What began as Denver street art became a worldwide phenomenon

Koko Bayer, born in France, was unaware of the American traditions of Valentine’s Day until moving to Evergreen, Colorado at age 7.

As an adult, she more than made up for lost Valentine time by creating her nearly 1,000 large, eye-catching, yellow-and-magenta-pinstriped hearts. She pasted the big hearts publicly starting in Denver, then in various Colorado towns and eventually internationally.

Koko’s “Project Spread Hope” celebrates its fifth anniversary in April. Her 6-by-6 foot murals known as pink lemonade hope hearts can be found on walls and fences, indoors and outdoors in schools and health care facilities, adding pops of joyful color and an uplifting message.

The design and typography of the hearts pay homage to her step-grandfather, Herbert Bayer, a widely celebrated multidisciplinary artist. Born in Austria in 1900 and recognized as a leader in the Bauhaus movement, Herbert Bayer left his creative imprints on Denver and Aspen long before Koko Bayer’s hearts.

But Koko resurrected her step-grandfather’s influence with her hearts, in part, by adding the word “hope” in the “Universal Font” designed by him and in the color known as Bayer Blue.

“When you have a font in the family, you start with that,” said Bayer.

“The heart had already been a form in the work of Herbert,” she added. “I think the image was about his mentor, Vassily Kandinsky, who talked about the head and the heart and the hand in the artistic process. In one of Herbert’s designs, the head is symbolized by the eye. The head is where ideas are born. The heart is where you infuse yourself, your soul, into the art. The hand is your craftsmanship, your involvement to make that thing.”

Making that thing — in the case of Koko’s pink lemonade hearts — involves having the large image printed. Then she installs the prints on surfaces with wheat-paste, a simple glue.

“Posting bills is one of the oldest forms of communication and the most common once people were literate enough to read bills,” Koko said. “In the movies, we see people nailing a bill, but at that time nails had to be made one at a time, so they would have used some sort of disgusting-smelling animal glue.”

While Koko allows her other wheat-pasted street art to decompose naturally, she maintains the hope hearts so they’re not as ephemeral.

Koko launched “Project Spread Hope” in April of 2020, shortly after the COVID-19 lockdown.

“My intent was to make something to make people feel just a little bit better, and for X amount of people that’s what it did,” she said. “It’s really special when art connects with people.”

Project born in Denver

Koko started pasting her hope hearts in Denver when the Mile High City, like much of the world, skidded to a halt during the pandemic.

“It was like a ghost town,” she said.

Koko pasted a heart on a dumpster at Project Angel heart, one near Denver Health and another by Hamburger Mary’s.

“I posted a couple pics and asked Instagram readers for high-visibility locations for installations,” said Bayer. “The response was overwhelming and barely slowed down for the first two years.”

The pink lemonade hope hearts got a boost at Denver Botanic Gardens (DBG) during Koko’s indoor exhibit that opened DBG’s new Freyer-Newman Center in 2020. To coincide with the exhibit, she pasted a pink lemonade hope heart outside near the DBG main entrance.

“That one opened the floodgates,” Bayer said. “I think all these other institutions and people who liked the idea thought, ‘Well, if Denver Botanic Gardens is behind this, it must be good.’ That one kicked it into high gear, and I started getting requests. And that flipped a paradigm for me. As a street artist, I was always trying to get spots, trying to find places, but this took on a life of its own.”

Street art to distribution

She continues to receive requests for her hope hearts. Since starting, Koko said she has pasted hearts numbering “in the high hundreds” in schools and health care facilities and at sites of tragedies, for example in Superior following the tragic Marshall Fire of 2021.

“It’s become a whole different thing since COVID,” Bayer said. “So many people have PTSD, and it’s cool to see that having these prints up helped those people.”

Project Spread Hope remains largely anonymous. Bayer never included a signature or a website as part of the heart design.

“This was not to build my brand. I’ve made a lot of things, but to make something that connects so many people is something special. It’s been a gift to me to be able to do it,” she said.

Five years since debuting the hearts, Koko Bayer is still enthralled with her art: “I still love it and love seeing it and love the way it looks. For me, the pink lemonade palette is uplifting.

“Initially, I saw it in the street from two blocks away, and I love that the colors amplify light. My pink lemonade palette — pure magenta and pure yellow — is part of what I’ve been doing with street art for a long time.”

The pure yellow of the pink lemonade hearts nods to Herbert Bayer’s lemon yellow “Articulated Wall,” the 85-foot-tall concrete sculpture that serves as a landmark at Broadway Park, formerly known as Denver Design District at Alameda Avenue and Broadway. The Bauhaus master originally designed a shorter version of the dynamic tower for the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Although located on private property, Herbert’s “Articulate Wall” belongs to the Denver Art Museum.

A graphic designer, architect, sculptor, painter and photographer, Herbert lived in Colorado from 1946 to 1974. At The Aspen Institute, Andrew Travers serves as the Penner Manager of Educational Programs at the Resnick Center for Herbert Bayer Studies.

“We all adore Koko and her work,” Travers said. “She ingeniously iterates on Herbert Bayer’s aesthetic breakthroughs for a contemporary context, including his work with color, typography and photo montage. But maybe more importantly, Koko is devoted to Herbert Bayer’s belief that the artist has a vital role to play in society, and to improving people’s lives, as her exceptional commitment to public art and accessibility makes abundantly clear.”

Koko also consulted on the 2021 addition of a recreation of Herbert Bayer’s “Four Chromatic Gates” at the Alameda Light Rail Station.

Koko studied design and printmaking at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. and filmmaking at the New School in New York. When not wheat-pasting her hearts, she’s working on a documentary series about the life of Herbert.

“A lot of the projects I do are more long-term and take a few years, so the pink lemonade hearts are gratifying because I can do them start to finish in a short amount of time,” she said.

Koko considered lots of words before deciding upon “hope” as her message.

“’Hope felt the best. We need hope now more than ever, and we always need hope — hope for our future, hope for our kids,” she said.

Project Spread Hope goes international

By request, Koko has designed hearts with the word “hope” translated into French, Italian, Spanish and Vietnamese. In addition to installations around Colorado, she has pasted her hearts in New York City, Chicago, Kansas City, Minneapolis and Miami, as well as in London and in Mexico.

Koko said the hearts seem universally appealing.

“One of the most amazing things is hearing stories about how the art impacted people. I’ve heard a lot from health care workers, people who tell me they see [a hope heart] every day and that it makes them feel better.”

Leah Brenner Clack, founder and executive director of Street Wise Arts, helped Koko find locations in Boulder for pink lemonade hearts.

“She pasted a heart at Southern Sun — a long-loved pub and brewery in the same shopping center with the King Soopers where the mass-shooting happened,” Clack said. “She put one at Boulder Housing and in North Boulder at The Amazing Garage Sale.”

“She so beautifully created an image that is so iconic now and something almost everybody can connect to and relate to,” Clack said of the pink lemonade hope hearts. “The hearts have such an uplifting presence when you see one. They’ve made a big difference in our community and all over the state at this point. It’s so far-reaching and one of very few pieces of street art people see all over and resonate with. People might not know who Koko is, but they recognize her hope hearts.”

Clack added that the artist often funds the installations: “She’s done a lot of this out of the kindness of her own heart. It’s really admirable, her dedication to our community and her medium and to sharing positivity. I have a lot of love and admiration for Koko. She’s a wonderful person.”

Koko’s heartfelt hope is to formalize her wheat-pasting project as a nonprofit entity and to continuing responding to requests for her heart art.

“As long as it wants to keep on going, I’ll figure out how to do it.”

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