Ed Dwight: Casting a Legacy

Ed Dwight: Casting a Legacy is running at the History Colorado Center in Denver from July 17, 2026, through February 28, 2027. It's an exhibition dedicated to Ed Dwight, a self-taught Denver artist, pilot, and engineer who has worked from his studio in the city since 1977. If you've lived here a while, you might recognize the name, but his story is one of those that gets better the more you know about it.

Dwight was the first Black astronaut candidate in the United States. He spent years working toward a flight that didn't happen for a long time, and then, in 2024 at the age of 90, he finally made it to space aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard, becoming the oldest person to ever fly. That's the astronaut side of things; the other half of his life has been spent in his studio, where he works in bronze.

The exhibition brings together several of his major series. There's Black Frontier Spirit in the American West, which he started while he was an MFA student at the University of Denver and which the 1975 Colorado Centennial Commission later commissioned. Those sculptures give a permanent shape to the stories of Black cowboys, homesteaders, soldiers, and laborers of the West. Then there's his Jazz series, with figures like Charlie Parker, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, and Miles Davis, and his Historical Figures busts, including Rosa Parks, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass. Together, his work has inspired more than 130 monuments across the country, including the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Denver's City Park.

There's a bit of a poignant edge to this one, too: illness and vision loss have recently disrupted his ability to sculpt, so this is a good moment to see the work in person. The exhibition is included with general admission to the History Colorado Center, and it runs all the way through February 28, 2027, so you've got plenty of time to fit it in.