Since late 2024, the Office of Arts and Culture has worked with consultants to solicit feedback on priorities from roughly 2,000 community members as they put together the Boulder Arts Blueprint. Courtesy: Boulder Office of Arts and Culture
As Boulder prepares for a bigger cultural spotlight with the arrival of the Sundance Film Festival in January 2027, city leaders are grappling with a question that goes beyond any single event, venue or grant cycle: What will it take to mature into a sustainable arts community?
While the city still attracts artists and creative professionals, the 2025 Boulder Artist Census tells a more complicated story. The number of artists living in Boulder declined 1.5% between 2019 and 2025, but creative-sector jobs have fallen more sharply, while average artistic income remains below $19,000 and many artists say there is insufficient space for their work.
This tension sits at the heart of the Boulder Arts Blueprint, a recently approved 10-year strategy from the city’s Office of Arts and Culture. With major civic planning initiatives underway, including updates to the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan and redevelopment planning across the city, the document aims to integrate arts and culture into Boulder’s broader economic strategy.
“It’s pretty hard to deny the economic impact of arts, especially with Sundance on the horizon,” says Lauren Click, manager of Boulder’s Office of Arts and Culture. “So this Blueprint is intended to serve as a guiding framework for arts and culture in the city over the next decade.”
Since late 2024, the Office of Arts and Culture has worked with consultants to solicit feedback on priorities from roughly 2,000 community members as they put together the Blueprint. The plan identifies seven goals to strengthen the city’s cultural ecosystem that together aim to address several long-standing challenges in Boulder’s arts community, from rising living costs to uneven access to cultural programming.
The plan calls for expanding low-cost arts opportunities, helping artists build sustainable careers and ensuring arts and culture are considered in major decisions across the city. Amanda Berg Wilson, artistic director of Boulder-based theater group The Catamounts and a member of the Blueprint’s advisory committee, sees promise in the framework.
“Boulder is known for innovation in so many other sectors, so the arts need to have our shoulders in there,” Berg Wilson says. “The most important [Blueprint priority] is accessibility and inclusion. I imagine there are great swaths of Boulder that don’t think the arts are for them, due to price, who is telling the stories, which stories are being told or where they are being told, and to change that, it has to be foundational.”
Some initiatives are already in motion. Click points to a summer partnership with the Small Business Development Center to help creatives build sustainable businesses, and a collaboration with Community Foundation Boulder County supporting artists with administrative work like filing taxes and connecting organizations with specialized contractors.
Now that her team is part of the Office of Cultural and Economic Development, Click says the arts have a voice in larger city discussions. Tangibly, this looks like the Office of Arts and Culture being included on the East Bookend and Civic Area Phase 2 redevelopment teams, as well as the Downtown Development Authority formation project.
“We’ve been invited into the economic development world in ways we didn’t have access to before,” Click says. “There’s a lot of pressure to address affordability concerns, and this change allows our office to represent artists’ interests in discussions about economic development.”
Despite broad support for the Blueprint’s goals, the Boulder Arts Commission March meeting revealed disagreements about the plan’s stated priorities. Several commissioners and community members argued that the document fails to emphasize the need for more arts infrastructure, including rehearsal studios, performance venues and artist workspaces.
Rita M. Rufino Valente-Quinn, Motus Theater’s producing executive director, is one of those who believe the document needed to be restructured to better communicate the “big ideas” of arts infrastructure investment.
“If Boulder wants to continue growing and stabilizing arts organizations that produce artistically excellent works,” she says, “we need the right venues to support that work.”
City staff revised the document following the meeting, moving discussion of venues and infrastructure earlier in the text before presenting the Blueprint to Boulder City Council on April 9 and releasing it publicly during Boulder Arts Week.
All eyes are now focused on what the plan can accomplish.
“The changes it will yield are likely going to be more legible in two to three years,” Berg Wilson says. “That said, we will have gone through our first Sundance in a year, and meaningful progress will look like the local arts being uplifted alongside the internationally famous festival, and the artists feeling that.”
With the Blueprint in place, only time will tell if its recommendations have an impact on redevelopment, cultural funding decisions and affordability concerns that threaten to drive out local artists while boosting a newly relocated film festival.
“If we don’t address Boulder’s infrastructure and affordability issues in the coming years, our city will not become the arts hub we want it to be,” says Deborah Malden, co-founder of Create Boulder, a nonprofit focused on arts policy, and a member of the Blueprint’s advisory committee. “We currently have a real opportunity for change, so it’s critical that all city planning departments are working together to ensure we’re nurturing the next generation of local artists to stay and create.”
