2607 Glenarm Place
In the Heart of Five Points, Denver
The Stiles Center is open to the public (most) Saturdays from 2-4p.
Confirm or set an appointment with Kala: 720-276-0741
2024 Saturday Workshops:
Community Based Artworks
Follow The Stars
Community Workshops in the Stiles Gardens
Saturdays, April 13th & 20th, 2-4p
Attend either session or both
Participants will learn how to create cast cement stepping stones. Together as a community, we will embed them with natural materials in motifs inspired by the designs described in Jacqueline L. Tobin’s book, Hidden in Plain View: a Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad. Coded patterns that offered guidance along the path to freedom. The cast cement stepping stones will be set as a path to guide visitors through the gardens, inviting them to pause and learn about plants collected in these grounds, including many that were used as food and medicine along the Underground Railroad.
Grace Stiles, founder of the Stiles African American Heritage Center in Five Points, inspired many youth who grew up in Denver. For over 40 years, she’d taught in the Denver Public Schools and was dismayed at the severely limited history book representation of African Americans. She started her center in the heart of Five Points, the historically black neighborhood just north of downtown Denver, with the intention to share the rich and complex contributions made to American history and culture by African Americans. She researched inventors and entrepreneurs, told their stories and lovingly crafted installations to represent histories that shine a light on how deeply woven their influence has been on who we are as Americans.
The last time we worked together was to host a tea for the quilters of Gees Bend in 2008. Grace is fading now, but her light is being carried on by those who love her and share her mission. We returned to the site in the fall of 2022 to find it full of weeds after laying fallow under three layers of groundcloth for nearly 30 years. We tore out the weedcloth and let the ground rest over the first winter. Come spring, we set stones; the bones of a garden, so to commence the process of restoring ground and supporting an assortment of dry loving plants that can thrive in a no-added-water urban Steppe landscape. We intend to carry Grace’s stories to the outdoor spaces that surround the center, and invite community member to come in for tea on Saturday afternoons from 2-4p. With the idea that the center continue its community centered approach of storytelling, we are exploring ways the space may be activated to best serve Grace’s intentions within Denver’s unique cultural fabric. We are committed to beautify the gardens with native and historically significant plants which will thrive with little maintenance while supporting local ecologies.
Starting by walking the site, paying attention to the value of the existing plants and preserving them as soft barriers as we cultivate diversity around them, we also paid particular attention to the unique challenges this particular site offers as well as the opportunity to use the site as a public access, educational platform for the community. We share stories about the rich history of African American relationships with plants, and to a larger extent, the landscape. Ultimately we envision the garden as being used as a ‘living seed library’ of plants adapted to the urban zones of central Denver and invite local gardeners to harvest ripened seeds when they are flush to cultivate around their homes and share freely with others.
Denver Arts & Venues awards the project
a PS You Are Here grant in 2023
2023 Saturday Afternoon Teas:
Exploring plant relationships of African Americans in the West
April 15th: Honoring Aunt Clara Brown & Plant Medicine
Thank you to everyone who joined us for tea to honor Aunt Clara Brown and sow the first seeds in the new Stiles African American Heritage Gardens.
May 13th: Honoring Madam CJ Walker & Afro Natural Beauty
August 19th: Transforming the ‘hell strip’ into the ‘Health Strip”
Honoring the Colorado Council of Black Nurses & Bessie Coleman
FEATURED ARTIST: Jacqueline Withers
November 4th: HARVEST featuring Barney Ford & Culinary Traditions
Postponed to Spring 2024: In collaboration with the Rocky Mountain Land Library – Book signing with Camille Dungy & her new book, Soil, The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden
The Saturday Afternoon teas are funded by a grant from the Puffin Foundation
The Evolution of the Stiles African American Heritage Gardens
Winter 2022
Site Assessment – A slow walk through the gardens
After tearing out three layers of groundcloth, we let the ground rest
Spring 2023
DOG Patrol: Structuring the garden to deter dogs & thinking about our historical relationships with these animals.
Setting Stones: the ‘bones’ of the earth & initiating planting the first round of native plants
Spring tea honoring Aunt Clara Brown and her relationships to medicinal plants
Summer 2023
Growth & Edits
Fall 2023
Sharing Russian Sage with neighbors to make room for a more diverse plant collection.
Winter 2023
SEED Broadcast to fill in the remaining open spaces.
2025 Events
HABITAT Book Club: The Warmth of Other Suns
The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
Stiles African American Heritage Center
Saturday, November 1st, 2025: 2:00pm to 4:00pm
In Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, three young people set out on a perilous journey out of the Jim Crow South, heading North and West in search of what the novelist Richard Wright called “the warmth of other suns.” Isabel Wilkerson interweaves their stories with those of others who made the journey that created a watershed in American history — the Great Migration that led to six million African Americans fleeing the South for the uncertain promise of anywhere else.
“Wilkerson’s book reminds us how much of this country’s history is bound up in people dissatisfied with where they woke up and resolved to be someplace better tomorrow.” — Detroit Free Press
“Profound, necessary, and an absolute delight to read.” — Toni Morrison
VOICES 