the 5th floor circular Reading Room. It is a dramatic setting that has hosted school tours, exhibits, rare book auctions, mayoral press conferences, receptions, and other civic events. Visitors invariably turn their eyes up as they enter, marveling at the Graves sculpture, a work variously described as an oil..

Primary location: Andes United States