A peek inside Lonnie Hanzon's Cabinet of Curiosities – and curious origin story | John Moore

Lonnie Hanzon did not grow up with fairy tales. No first-hand knowledge of literary witches, killer queens or big, bad wolves.

Which is not to say he didn’t grow up in the presence of monsters.

“I was raised by wolves in the Colorado mountains,” Hanzon told me – a clever badinage that prompted a knee-jerk retort: “So, your people have just been reintroduced in the Colorado wild?” 

“Oh, I am not kidding,” he said with just enough blunt earnestness to warrant momentary consideration.

My original question to this renowned installation artist who has lived his entire adult life dusting Colorado in magic and three-dimensional wonder, was simple:

“So, Lonnie … how did you get to be this way?”

Hanzon has imagined everything from the city’s original Parade of Lights to the “Evolution of the Ball” sculpture outside Coors Field to the Denver Center’s popular annual “Camp Christmas" holiday sensory overload. The Museum of Outdoor Arts calls him its "Wizard in Residence," and why not? After all, he designed the original, iconic Wizard's Chest toy store back in the 1980s.

For the past 18 months, Hanzon's life has been consumed by fairy tales. Just not the ones that start off with, “Once upon a time.”

Now 65, Hanzon has just completed the dying artistic wish of the late real-estate developer and arts apostle John W. Madden Jr.: To make a permanent home for “The Cabinet of Curiosities and Impossible Things,” Hanzon’s astonishing assortment of fairy-tale artifacts that opened last week in an impeccably designed, 20-by-26 standalone container built on the grounds of Marjorie Park at the Museum of Outdoor Arts – an open-air dreamscape already fully dedicated to “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”

But Hanzon is no Wonka. He never even heard of Alice until he was an adult. Ironic, given that his entire youth was an unending fairy tale of its own sort. Which, if you know the truth about fairy tales, might not mean what you think. After all, a fairy tale is, by one definition, “a fabricated story intended to deceive.”

“I had a wicked childhood. It had a lot of stress in it,” Hanzon said. “I had to fend for myself. I was working full time and a member of the Chamber of Commerce by the time I was 14.

“I have no formal education,” he tells me – yet he’s spoken before of spending his boyhood in Pine, 45 miles southwest of Denver, and graduating from Wheat Ridge High School – ”just barely.” Always the entertainer, Hanzon began his artistic career as a teenage magician, bad clown (his adjective), a deliverer of 1,500 singing telegrams and “a horrible waiter.”

Talking with Hanzon is a joyful exercise – in part because you have no idea what, if anything, he says is actually true. But inside “The Cabinet of Curiosities and Impossible Things,” truth doesn’t much matter.

Whatever his truth, it’s plain that Hanzon overcame a challenging upbringing. “I used artwork as a way to escape,” he said, “and it was sublimation.” Which, in psychology circles, is a way of transforming socially unacceptable impulses into more permissible ones.

Truth is a nebulous concept inside Hanzon’s repository of peculiarities – which makes it all the more deliciously anachronistic that its four walls are lined with wallpaper made from 120-year-old encyclopedias that have been ripped apart. (Talk about disinformation!)

Hanzon says his overwhelming artistic impulse with this exhibition is one of direction. I think it’s turning our notion of credible and incredible information on its Britannica ears.

Hanzon takes me for a spin around the cabinet, which in this case is a jaunt not 25 feet in circumference. "We have here," he says grandly ... "Pinocchio's original legs!" 

"What does that even mean?" I ask.

"These are Pinocchio’s original legs," Hanzon repeats with the insistence of Barnum. "He got new legs early on in his childhood – and we were able to acquire the original legs."

"Well, OK, if you say – "

Wait.  Why am I still believing this guy?  

Next, Hanzon presents Puss ‘n Boots’ hat. And there’s the braid of hair that Rapunzel climbed down. The clock from “Hickory Dickory Dock.” A macaroni feather from “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” The Fisher King's tackle box. The Golden Ball from “The Frog Prince.” Jack's candlestick. The crumbling stone from London Bridge, because, you know ... it's falling down.

Hanzon has meticulously divided his exhibition into various themes both literal and esoteric that range from “Alice in Wonderland” to fauna to lions to the heavens to the ocean to flora to sacred geometry to alphabets and back again to “Alice.”

All in 500 square feet.

But the primary attraction are the dozens of fairytale relics either created by Hanzon or obtained by his team from around the world. Each inspired by the stories of Mother Goose, Hans Christian Andersen, Aesop’s Fables and more. Hanzon points out the witch's house in “Hansel and Gretel.” The musicians of Bremen. Little Red's riding hood. (“It came at great expense from Germany.”) The Queen Bee’s collection of a thousand pearls.

This is all inspired by a real historical phenomenon straight out of Ripley’s Believe it or Not. For centuries, many religions placed great value on collecting the bones and body parts of saints or other devout figures. These so-called “religious reliquaries” inspired the faithful to make pilgrimages and ask for blessings. And here again, authenticity was never a primary concern. 

“Historically, these reliquaries might have, say, the pinkie bone or the brain of a saint that they would put in these elaborate displays,” Hanzon said. “And when travel came to become incredibly expensive, rich people would build these cabinets to show off the objects that they had stolen from around the world as a way of showing off their wealth.

“So, the cabinets started as these very ostentatious follies, but they turned out to be the birth of what we now call natural history museums – only, they used to be private.”

The floor inside Hanzon's cabinet is a finely detailed tile mosaic. The heavens above make up a planetary system unfamiliar to our own. “Most astronomers are not going to buy my planetary rotation here – but it works for me,” Hanzon said with a laugh.

One entire corner is a replica of Alice’s very own rabbit hole (made of books). There are six separate sound systems tucked everywhere from the rabbit hole to desk drawers. Eventually, the cabinet’s storefront windows will be used as a dedicated space featuring new curiosities by rotating local guest artists.

Hanzon first conceived of his “Cabinet of Curiosities” back in 2008 as an exhibit called “Magic Lantern,” which was about early optics in film. That grew into a larger group exhibit at the Englewood Civic Center, where artists from all over the country were invited to contribute their own oddities. But eventually, it all went into storage.

When the Museum of Outdoor Arts moved its headquarters to Marjorie Park last year, the Madden family asked Hanzon to reassemble, reimagine and grow the cabinet. “About one-third of the exhibit is new to this location,” he said.

All they were missing was, well … the cabinet.

“But they said to me, ‘We can build you a building,'” Hanzon said. And they did – a gorgeous brick structure with a vibrant red entryway that combines to infer an Olde English curio shop. It surely cost several golden eggs to build it – but “the museum does not divulge pricing information on art,” a spokesperson said.

“In all, it took thousands of hours to create, with a crew of five or six people working part-time for a year and a half,” Hanzon said.

The Museum of Outdoor Arts will be taking the whole “curiosities” experience to a next level from May 25 to June 16, when an adventurous Boulder theater company called The Catamounts takes over the park’s outdoor grounds to stage an immersive theater production called “Impossible Things.” It’s a new play by local playwright Jessica Austgen that will take audiences into Hanzon’s cabinet for its climactic scene.

“Being able to take the rich and magical setting of the cabinet and use it as a springboard for an immersive theater work is a dream come true,” said Hanzon.

At the end of my tour, I came across a Lewis Carroll quote describing Hanzonland, I mean Wonderland, “as a world where imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.”

I asked Hanzon if, during his full, rabbit-hole immersion into fairy tales these past few years, he has found some sort of completion to his own story.

“I think so,” he said. “What I’ve learned is that the function of fairy tales is really cautionary. They don’t exist to comfort children. They exist to toughen them up. They're not supposed to be about fairies – that's the easy stuff. Fairy tales are about figuring out what you do when the wolf starts blowing your house down.

“I mean – there are a lot of wolves out there.”