Where is Denver’s Chinatown? Exhibit Tour
Saturday January 25, 2025
Registration opens 1/11 @ 4pm MT
About the tour: Once located in the area known today as Lower Downtown (LoDo), Denver’s Chinatown was one of the largest Chinese communities in the American West during the late 1800s and early 1900s. It provided a welcoming space for Chinese people in Colorado, allowing them to build a community and celebrate their culture against a backdrop of frequent ignorance, hostility and violence.
Join members of the exhibit development team Leyuan Li, Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Colorado Denver, and Samantha Martin, Temple Buell Associate Curator of Architecture at History Colorado, for an in-depth guided tour of the exhibit.
About the exhibit: Created in collaboration with Colorado Asian Pacific United and the University of Colorado Denver’s College of Architecture and Planning, Where is Denver’s Chinatown? reveals the Chinese community that flourished here, the racist efforts that erased it, the resilience of the community today, and possible futures for the neighborhood. The exhibition invites visitors to explore this vibrant cultural history through historic family photographs and objects, artifacts from the museum collection, a portrayal of a typical home, and spatial reimaginations for the future of the former Chinatown neighborhood.
About the tour guides: Leyuan Li is a Chinese architect, educator, and researcher whose professional and academic work focuses on the agency of the architectural interior in the articulation of spaces and societies. He has practiced architecture internationally at OMA and SOM before founding his practice, Office for Roundtable, a design collective exploring different forms and events of sharing. He is an assistant professor of architecture at the University of Colorado Denver and has taught at the Rice School of Architecture and the University of Houston. His work has been exhibited at History Colorado in Denver, the 9th Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism in Shenzhen, and the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. Most recently, he was awarded the 2024 AIA/ACSA Housing Design Education Award.
Samantha Martin, Temple Buell Associate Curator of Architecture, is a graduate of Wright State University with a MA in Public History. She joined History Colorado in 2023. Samantha is responsible for collecting, preserving, and sharing contextual materials that tell the unique story of Colorado’s built environment.
Accessibility: For full accessibility information at the History Colorado Center, please visit their website.