Picture a Saturday last spring. You drive over to EASEL on South Broadway, find parking, spend twenty minutes at Nicole Korbe's gallery looking at whatever NKollectiv's artist-members have hung that month, then check your phone and realize the next stop on the Second Saturday list is Blue Tile Gallery, most of a mile away, with nothing connecting the two but four lanes of Broadway traffic. You get back in your car. You might make it to one more stop before you call it a night and go home.
That was the honest experience of Englewood's monthly art walk for its first year. The event itself was never the weak link. The distance between its parts was. As of June 2026, that gap has a fix, and it changes what a Second Saturday in this city actually looks like.
A Gallery Hop That Couldn't Be Walked
Second Saturday started in March 2025, the idea of Nicole Korbe, who had moved her NKollectiv Gallery to Englewood from Denver's Santa Fe Arts District after facing rising rent there. She opened EASEL, short for Englewood Art Studios, Events, and Lessons, at 3485 South Broadway in January 2025, and within weeks she was calling around to other gallery owners to see if a shared monthly event made sense. Hayley Schneider at SeeSaw Gallery and Timothea Biermann, who had taken over management of Blue Tile Gallery at 3944 South Broadway in December 2024, both said yes.
The name borrowed a format familiar from Santa Fe Drive in Denver, where a dozen galleries sit close enough to cover on foot in an evening. Englewood's version never had that geography. Its creative spaces, EASEL, SeeSaw, Blue Tile, plus a growing list that now includes Mutiny Comics and Coffee, Redline Artist Studios, Los Fantasmas, Western Sky Bar, Access Gallery, Anthology Fine Art, Continuum Art Studios, and the Curtis Center for the Arts, are scattered across downtown and out toward the Englewood and Malley Recreation Centers, not clustered on a single strip. Korbe put the problem plainly to a Littleton Independent reporter not long after the walk launched: the format only worked if you were willing to drive from stop to stop, park again, and repeat, which defeats the point of calling it a walk.
The event grew anyway. It had to, on the strength of the art alone. By May 2026, an artists' reception at NKollectiv pulled in roughly 175 people, a jump from the handful of regulars who showed up in the early months of 2025. But growth in attendance at any single stop isn't the same as growth in how many stops a visitor actually reaches in one night.
The Bus That Solved the Geography
The fix came from the gallery owners themselves. Korbe, Schneider, and Biermann approached Englewood's Cultural Arts Commission, its Downtown Development Authority, and its Economic Development Department to ask about funding a shuttle. The city already runs a free bus called bert, short for Bringing Englewood Riders Together, on one regular route. Through a new partnership between bert and RTD, the city found the money to add a second route that runs specifically on Second Saturdays, stopping at NKollectiv and continuing on to other participating galleries and studios, including Ink Lounge, before extending out toward Belleview Park and the recreation centers.
"We have this extra funding this year," Will Slate, the city's Economic Development manager, told Colorado Public Radio, "and we want to try and support the galleries and the businesses that are participating." The new route started running in mid-June 2026, more than a year after the walk itself began, which tells you the fix wasn't obvious or automatic. It took the galleries organizing themselves, then asking three separate city departments to co-fund a transportation answer to what had been treated as an art-programming problem.
Korbe expects the bus to change attendance patterns more than the reception numbers alone can show. "It's just really going to help those areas get some increased Second Saturday traffic," she said, pointing to the parts of town that had been getting skipped simply because they were inconvenient to reach after another stop.
What's Actually on the Route Right Now
If you're planning around the new bus, here's what a few of the anchor stops have looked like in recent months:
- NKollectiv Gallery at EASEL (3485 S. Broadway): Nineteen artist-members work across the space's five studios. Its early summer show, "Found Narratives," paired Hugh Daly's collage-and-painting work with Victoria Eubanks's layered prints of abstract grasses and vines.
- Blue Tile Gallery (3944 S. Broadway): Under Biermann, the gallery runs five to seven exhibits a year and regularly features her own photo screenprints alongside Emily Hammack's botanical printmaking and pieces from Chameleon Art Collective, a working group of twelve local artists based out of the space.
- SeeSaw Gallery: Schneider has used the monthly event for happy hours, meet-and-greets, and artist talks, explicitly aimed at making the gallery feel less like the intimidating white-box spaces some people expect. "We want to erase that stigma and provide our community with a space to experience really thought-provoking art exhibitions and experiences," she said.
None of this is new art appearing out of nowhere. It's work that's been building in Englewood for a year and a half, finally reachable in one trip instead of three separate car rides.
Pairing It With What's Already Outside
If you want to extend the evening, or start earlier in the day before the galleries open their doors at 4 p.m., downtown Englewood has a second art layer that requires no bus and no ticket. The Museum of Outdoor Arts keeps close to 40 sculptures on permanent public view across the downtown area, accessible around the clock with no appointment needed. The organization recently announced it's stepping back from indoor exhibitions altogether to focus on that outdoor collection and its placemaking work with the city, which means the sculptures scattered through Englewood's public spaces aren't a side note to the museum's mission anymore. They're becoming the whole point.
Walk a few blocks past the Civic Center on any weekend morning and you're doing a self-guided version of the same thing Second Saturday does after dark: moving between individual works of art that were never designed to live in one building.
The Bigger Shift
What the shuttle bus really tells you is that Englewood's art scene stopped being a collection of individual businesses trying to survive on their own and started acting like a district that expects to be visited as one. That's a different kind of momentum than a single popular restaurant opening. It's infrastructure money following an event that proved, over fifteen months, that people wanted to come.
If you live within a few blocks of South Broadway, the practical version of all this is simple. Check the second Saturday of the month, find the bert bus schedule through the city's Downtown Development Authority page, and treat the ride between galleries as part of the evening instead of the obstacle to it.
Living in a neighborhood means knowing which small changes actually matter. A free bus route sounds minor until it turns a fragmented gallery crawl into an evening you can actually finish. If you're curious what else is shifting in Englewood, or you'd like to talk through what any of it means for your own block, T.J. Gordon is always happy to connect. Get your free home valuation or just say hello.
