Revolutionizing · Modernizing · Simplifying
Revolutionizing · Modernizing · Simplifying
You have driven past it. Probably a hundred times. Walsenburg is that exit off I-25 between Pueblo and the Raton Pass, the one where you maybe stop for gas and keep moving toward New Mexico. Most Coloradans have never turned off the highway and walked down Main Street.
Here is the part people miss. There is a contemporary art museum sitting in a century-old mercantile building down there, and it holds more than 1,600 works. Admission is eight bucks. I am not making that up.
The place is called the Museum of Friends, and the name is not marketing fluff. It is a fact.
Back in 2006, two artists, Brendt Berger and Maria Cocchiarelli-Berger, opened the doors with a starting collection of about 600 pieces. And almost every single one of those was a gift. Art their friends had given them over the years, separately, to Brendt and to Maria, before they ever thought about hanging it on a public wall. So when it came time to name the thing, Museum of Friends. Done. That is where it came from.
The museum opened in October 2006. That 600-piece pile of gifts has since grown to over 1,600 works of contemporary art. And the museum's own website says it is recognized as the first counterculture museum in the United States, citing Art in America. First in the country. In Walsenburg. Population, not a lot.
The museum lives in the historic Roof & Dick Building at 600 Main Street. You can also get in from the 6th Street side at 109 East 6th.
And this is not some slapped-together storefront. Part of the museum's actual mission is preserving the Roof & Dick Building as a historic site and celebrating what it meant to Huerfano County when Walsenburg was a real mercantile town. So the art and the building are doing the same job. Both are anchoring a Main Street that has had a hard couple of decades.
You get about 6,000 square feet of display space. The first floor is where the rotating exhibitions live, plus workshop areas and the gift shop, which they call Made in Walsenburg. Locally made goods, the real stuff, not keychains trucked in from somewhere else.
Then you take the elevator up. The second floor is where the bulk of that 1,600-piece collection actually hangs. There is also a Hawaiian Collection up there, an Artist in Residence space, and a resource library. The Hawaiian part is not random, by the way. Co-founder Brendt Berger has native Hawaiian roots, so that thread runs right through the place.
Let me say the price again because it is the thing that gets me. Admission runs $8 for adults and $3 for kids, at least by one listing. Eight dollars for 1,600 pieces of contemporary art.
I mean, think about what a single ticket to a big-city museum runs you now. And here is this collection in a southern Colorado town most people write off as a gas stop.
The museum is generally open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. But here is my one piece of practical advice. The listed hours move around depending on which source you are looking at, so call ahead before you drive down. The number is (719) 738-2858. Two hours from Denver is a long way to go and find a locked door.
What is actually happening with this place is bigger than the art on the walls, if you ask me.
The Berger's positioned the Museum of Friends as a cultural anchor and a rural revitalization catalyst. That is the language, and in a town like Walsenburg it actually means something. A struggling main street does not fix itself. It needs a reason for people to turn off the interstate, park the car, and spend a few hours and a little money downtown. The museum is that reason.
And it is not working alone. The Museum of Friends has pitched in on a mural over at Miner's Plaza. Right around it you have got the Fox Theatre, the Walsenburg Mining Museum, Huerfano Butte out on the horizon, and Lathrop State Park for the folks who want lakes and hiking after the art. There is a whole afternoon down there. People just do not know to look for it.
The recognition is starting to catch up, too. Back on August 2nd, 2026, the Colorado Sun ran a feature on readers' favorite Colorado things, and the Museum of Friends made the list. So this is not just me telling you. Actual Coloradans who found it are telling everybody else.
October 2026 is the museum's 20th anniversary. Twenty years since two artists hung their friends' gifts in an old mercantile building and decided a town of a few thousand deserved a real contemporary art museum.
So next time you are running south on I-25 and you see the Walsenburg exit, do the thing you have never done. Take it. Drive down Main. It is $8 and it is one of the more surprising rooms in the whole state. Hayley and I do not throw that around lightly.