Art project tells tale about gentrification
A home on West Colfax reflects neighborhood’s changing face
The faded purple Victorian at 1240 Newton St. appears perfectly normal from the street. A short metal fence gives way to a snow-covered front lawn. White-painted lumber, the skeleton of a former porch, frames the front door. The first sign of something out of the ordinary peeks from the windows: lines of paint swirling and folding around each other on wooden Venetian blinds.
But step through the front door and you have entered the mind of artist Markus Puskar, mapped in flowing lines of color pulling on each other as they race across every surface of the home, which will soon be demolished to make way for new development.
You can’t look away from “The Funkhouse,” in the same way neighbors can’t not notice the rapid change rolling through their West Colfax neighborhood.
“Something’s getting bulldozed and it’s something else remarkable you didn’t know about on the inside,” Puskar said. In this case, that something is art. But many times, it is people’s actual homes and the lives they lead there, he said.
But Puskar didn’t start this installation to make a statement.
His friend Zach Scanlon moved to Denver in September. Scanlon, a musician and artist, rents the century-old home in the West Colfax neighborhood, where the streets are lined with houses similar to his. The duplex next door is an odd juxtaposition, though, an ultra-modern, three-story home clad in wood, black brick and metal. The people who live there are nice, he said, but wealthier than most of the people in the surrounding neighborhood.
In 2015, about 51 percent of West Colfax was Latino and roughly 10 percent was African-American, according to Community Facts. Nearly twofifths of the neighborhood lived in poverty. The average income was a little more than $43,800, which is less than half the greater metro’s average that neared $89,200. More than half the neighborhood worked public jobs.
But here, much as the rest of
Denver, signs of gentrification are popping up. Developers are grabbing lots. Luxury apartments are going up. New attractions, such as the Alamo Drafthouse, are moving in. The West Colfax neighborhood is changing — and rapidly. Too rapidly, Scanlon and Puskar say.
An abandoned house was torn down to make way for the ultra-modern duplex next to Scanlon’s house. Developer Hasan Almabuk said there are similar plans for that home and the house next door, with eight units in four duplex buildings on the drawing board.
With a move-out date set for Feb. 1, Scanlon reached out to his longtime friend Puskar, asking if he wanted to paint his house.
“A little bit of it is this childish sense of I get to paint on the walls — and the ceiling,” Puskar said. “That’s where it all started.”
Puskar is an artist, cartoonist and muralist, but he has never done something this big. With four gallons of the cheapest paint from Home Depot — the primary colors plus white — he’s spent two months in the house, listening to Fleetwood Mac, Kevin Parker and Bob Marley along the way.
He quickly pointed out parts of the piece that escaped a first glance at the purposefully overwhelming piece. A jellyfish — an animal Puskar talks animatedly about — is on one wall while a mushroom adorns another. He’s fascinated by disparate objects with the same shape. He abandoned structure for fluidity.
“The Funkhouse” is more powerful than a mural, he said. He loves murals, but the room holds the viewer’s attention for longer, forcing them to look at nothing else. It’s a stream of consciousness, each section representing his headspace at the time yet still flowing together cohesively.
“You start thinking about the implications that are beyond just how we enjoy the house,” he said. “There are bigger things at stake than just a fun painting project.
“And when that set in, we were like, ‘All right, wow. We can use this as a way to show how development can tear apart neighborhoods.’ ”
Scanlon and Puskar have lived in several cities. Scanlon most recently arrived from Nashville, Tenn., while Puskar came from Washington, D.C. They say the type of development happening in West Colfax is happening everywhere.
They say they aren’t against redevelopment. It’s how rapidly it’s happening, and the way that young professionals with money replace low-income families that bothers them. And a big issue, especially for Puskar, is the aesthetics a large luxury apartment complex brings to a neighborhood.
“I don’t think anyone is a fan of it,” Puskar said. “You can’t knock down everything.”