DENVER.- The Denver Art Museum has announced that it will showcase objects primarily from its own collections in more than 20,000 square feet of traveling exhibition space when the Frederic C. Hamilton Building expansion opens in fall 2006.

The new building includes three major spaces for changing exhibitions, which will allow the Museum to host more artworks from around the world and will create more flexible spaces for the display of those objects. During its first year, the Museum anticipates accommodating a million visitors through the building and will utilize the changing exhibition spaces to display more of its permanent collection, enabling visitors to see artwork that has previously been in storage.

“The Hamilton Building is creating galleries that will allow us to share hundreds more artworks from our collections with this community,” said Director Lewis Sharp. “We felt that by using the changing spaces for the display of permanent collections during this first year, we could introduce the exciting new galleries while at the same time providing a broader view of the Museum’s holdings.”

The first-floor changing exhibition space, named the Gallagher Family Gallery, will feature works from the Japanese art collection of Kimiko and John Powers. This installation will feature two rotations of approximately 120 works spanning nearly seven centuries by Zen priests, professional artists and artists experimenting with Western techniques. This Colorado collection, amassed over three decades, focuses on folding screens, hanging scrolls, handscrolls, sculpture and lacquer ware.

The second-floor Anschutz Gallery will host Radar: Selections from the Logan Collection. In 2002, Vicki and Kent Logan donated more than two hundred works to the Museum’s modern & contemporary art collection. This exhibition will feature works from that gift, as well as works from the Logan’s personal collection and objects the Logan’s have donated to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The Martin & McCormick Gallery, also on the second floor, will showcase a collection of contemporary Native American art donated in December 2003 by Virginia Vogel Mattern. The gift consists of 320 works of art, including Pueblo ceramics, contemporary oil paintings and Navajo and Hopi textiles. The gallery installation, which will include approximately two hundred of these pieces, represents the finest work being done by contemporary American Indian artists.

By exhibiting more of its own collection prior to hosting traveling exhibitions in the three gallery spaces, the Museum is attaining its two primary goals for the expansion. “We are pleased to introduce the Hamilton Building to our visitors by exhibiting almost exclusively the Museum’s extraordinary collection and we greatly look forward to bringing major exhibitions to this community in the years following our opening,” Sharp said.

The steel structure for the Hamilton Building was completed in September 2004 and construction will continue throughout 2005. The new Denver Art Museum complex is scheduled to open in the fall of 2006.