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The Project The Tour Heritage Aerospace Stories Partners Get Involved
Trinidad, Colorado  ·  Launching June 3, 2026

Space Cowboy

A statewide touring project connecting Colorado's frontier identity to its aerospace future — in every region, every corridor, every community.

2026–2030  ·  37 Colorado Creative Districts  ·  Every Economic Region  ·  Every Scenic Corridor

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Space Cowboy — a rocket wearing a cowboy hat with the tagline: The frontier isn't gone, it's just higher now
The Project

Where the frontier meets the cosmos

★  A Colorado Creative Industries Change Leader Initiative  ★

Space Cowboy is a large-scale traveling exhibition that creates a high-engagement public experience wherever it lands — drawing community members in through fiber art, live story collection, and programming that connects Colorado's frontier identity to its aerospace future.

It doesn't just show up.
It listens.

Community voices are archived through History Colorado, and woven into the exhibition itself — creating a living record that grows with every stop. Over four years, Space Cowboy is estimated to reach 37,000 Coloradans across every economic region, scenic corridor, and creative district in the state.

Space Cowboy launches at the Colorado Creative Industries Annual Summit in Trinidad, June 3, 2026 — at the heart of the Santa Fe Trail corridor in Southeast Colorado, the first stop on a four-year statewide journey.

Space Cowboy is the latest project from Dundee & Lee — the team behind Goodnight Moon: A Fiber Tale, a 500 sq ft fiber art installation of the beloved children's book, currently touring Colorado and bringing young and old together around shared stories.

37
Districts — Scheduling Now
4
Year Statewide Tour
History
Colorado
Archives
Scenic &
Historic
26 Byways

Exhibition Specs

Width16 ft or 22 ft (modular)
Depth8 feet
Ceiling Height10 ft minimum
Residency~3.5 or 7.5 weeks per stop
StructureFreestanding · no wall anchoring
Oral HistoryRecorded at every stop
WiFiRequired
PowerStandard 110V outlet
The Tour

Across every corner
of Colorado

A four-year statewide tour through Colorado's creative districts, economic regions, and scenic corridors — every community, every story.

Phase 1 · Launch
2026

Trinidad & Western Slope Pilot Phase

Launching June 3, 2026 at the Colorado Creative Industries Annual Summit in Trinidad, Las Animas County — then Western Slope pilot districts through 2027.

Register for the Summit ↗
Phase 2 · Expansion
2027

Front Range & Mountains

Expanding through Front Range and mountain communities — scheduling Creative Districts and regional stops across Colorado's economic regions.

Phase 3 · Completion
2028–30

Statewide Completion

All 37 districts. The living oral history archive grows with each stop — a permanent record of Colorado communities at a turning point.

Tour stops are being scheduled across all regions. Dates are confirmed upon signing of host agreements. Contact us to discuss scheduling your community →

Communities in Scheduling
Trinidad
Grand Junction
Ignacio
Ridgway
Silverthorne
Crested Butte
Steamboat Springs
Carbondale
Loveland
Aurora
Longmont

Additional communities scheduling through 2030.

What we bring
  • ▸ Delivery, install & deinstall
  • ▸ Oral history collection
  • ▸ Press templates & marketing copy
  • ▸ Docent guides & programming support
  • ▸ Customizable sponsorship materials
What you handle
  • ▸ Scheduling a 3.5 or 7.5-week residency
  • ▸ Opening event coordination
  • ▸ Identifying 5–10 local participants
  • ▸ Local promotion via existing channels
  • ▸ Insurance during residency
Hosting Information

Ready to host Space Cowboy?

Enter your email to download our hosting one-pager — everything your district or organization needs to know to get started.

Your email will only be used to share Space Cowboy news and hosting information. We will never sell or share your information. Privacy Policy

Statewide Reach

A project built for
all of Colorado

Space Cowboy is designed from the ground up as a statewide initiative — moving through Colorado's economic regions and scenic corridors, activating communities and generating stories that belong to the whole state.

Colorado Scenic & Historic Byways

Space Cowboy travels Colorado's 26 designated Scenic & Historic Byways across all five economic regions — following the corridors that carry visitors deep into the communities, landscapes, and stories that define the state.

Colorado's 37 Certified Creative Districts
Map of Colorado's 37 certified Creative Districts

All 37 districts across every economic region — from Trinidad in the southeast to Grand Junction in the west, Steamboat Springs in the north and Durango in the southwest. View interactive map ↗

For Destination Marketing Organizations

Space Cowboy gives communities a cultural anchor event on the calendar — something to promote, something to build programming around, something that generates press. Each 3.5-week residency produces oral history recordings, public events, and media assets that belong to the community long after the exhibition moves on. We welcome DMO partnership at the regional and statewide level.

Start the Conversation →
Colorado Cultural Tourism

Colorado's scenic byways exist to give travelers a reason to leave the highway and go deep into the communities that define the state. Space Cowboy travels those same corridors — not as a tourist attraction, but as a cultural event that gives those communities something to gather around and something to say about who they are.

Heritage tourism works when there is something living at the destination — a story still being told, not just a marker on a roadside. Space Cowboy is that living story, in 37 communities across every economic region, for four years. It connects Colorado's cultural tourism infrastructure to the communities that infrastructure was built to serve.

Statewide Footprint
37 communities · all 5 economic regions · 26 scenic byway corridors
Community Engagement
Est. 37,000 Coloradans · 3.5 weeks per stop · public programming at every visit
Lasting Assets
Oral histories archived to History Colorado standards at every stop
Start the Conversation →
Colorado's 26 Scenic & Historic Byways — Space Cowboy's Travel Corridors
Map of Colorado's 26 Scenic and Historic Byways

Space Cowboy travels Colorado's 26 designated Scenic & Historic Byways — the corridors that connect Creative Districts across every economic region, from the Santa Fe Trail in the southeast to the Trail of the Ancients in the southwest. coloradobyways.org ↗

Western Heritage

Duct tape, bailing wire, and the will to figure it out.

The frontier runs on
ingenuity

There's a scene in Apollo 13 where a NASA engineer dumps a box of parts on a table — whatever happened to be on the spacecraft — and tells the room: figure out how to bring them home. They did. That instinct didn't come from nowhere. It came from a culture that already knew how to solve hard problems with what was at hand.

That culture runs all through Colorado. It shows up differently depending on where you are — mending fences at dawn, keeping the tractor running through harvest, raising livestock through a hard winter. But it also shows up in garages and community kitchens and school shops and backyards all over the state. The willingness to roll up your sleeves, give the shirt off your back, and figure it out — that's not a rural trait. It's a Colorado trait.

That's the spirit Space Cowboy wants to celebrate and connect to Colorado's future. Wherever it exists — and it exists everywhere — we want to hold it up and say: this is who we are, and this is exactly what the next frontier needs.

Ingenuity Under Constraint

Colorado is home to one of the most significant aerospace ecosystems in the country — satellite operations, space command, private launch companies, research institutions. That industry runs on the same problem-solving instinct that Colorado communities have always had. Space Cowboy is the bridge between the two.

Fiber Art Tradition

Space Cowboy is a large-scale fiber installation — a medium rooted in the communal craft traditions of the American West. Artist Emilie Odeile works in fiber because of what it carries: patience, community, and the long view.

The Santa Fe Trail

Space Cowboy launches in Trinidad — at the heart of the Santa Fe Trail corridor, one of the most significant routes in the history of the American West. The trail carried people into the frontier. The exhibition follows.

Living Communities

The oral histories Space Cowboy collects are not archives of a vanished past. They are voices of people living in Colorado right now — ranchers and artists, elders and students, innovators and builders, all of them part of a state still becoming itself.

Colorado Aerospace

Where does Colorado's next aerospace engineer come from?

Building the pipeline
from the ground up

Colorado is home to one of the most significant aerospace ecosystems in the United States. The companies, research institutions, and mission operators driving that industry need the next generation of talent — and that talent grows up in communities across the state, not just along the Front Range.

Space Cowboy puts aerospace where young people in rural Colorado can see it, hear it, and connect to it — through the voices of real professionals, in their own communities, in an exhibition that makes the future feel close.

For Colorado's aerospace industry, Space Cowboy is a four-year, statewide investment in the communities your future workforce comes from.

Statewide Reach

37 communities across all of Colorado's economic regions — including rural and underserved areas where aerospace industry presence is minimal but talent is not.

Living Content

Space Cowboy is building a time capsule. Scientists and engineers — the people solving Colorado's most consequential aerospace problems right now — sit down on camera and talk about their work, what drives them, and what they believe is possible. Those recordings travel with the exhibition across all 37 communities, for years. A young person in Ignacio or Ridgway or Longmont watches a researcher describe the frontier they're working on — and sees a path they didn't know existed.

Intergenerational Programming

STEAM programming at every stop connects students, educators, and community members — with History Colorado archiving the stories that result.

School District Engagement

As Space Cowboy travels, it connects with students and educators in local school districts — bringing STEAM themes into classrooms and creating pathways between community stories and Colorado's aerospace future.

For Educators & District Leaders

Download our educator guide — capstone projects, Seal of Climate Literacy, CTE alignment, oral history training, and how to connect with Space Cowboy when it visits your region.

Your email will only be used to share Space Cowboy updates. Privacy Policy

Oral History

Community voices,
permanently archived

Live Archive · History Colorado

Space Cowboy is a participating project in the History Colorado Portrait of Colorado at 150 Storytelling Initiative. At every stop, community members share their reflections on land, identity, and the future — voices that don't disappear when the exhibition moves on. They become part of Colorado's permanent historical record.

"Grandparents and grandchildren in the same room, sharing the same stories."

Oral history interviews are conducted and archived to History Colorado standards at each host community.

The STEAM Connection

Space Cowboy's central figure draws from CU Boulder's sounding rocket research at White Sands beginning in 1948 — a decade before NASA existed. Colorado's aerospace researchers are the next chapter in that story. Their work travels with the exhibition through short-form video segments — scientists and engineers talking about the problems they're solving right now, playing on the installation's monitors in communities across the state.

At each stop
01Exhibition open to the public for ~3.5 or 7.5 weeks
025–10 on-camera oral history interviews recorded
03STEAM programming with local schools
04Stories archived to History Colorado standards
Partners & Team

A Dundee & Lee project

Space Cowboy is created by Dundee & Lee and built on institutional relationships that give it permanence beyond any single exhibition. Every story collected becomes part of Colorado's official historical record — not a project archive, but the state's archive.

History Colorado — Portrait of Colorado at 150 Storytelling Initiative Colorado Creative Industries

Space Cowboy is a participating project in the History Colorado Portrait of Colorado at 150 Storytelling Initiative and a Colorado Creative Industries Change Leader Initiative — oral histories collected at every stop become part of Colorado's permanent historical archive.

Colorado Creative Industries
Colorado Creative Industries

Space Cowboy is a Change Leader Initiative — developed through the Colorado Creative Industries Change Leader Institute, which supports artists and creative professionals building lasting cultural infrastructure across the state.

Colorado's 37 certified Creative Districts represent the state's most organized cultural ecosystems, spanning every economic region from Cortez to Sterling. They are the backbone of Space Cowboy's touring infrastructure.

Change Leaders Contributing to Space Cowboy

Current and former Colorado Creative Industries Change Leaders are contributing to Space Cowboy in different ways — bringing their expertise, networks, and projects into alignment with the tour.

Artist
Emilie Odeile
Dundee & Lee
Producer
Ken Chapin
Dundee & Lee
Co-Producer
Eva Lewis
Executive Director
Ignacio Creative District
Oral History Partner
Kim Kennedy, Ph.D.
Associate Curator of Oral History
History Colorado
STEAM & Education
Samantha Agoos
M.Ed., NBCT · Colorado Department of Education Science Content Specialist
Work-Based Learning Specialist
Miranda Ziegler
Executive Director & Board Chair
Scholastic Art & Writing Awards / Colorado Art Awards
Get Involved

Be part of something
statewide

Space Cowboy is building a four-year statewide record of Colorado communities. There are a limited number of ways to put your name on it.

Become a Founding Sponsor

Your name travels with Space Cowboy to all 37 communities — every economic region, every scenic corridor, for four years. Founding Sponsor recognition closes at the June 3, 2026 launch. Slots are limited.

Start the Conversation

Sponsorship Opportunities

Connect your company to rural communities, young people, and Colorado's aerospace future — statewide reach across all 37 Creative Districts for four years. Reach out to start the conversation about sponsorship tiers and visibility opportunities.

Start the Conversation

Host or Partner

Creative District directors, DMOs, educators, journalists, and institutional partners — reach out to learn more about bringing Space Cowboy to your community, exploring a regional partnership, or requesting media assets and press information.

Start the Conversation