There’s been a different timber to the hum of creativity at Downtown Aurora Visual Arts this summer.
The constant chorus of trebly voices that has permeated the building at 1405 Florence St. for nearly 20 years has, at times over the past three months, been overpowered by the racket of spinning cement trucks, piercing nail guns and moaning bull dozers.
“It’s been very exciting, it’s been very exhilarating, but it’s been very loud,” Susan Jenson, executive director of DAVA, said with exuberance of the monumental changes she’s recently seen at her proverbial second home of the past 17 years.
DAVA, the city’s longstanding bastion of art education, has been systematically dismantled and partially demolished in recent months amid a massive facility overhaul. With a price tag totaling nearly $1.9 million, the building originally constructed as a small strip mall in the 1950s is set to soon boast about 8,000 square feet of total space and a slew of sleek new features, including several classrooms, offices, bathrooms and a new media room.
“For so many years we just built our programs up and our capacity to work with kids, but as we looked at the longstanding life of the organization, we had to look at having a building that matched the talent of our kids,” Jenson said. “It was no longer a matter of patching and painting.”
The organization originally purchased the Florence Street building in 1993 for $125,000 and rented to retail tenants like Zephyr Electronics and the Bethany Apostolic Church throughout the decade in order to buoy operating costs.
Efforts to begin remodeling the DAVA site 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 early in 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 to apply to other funding mechanisms, according to Jenson.
“The CDBG gave people a view of the future,” she said. “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 in late February to approve a $287,374 forgivable loan for the completion of the construction project.
“Hearing the council members discuss DAVA with such positivity was a really validating moment,” Jenson, who attended the council meeting, said. “The city recognized the work we’ve doing for years for kids, which was also a nod to the kids becoming the new creative workforce in Aurora.”
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.
One of the organization’s flagship offerings for teens, the job training program, recently wrapped its summer film camp, which allows students to create their own short films in cooperation with the Colorado Film School and the Community College of Aurora. And even though the summer film camp students have spent much of the summer at the Colorado Film School campus and away from the DAVA facilities, many, like 10th-grader Ireland Reynolds, said they haven’t minded the incessant noise and temporary workspaces the relatively few times they’ve been on Florence Street this summer.
“I’m happy for the building to be done, because it’s so small in here,” Reynolds said of the programs’ temporary digital work station. “But, in a way it’s cool, because we don’t have to yell across the room and we get closer together — literally.”
All of the summer film camp shorts will be shown at a screening at DAVA on Sept. 11.
The renovations at DAVA are expected to be finished by mid-November, according to Neil Hoffman, the site’s construction supervisor who lauded the organization’s community impact.
“It’s really a neat project to be on because it’s not just some random commercial venture where there’s nothing behind it,” he said. “It really means something to this area.”