Space Cowboy
A statewide touring project connecting Colorado's frontier identity to its aerospace future — in every region, every corridor, every community.
Where the frontier meets the cosmos
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 , 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 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.
Exhibition Specs
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. Created with the express permission of HarperCollins Publishers, it is currently touring Colorado and bringing young and old together around shared stories.
Across every corner
of Colorado
A four-year statewide tour through Colorado's creative districts, economic regions, and scenic corridors — every community, every story.
Trinidad & Western Slope Pilot Phase
Launching June 3, 2026 at the Annual Summit in Trinidad, Las Animas County — then Western Slope pilot districts through 2027.
Register for the Summit ↗Front Range & Mountains
Expanding through Front Range and mountain communities — scheduling Creative Districts and regional stops across Colorado's economic regions.
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 →
Additional communities scheduling through 2030.
- ▸ Delivery, install & deinstall
- ▸ Oral history collection
- ▸ Press templates & marketing copy
- ▸ Docent guides & programming support
- ▸ Customizable sponsorship materials
- ▸ 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
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.
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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 says: figure out how to bring them home. They did. That instinct didn't come from a laboratory. It came from a culture that already knew, in its bones, 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, feeding a community through a hard winter. But it also shows up in garages and school shops and backyards and makeshift workshops all over the state. The willingness to roll up your sleeves and figure it out — that's not a rural trait. It's not a Front Range trait. It's a Colorado trait, and it always has been.
Space Cowboy is built from that same instinct — fiber art and digital technology, made by hand, traveling through communities that don't always see themselves in the state's cultural or economic story. It shows up. It listens. It connects the rancher and the rocket scientist, the elder and the student, the frontier that was and the one that's being built right now. And it leaves something permanent behind.
Colorado has always produced people who can work with what they have, solve what needs solving, and hand something better to the next generation. That is not a small thing. It is exactly the disposition the aerospace industry — and the next century — is going to need. Space Cowboy is here to say so, loudly, in every community it visits.
Colorado is home to one of the most significant aerospace ecosystems in the country — satellite operations, space command, private launch companies, research institutions pushing the edge of what's possible. That industry doesn't run on unlimited resources. It runs on the same problem-solving instinct that Colorado communities have always had: the ability to look at what's available, understand what's needed, and close the gap. Space Cowboy is the bridge between that instinct and the frontier it built.
Knitting is the original binary code. Every stitch is a decision — knit or purl, one or zero — and from that single binary choice, an infinite range of structures, patterns, and meaning emerges. Jacquard looms, punched with cards to control which threads rose and which fell, were the direct ancestor of the first programmable computers. Ada Lovelace understood this. Charles Babbage studied it. The logic that runs every device on earth traces back to a loom. That history is not a metaphor — it is the literal origin of computing, and it belongs to the same tradition of communal, skilled handwork that has run through human communities for thousands of years.
Artist Emilie Odeile works in fiber because of what the medium carries: patience, precision, community, and the long view. Space Cowboy is a large-scale fiber installation rooted in the communal craft traditions of the American West — and in the deeper truth that the hands solving tomorrow's hardest problems are connected, by a direct and unbroken line, to the hands that first learned to turn thread into structure.
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.
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 engineers, artists and students, elders who remember what was and young people deciding what comes next. All of them part of a state that is still, actively, becoming itself. That story belongs in the record. Space Cowboy puts it there.
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.
The archive Space Cowboy is building spans three generations — aspiring young Coloradans at the moment of ambition, active researchers and engineers doing consequential work right now, and retired professionals who carry the founding history of Colorado aerospace in their memories. Together, they tell the complete story of an industry and a state.
37 communities across all of Colorado's economic regions — including rural and underserved areas where aerospace industry presence is minimal but talent is not. Space Cowboy is building a living archive of Colorado aerospace spanning three generations: aspiring young Coloradans, active researchers and engineers, and the retired professionals who carry the founding history of the industry. That testimony travels on the installation's monitors for four years, in every community, preserving what would otherwise be lost.
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.
At every stop, Space Cowboy connects with local school districts through CDE Science Content Specialist Samantha Agoos — bringing STEAM programming into classrooms, identifying aspiring aerospace students for the archive, and creating direct pathways between community stories and Colorado's aerospace future. archives the stories that result at every stop.
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.
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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.
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.
Space Cowboy gives your community a cultural anchor event — a reason to show up in regional and statewide press, a hook for visitor programming, and a story worth telling. Each residency runs 3.5 or 7.5 weeks, generating public events, oral history recordings, and media assets that belong to your community long after the exhibition moves on.
Space Cowboy is designed to anchor a month of aligned programming — Creative Districts, school districts, local businesses, and community organizations can all build around the residency, extending its reach and your community's cultural calendar.
This isn't a weekend festival. It's weeks of programming, press, and community engagement — on your calendar, in your region, building toward a statewide story. We welcome DMO partnership at the regional and statewide level.
Start the Conversation →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.
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.
Space Cowboy is scheduling through all 37 Colorado Creative Districts from 2026 to 2030. The following communities are currently in scheduling.
Additional communities scheduling through 2030.
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.
Help Launch Space CowboySponsorship 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 ConversationHost 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