Iconyx Tames the Modern Art of Denver’s Clyfford Still Museum

Denver, CO | October, 2012 – One of the giants in post-WWII American painting, Clyfford Still dropped out of the commercial art world in 1951. When he died in 1980, he willed entire collection to an American city willing to create a permanent home for it.

More than three decades later, the Clyfford Still Museum opened its doors in downtown Denver. The 28,000-square-foot steel and concrete building houses more than 2400 of Still’s works, as well as a collection of the artist’s journals, sketchbooks and archives.

Visitors enter the museum through a massive glass-lined lobby whose windows extend from its tiled floors to its concrete ceiling. The strikingly beautiful architecture, while visually stunning, creates a highly reverberant acoustical environment that is anything but conducive to the large-screen video presentation that runs in the museum’s entry.

Denver-based Empowercom was retained by the museum’s planning commission to address the lobby’s challenging acoustics. As Empowercom’s Vice President Terri Jackson explains, the selection of Renkus-Heinz’s Iconyx steerable array loudspeakers was a logical choice.

“The content management committee on the project had suggested the Iconyx system, and everyone involved unanimously agreed they were the only speakers that would meet the needs of the space,” says Jackson. “Being able to steer the sound away from the abundance of reflective surfaces was key. Using the Iconyx, we were able to focus the sound to a concentrated area directly in front of the screen, rather than create a cacophony across the entire lobby.”

Jackson adds, “The program material contains both narration and music, and the Iconyx delivers on both spoken word intelligibility and musical performance.”