After years of fundraising and months of noisy construction, Downtown Aurora Visual Arts is finally ready to show off its shiny new facility on Florence Street.
DAVA, the city’s longstanding bastion of arts education, will unveil a fully overhauled facility during a grand opening ceremony on Jan. 14, marking the completion of a demolition and renovation process that began last summer.
“DAVA’s newly reconstructed facility will add light and fluid space for art and technology to operate in tandem,” Susan Jenson, DAVA’s longtime executive director, wrote in an email.
With a price tag totaling nearly $1.9 million, the building originally constructed as a small strip mall in the 1950s now boasts 8,636 square feet of total space, nearly half of which is brand new construction. Additions to the facility, which has operated in Aurora since 1993, include several new studio spaces, two new bathrooms, a revamped lobby and reception area, as well as new HVAC systems.
“Original Aurora will have an attractive, modern anchor of after-school arts education that will model cutting edge programming with documented outcomes,” Jenson wrote. “It is truly a pragmatic response to our needs.”
One highly anticipated upgrade to the DAVA space is the addition of an entirely new wing of the building which will be dedicated to the organization’s popular job training program. Catered to some of DAVA’s older students, the program mimics vocational responsibilities with programs in computer and studio arts.
DAVA serves more than 1,000 local children ages 3 to 17 each year and offers a menu of programs that run year round, according to Jenson.
Efforts to begin remodeling the DAVA site at 1405 Florence St. began about four years ago when the organization’s board first launched an ambitious capital campaign with a goal of raising about $1.7 million — a number that swelled after contract bidding began. Though a formidable goal, Jenson said that optimism surrounding the project ballooned after DAVA received a community development block grant for $225,000 at the beginning of the process. From there, the board was able to get a better sense of how the revamp could be brought to fruition and it opened up the possibility of applying to other funding mechanisms, according to Jenson.
“The CDBG gave people a view of the future,” she said in an August interview. “Then as we got closer to halfway, we could start applying to the bigger capital foundations, like the Boettchers and the Anschutzes of the world.”
Shortly after the organization started applying to the big league benefactors, a private, angel investor stepped in and shot the campaign forward. The exclamation point came for Jenson and others on the DAVA board when Aurora City Council voted 9-1 last February to approve a $287,374 forgivable loan for the completion of the construction project.
“I’m proud of the fact that council understands the importance of DAVA and backed it with general fund money,” said Ward I Councilwoman Sally Mounier, whose ward includes the DAVA facility. “It’s just a testimony to the good work that they have done over the past 20 years. This is an institution in urban Aurora.”