Big Sweep (Oldenburg broom and dustpan, Denver Art Museum)

Big Sweep turns an everyday broom and dustpan into a landmark beside the Denver Art Museum. The Denver Art Museum credits it to Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, a husband-and-wife team known for monumental sculptures of ordinary things, and says it was inspired by Colorado's prairies, mountains, bright light and scouring winds. It stands along 13th Avenue at the north end of the Frederic C. Hamilton Building and, according to the Associated Press, has been there since 2006. A 2013 museum conservation post names Carlson & Co. as fabricator and captions the work 1999 to 2006; the museum bought it with funds from its 1998 Collectors' Choice event. Westword described a yellow and red broom frozen mid-sweep, tossing crumpled paper into a blue dustpan. Height is stated two ways: the museum's text calls it 40 feet tall, while its object record lists 376 inches, about 31 feet, with a length of 304 inches and a width of 181. The record lists aluminium, stainless steel and polyurethane resin painted with acrylic polyurethane; the museum's 2013 conservation post gives stainless steel, aluminium and fibreglass. That post said the colours had not faded or altered after seven years, and that damage from skateboarding and climbing, mostly below eight feet, was repaired by repainting parts of the sculpture, a project completed in August 2013. Oldenburg died in July 2022 aged 93; Westword counted Big Sweep among Denver's ten most famous public artworks in 2023.