Amanda Precourt spent the last nine years collecting contemporary art at a furious pace—while building a home tailored to showcase the trove. “I would find a piece then design a room around it, using art as an active participant in the conversation,” says the 52-year-old philanthropist as she tours me around her recently completed 8,000-square-foot residence.
The exterior conditions of Precourt’s new digs are as singular as what’s contained inside: The home is perched atop a former fortune cookie factory in Denver’s Baker neighborhood, which the real estate developer, who launched her own firm, AJP Realty and Design, in 2009, repurposed into a non-commercial art space that opened to the public last May.
Precourt first came across the condemned factory in 2016, shortly after she began collecting, and immediately imagined building a home on its roof. It was an ambitious plan: The ceiling was caving in, and paper fortune slips floated in puddles of standing water inside. “As a developer, this was certainly the most complex project I’ve ever done but [also] the most rewarding,” says Precourt, who salvaged the original brick walls and wood-beamed ceiling from the 1941 structure to frame what she dubbed Cookie Factory—5,700 square feet of public gallery space that is entirely self-funded and free to access.
Inside, Precourt—along with her partner, Andrew Jensdotter, who serves as director of exhibitions, and curator Jérôme Sans, who has assumed the role of artistic director—invites artists to make site-specific work inspired by Colorado. Twenty-five hundred people attended the opening of Cookie Factory’s inaugural exhibition with Sam Falls last year. The art space’s second exhibition, featuring works by Gary Simmons, is on view through May 9.
“We wanted to create an art-forward life and share it with the community,” says Precourt, an outspoken mental health advocate who is open about her experiences with attempted suicide and recovery. “I got a second chance at life, and I need to give back. It’s my karmic duty.”
The piece that sparked Precourt’s collecting trajectory was Jeffrey Gibson’s Know Your Magic, Baby, 2016, a beaded punching bag that she encountered at New York’s Marc Straus Gallery that same year. Precourt worked with her close friend Kim Gould, the art advisor who died unexpectedly in 2023, to acquire it. Today, Gibson’s sculpture hangs in Precourt’s home framed by a floor-to-ceiling window, a beacon drawing the attention of passersby.
These days, the stories that accompany the works in the couple’s collection fill the house as much as the works themselves: In the entertainment room, a Rashid Johnson mixed-media Untitled Escape Collage, 2019, blankets an entire wall. Precourt bonded with the artist over their shared experiences with recovery. In an interior courtyard, an otherworldly totemic figure in a little pink dress by Huma Bhabha stands like a sentinel, presiding over Precourt while she reads or practices yoga. “We predicted it would scare the daylight out of my mother—and it did,” Jensdotter recalls.
Covering an entire wall of the living room is Anselm Kiefer’s Engel der Geschichte, a monumental mixed-media painting completed and acquired in 2017. It weighs nearly 2,700 pounds and stretches 21 feet. “The whole building was engineered to support [it],” Precourt says. Jensdotter, an artist who counts the German painter among his influences, describes how Kiefer sprayed this densely layered landscape piece with molten lead, causing the surface of the canvas to peel and curl and creating two wing-shaped forms that suggest a phoenix rising from the ashes. “I’ve been through some tough times,” adds Precourt, “and that idea of resurrection and resilience really spoke to me.”
By this point, the couple has amassed more than 140 works by artists including Lauren Halsey, Sterling Ruby, Mary Weatherford, Fred Eversley, Barbara Kruger, and El Anatsui. “I look at our collection, and there’s a lot of discussion about otherness, pain, struggle—and also reconciliation, hope. We’re not looking at values and buying based on [the] market,” Precourt concludes. “Every piece, I feel it in my gut.”
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