Grace Noel Art has been in business since 2013 and is celebrating a decade of art in 2023. On Feb 01, 2013, First Friday, I started showing my artwork at the Denver Art Society. How it all manifested was serendipity. My boyfriend at the time had been attending meetings for Occupy Denver at the Denver Art Society TreeHouse Studios. He would come home from the meetings and say, “The occupy Denver meetings are in a co-op art gallery. That art gallery is pretty cool, you should show your art there.” I was busy with work and massage school at the time, plus I was creating my first series of artwork post graduating art school. I wanted to start with a fresh look in a new scene. Even though I was born and raised in Boulder and would stay with my godparents in Denver overnight(s) throughout my childhood, Denver was a new city and scene for me. I had graduated with my art degree in the Pacific Northwest and my art scene was there, so I was starting fresh when I moved back home. As a side note, I wanted to go to school in the Pacific Northwest to be in the rainforest. After growing up in the dry climate of Colorado, I wanted to experience the opposite. Plus I received a scholarship to attend Oregon State University in Corvallis, OR. Once I was done with college though, it was time to return home to my family and help support them, as they had supported me through college.

I moved back to Boulder in the summer of 2012, the beginning of the recovery from the great recession, aka there were no art jobs. So I started my own landscaping and home maintenance business: Everything Under The Sun. Work was plentiful helping homeowners and hobby farms with rehabilitating overgrazed pastures and checking off the neverending home maintenance task list. I didn’t realize it then, but I would continue to work for and operate Everything Under The Sun for 8 years until the 2020 pandemic, and pregnancy of my first kiddo, made me close the business. Circling back though, I spent the summer of 2012 pulling weeds, mowing lawns, installing new landscape designs, and rehabilitating scarred land. In my spare time, I created my first art series since college and it was inspired by being home in the Colorado sunshine. My roots are in Colorado and New Mexico - my body has evolved through generations of ancestors to be perfect for the climate that exists there. So much so, that my body craves the climate I was born into. I was home and I wanted to create artwork that depicted my deep connection to the land and my family.

Nov 2012 I attended my first First Friday in Denver. I was used to First Thursday in Portland in the Pearl District and wanted to check out Denver’s First Friday on Santa Fe. I was completely inspired! Of course the November first friday is the El Dia De Los Muertos Themed First Friday and has always been the busiest and most attended first friday in Denver. I joined in the festivities and at the end of the night I was excited to go back and learn more about the galleries in Denver’s Art District on Santa Fe. Now I had a goal and a direction to show my art in one of them.

Now, circling back to showing my art at, “The occupy Denver meetings are in a co-op art gallery. That art gallery is pretty cool, you should show your art there.” That co-op art gallery is called the Denver Art Society. I learned that the Denver Art Society was a gallery in the Denver’s Art District on Santa Fe that was run by the artists and anyone was welcome to join, so I tried there first. I found out from Linda Hart that I needed to fill out an application, volunteer 6 hours a month and attend the monthly meetings to join the co-op and show my artwork. Linda probably onboarded a couple thousand members to DAS and has helped sustain that gallery since the beginning, she’s a force! I arrived for the meeting on Jan 30, 2013 and learned that the curation team needed some artwork to fill a hole in the gallery art layout for first friday on Feb 1. I volunteered to bring my artwork in and even though I was brand new and hadn’t done any of the membership requirements, the curator approved and hung my artwork for me. Everything came together with such serendipity, it was amazing.

I arrived for my first first Friday on Feb 01, 2013 and sold my first prints, woodblock prints. My best seller of the night was my woodblock print: Respect Existence or Expect Resistance that I had made late in the summer 2012 and this was my first time showing it. The print was inspired by my involvement in multiple local activist groups across the country from over the years. That night I officially had begun my journey into the Denver Art scene and Denver Art Society. It's been quite a ride since then.

The photos in the blog post are from Grace Noel Art’s 10 year anniversary party on 02/05/2023 but I did include a reference photo of my Respect Existence woodblock print.