Re: Dec. 18 Perspective article.
As an artist, I was never truly “painted into a corner” and forcibly removed, but I was priced out of viable downtown Denver studio options. Some of you may remember the Grant Street Art Center in the 1980s. It was full of artists (Mark Friday, Patti Ortiz, Katharine McGuinness), and held memorable First Friday-like openings long before First Friday. Then we were handed our hats, and the building became the Art Students League. We scattered.
I had to pack up and leave my downtown Denver studios three times, once because of the impending baseball stadium, and decided to have an in-home studio built in 2004. But I am never very far removed — in thought — from urban, collective and cooperative artists, who, as Ray Mark Rinaldi explained, provide the community, the state and the region with objects and ideas that anyone can use as maps to find the intimate places in our heads and in our hearts.
Craig Marshall Smith, Highlands Ranch
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