LOOK – A 145-foot, $1.8 million piece of art is now hanging 70 feet above the Colorado Convention Center

The city that gave us a glowing-eyed demon horse at the airport has added another piece to its growing collection of public art that makes visitors go, “Wait, how much did that cost?” The answer this time: $1.8 million.

“Mountains and Rivers Without End,” a mixed-media sculpture by California artist Cliff Garten, is now suspended about 70 feet above the escalators in the new western-facing wing of the Colorado Convention Center. The piece is 145 feet long and 41 feet wide — for those doing the math at home, that’s roughly the size of half a football field dangling from the ceiling. When lit at night, it’s visible from as far away as Speer Boulevard, which means Denver just got a new landmark that most people will discover while riding an escalator with a lanyard around their neck.

The sculpture is based on a scale model of a 120-mile section of Colorado’s Rocky Mountain topography, rendered in aluminum topographic lines with blue glass rivers running through them. Artist Garten describes the landscape as being “translated into a diaphanous, transparent veil,” which is a sentence that cost roughly $12,414 per word at that price tag. The piece’s lighting shifts throughout the day with the western sun exposure and switches to multi-colored interior lighting at night, creating shadows that mimic the actual mountain view outside the window.

So who paid for a sculpture that costs more than most Colorado homes? Technically, Denver did — through its 1% for Art municipal ordinance, which requires that 1% of any city capital construction budget go toward public art. The convention center wing it hangs in cost $233 million, so the sculpture is actually under budget by that formula. Gina Cerri of Denver Arts & Venues noted the piece “really fills the space and adds volume,” and said the installation took years to engineer because hanging something that massive 70 feet in the air inside a building that’s rarely empty is, shockingly, complicated.

About 90% of the artwork inside the convention center is Colorado-themed, according to Cerri, and this one fits right in. It’s just a little bigger. And a little more expensive.