By Hannah Carley
Boulder Weekly
The Longmont Museum hosted a grand reopening recently, cutting the ribbon on the year-and-a-half-long project.
The expansion cost roughly $100 million and added three permanent galleries: an art gallery, a children’s gallery and a local history gallery. The project added 70% more gallery space in total, with staff contributing over 9,000 hours to the expansion.
The museum showcased 10 objects from Longmont’s history in the incomplete local history gallery, giving the community a sneak peek at the project set to finish next year.
Museum Director Erik Mason and City Mayor Susie Hidalgo-Fahring spoke to a large crowd of community members gathered around the entrance at 9 a.m. for the ribbon-cutting. After the ribbon-cutting, a steady stream of guests filed in and out of the museum all day long to experience the new exhibits with friends and family.
“We are so pleased,” Mason said. “I think that this day will be the first of many where the museum will be humming with activity all day long.”
Mason said the project was a four-year process of planning, designing and building the expansion, focusing on additional gallery space and reconfiguring existing spaces. He thanked those who donated toward the project for their generosity, enabling the project to come to be.
After filing in, guests formed lines for each exhibit to see the results of the community-funded project.
A closer look at Frida Kahlo and female artists across 400 years
The larger feature gallery will show temporary exhibits and features movable walls for different exhibitions. Now, the gallery hosts a special exhibition, “Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Portrait.” The exhibition takes a closer look at Kahlo, showing her personal collection of photographs, portraits, letters and notes.
The exhibit features 98 intimate photographs and personal writings of the world-famous artist. Senior Manager of Exhibitions Jackie Hobbins explained the Women’s Art Exhibit complements the main feature, as many of the women showcased have experienced struggles similar to Kahlo.
The complementary exhibit, “Women Artists: Four Centuries of Creativity,” celebrates female artists spanning 400 years. Featured artists range from women who pioneered artistic movements and techniques to artists alive today.
“There’s a lot of really interesting stories,” Hobbins said. “As a mother, I think some of these are really relatable, but I also think it’s relatable to anybody who’s been a part of a group that maybe hasn’t had the same opportunities as some people.”
Museum Marketing and Development Manager Joan Harrold said the exhibition can give visitors a deeper understanding of Kahlo's life and personality through her personal letters and portraits.
“You will be so impressed by the Frida Exhibit and the scale of these internationally significant shows that we can have here at the museum now,” Harrold said.
The Frida Kahlo exhibit will run until the end of January, while the Women Artists exhibit will be available until Jan. 24.
Fun for the family: the DreamLab’s debut
Local artists designed and built the components of Lila’s Children’s Gallery, nicknamed the “DreamLab,” completely in-house. Denver artist Bree Angela and local artists Giovanni Gurrola, Taylor Malone and Ally Kotarsky produced the finished gallery. Staff created each element of the gallery to promote early childhood learning and development.
“We’ve had four staff pretty much working full time on it for the past six months, working on the design, the build, as well as working with lots of groups in the community,” Mason said. “We’ve brought in folks from the neurodivergent community to the accessibility community.”
These artists came together to create sensory-friendly activities, like intricate textiles, sculptures and sets for children to explore. For the past 15 years, staff have focused on incorporating more community, hands-on experiences into all exhibitions. The DreamLab focuses on interactability, where both children and adults can enjoy an immersive learning experience.
“We really felt like having a dedicated exhibit built from the ground up, designed around educational play, designed so that kids can come in and feel totally at home in a space, not have parents afraid of what they can and can’t touch, because everything in DreamLab is touchable, was something that we’ve really been dreaming of for a long time,” Mason said.
Many of the DreamLab activities are designed to inspire teamwork and interaction among visiting children. Cooperative games include a scarf-launching cannon inside the castle, a rope-pulling game inside the sculpted faux-rock cave and a diner set with a kitchen and booths.
“So you can’t necessarily do it by yourself, and that’s the point,” Hobbins said. “Our social engineering worked wonderfully. The first batch of test runs we had, kids were meeting each other to try to figure out how this works and how to use it together.”
Lilypad Landing offers activities for all ages, Hobbins said, with activities available for children younger than one year. Plush lilypads, a wooden, honeycomb-shaped play structure and a bin of animal puppets decorate the space, available for parents and children to use. Harrold shared that many children attended the opening dressed like princesses to explore Dragon Sky Castle.
Longmont resident Sheree Seyfi brought her two grandchildren to the DreamLab on opening day. She emphasized the importance of a local museum that Longmont residents can enjoy. Seyfi appreciated that the community can now experience an interactive museum without the travel.
“We were so excited,” Seyfi said. “To have something like this in Longmont is going to help us to stay in Longmont rather than go to the bigger areas.”
She said her grandchildren really enjoyed the honeycomb play structure inside Lilypad Landing and the Dragon Sky Castle scarf-cannon interactive and slide.
Longmont’s History in 100 Objects: coming soon
The local history gallery, “Collected: Longmont’s History in 100 Objects,” will display 100 pieces of city history at a time. The exhibit will showcase pieces from the museum’s off-site historic collection center, which holds 17,000 historic objects from across the region.
The project will give museum staff the space they need to showcase more Longmont local history. Harrold said the museum will showcase objects in chronological order.
“Today we wanted to show people that we do have this third gallery space and give them a little taste of some of the artifacts that we’ll have in there,” Harrold said. “Just let them know that this is a three-gallery museum now, which is really different than the past.”
The local history exhibit demo included 10 local history pieces on full display. A projector showed black-and-white film provided by the city, including an old Longmont city advertisement. Museum staff presented a “Cursive Challenge,” where visitors to the demo attempted to decode historical documents that were written in cursive.
“I think, you know, when somebody can come into a local history museum like this, but feel connected to that history, I think that can be a really special experience,” Harrold said.
Harrold said the project was fully funded through donations ranging from $10 to $6 million. The Stewart Family Foundation was the largest contributor.
“I would just encourage people to come check it out, because this is so much bigger than it was before, and there really is going to be something for everyone here all the time,” Harrold said. “You don’t have to be a museum person. There is something for everyone.”