When artists are tapped to create a public art project, they have to walk a fine line between delighting the masses without alienating them, and playing it too safe to leave a lasting impact.
Thomas “Detour” Evans, a celebrated Denver artist best known for portraiture murals honoring community leaders and changemakers, is the latest to accept the challenge.
Detour scored his first public art project – to be displayed in Concourse B at Denver International Aiport – in 2022. Since then, he’s been constructing a piece titled "It's Not What You Take, It's What You Bring Back."
Now, it’s in the final stage of production and will be installed in mid-January 2025.
Holy bags, Batman!
Detour describes the sculpture as an undulating carousel of bags that resembles an infinity sign from afar and a Mobius strip up close.
The carousel has been constructed with a copious number of bags – all donated by regular travelers and famous Denverites alike. They were then deconstructed, stuffed with foam, primed, painted and mounted on a metal armature.
The loop morphs from reds and oranges to yellows and blues. The colors, Detour explained, represent sunrise and sunset – the neverending loop of travelers taking off and landing at a multitude of times in a multitude of locations.
Did the airport’s Lizard People provide any of the bags?
”The Illuminati will not let me talk about this,” Detour said.
Adding more seriously, “I did hide some stuff inside of a few bags, so hopefully in a thousand years when it's decommissioned they’ll find some magic in there.”
The installation, which cost $450,000, was funded by Denver's 1% for Public Art Ordinance. The program allocates 1 percent of the budget on all city construction projects to public art.
‘Scuze me, ‘scuze me, virtual Thomas ‘Detour’ Evans, coming through
When DIA announced its call for public art proposals as part of its $1.5 billion Concourse Expansion Program in August of 2021, local and international artists were champing at the bit to have their proposals selected.
So was Detour — but he knew he’d have to prove himself in the process.
“It's one of those things where it's a catch-22,” Detour said. “[To] get a project like this, you have to show that you've done one before, but you haven’t done one before because no one’s come and give it to you, because you haven't done one before.”
To escape the catch-22, he created a pitch that demanded attention – including an animated, 3D rendering of himself walking the concourse with his proposed luggage sculpture hanging from the ceiling.
“You just want to be different,” Detour said. “You want to stand out and you can't do that doing what everyone else is doing or using the same tools.”
So he didn’t. And he got his foot in the door.
‘How do I have a sculpture piece that's different than everything that I see in an airport?’
Detour said many of the proposals he saw “tried to fit that airport aesthetic.” But he wanted to break the mold – and figure out how to involve the community.
The angle, he decided, was combining a sense of legacy with a focus on upcycled materials. That’s where the inspiration for "It's Not What You Take, It's What You Bring Back" originated.
So he put out a call for used luggage and asked people to share their bag’s stories. Slowly but surely, donations rolled in.
“[It] was really cool, giving people the opportunity to be a part of something that they'll see forever,” he said.
The final work will feature the donated luggage loop, suspended from the ceiling in Concourse B, as well as a digital archive of each bag’s story. Viewers can access the archive via a QR code on a nearby plaque and explore the history of each parcel as they wait to catch their flight.
The sculpture includes bags donated by local legends such as Ed Dwight, the artist who created the Martin Luther King Jr. sculpture in City Park, John Mosley, local sports pioneer and Tuskegee Airman, to traveling bags used by the Nuggets and the Broncos and even an old touring chest owned by the Cleo Parker Robinson dance company.
Much of the luggage also came from local travelers and flight attendants. Darrell Anderson is one of them.
A project at the airport can be an artistic breakthrough
When Detour was 29, he was trying to join the military. But he tore his LCL doing jiujitsu and decided to move to Tanzania to volunteer at a school.
“That was a part of my life where I went to a place, traveled and then came back totally different,” he remembered. “And that's when I said, let me just do art full time and figure it out.”
Now, he’s been a professional artist for about a decade. His story has many parallels to that of his fellow artist and friend, Darrell Anderson.
“I was the first male flight attendant they hired for the old Frontier,” Anderson said. “So it was like me and 300 women after I'd gotten out of Vietnam.”
“When Continental bought Frontier in ‘86, that's when I left, because I've always wanted to be an artist,” he added.
By 1994, Anderson and co-artist Barb McKee had debuted “Patterns and Figures – Figures and Patterns,” a terrazzo and mosaic tile work, on the floor of the newly built international airport – a major achievement for an artist with under 10 years of professional experience.
“It was like a complete transitional time for me to quit as a flight attendant,” Anderson said. “Where all my buddies told me I'll never make a living [as an artist] — and end up putting public art on the floor at DIA.”
“That project really kicked off my career,” he added, “and I was all over the world because of it.”
A big work with big opportunties
Detour hopes his installation, "It's Not What You Take, It's What You Bring Back," will open up those kinds of opportunities, too.
“All the money I spent with all the errors I was making [on this project], it was a tuition,” Detour said. “Tuition for learning how to do public art the right way. But now that I've gotten through it, it's like I can duplicate that process on other projects,” of which, he hopes, there will be many.
The only thing he’s worried about? The little birds you see flying around, trapped inside the airport.
“[The sculpture is] like, a perfect place to nest,” he laughed. “That is literally the only thing I'm worried about.”
