Working with the Visual Arts department at the College of Arts & Media at the University of Colorado Denver — right in the heart of the city that this issue celebrates — we designed a contest to create the cover image for the 2025 Best of Denver. The winner? A variation on the Big Blue Bear, officially “I See What You Mean,” the beloved statue outside the Colorado Convention Center that was created by the late Lawrence Argent and installed in 2005 — before many of the students who entered this contest were born. Growing up in the suburbs of Denver, Alejandro Rodriguez-Gomez always knew that bear. Hearing about the contest, he got the idea of replicating that image, but with a curious cow. “It was a funny image in my mind,” he says. The students at UCD were very engaged with this project. In fact, the entries were so impressive that our section openers in this issue feature the work of six more students who entered the contest: August Blackmer, Hattie Boyd, Lauren Henderson, Euridice...