During his inaugural address, President Donald Trump criticized California’s response to the Los Angeles wildfires ahead of his Golden State visit to survey the damage on Friday. 

Trump has been vocal of his disapproval of the way California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass have handled the fire response, accusing them of “gross incompetence,” even suggesting that Newsom resign as governor. 

During Trump’s visit to California Friday, Newsom greeted the president at the bottom of Air Force One. 

“Thank you first for being here. It means a great deal to all of us,” Newsom told Trump after they met on the tarmac of LAX in Los Angeles just after 3 p.m. “We’re going to need your support. We’re going to need your help.” 

US President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump tour a fire- affected area in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, on January 24, 2025.  (MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

In his first televised sit-down interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity since returning to the White House, Trump ripped Newsom for his leadership leading up to the deadly wildfires and his defense of sanctuary cities.

“If you actually polled the people, they don’t want sanctuary cities,” Trump told Hannity. “But Gavin Newsom does, and these radical left politicians do. I watched Gavin Newsom try to answer that question. He looked like an idiot. He was unable to answer.”

Trump claimed the lack of forest management and Newsom’s reported refusal to allow stormwater from the north to flow down freely to Southern California helped contribute to one of the most destructive wildfires in the state’s history.

Izzy Gardon, director of communications for Newsom’s office, previously combated criticism of the governor’s wildfire handling in a statement to Fox News Digital. 

“The Governor is focused on protecting people, not playing politics, and making sure firefighters have all the resources they need,” Gardon said. 

On Thursday, Newsom signed off on a relief package where the state will spend $2.5 billion to help with the Los Angeles wildfires recovery. 

“This is about distilling a sense of hopefulness,” Newsom said during a news conference.

Newsom’s administration added that the state expects to be reimbursed by the federal government for the disaster relief funding.

“We are glad President Trump accepted the governor’s invitation to come to Los Angeles,” Newsom’s office told Fox News Digital earlier this week. “We are glad he took our invitation to heart.” 

Newsom told FOX 11 Los Angeles on Thursday that he had not heard anything from the White House about Friday’s trip, and that he had not spoken to Trump since he left office in 2021. The governor said he was planning to meet Trump when he arrives, though.

“I look forward to being there on the tarmac to thank the President, welcome him,” Newsom told FOX 11. “And we’re making sure that all the resources he needs for a successful briefing are provided to him.”

Before leaving the White House on Friday morning, Trump told reporters, “I think we’re going to have a very interesting time.”

Trump’s criticism of California and Newsom’s leadership in the state spans years, with the president singling out forest management, sanctuary cities, homelessness, crime and spending as contributing factors to the state’s condition. 

Mel Gibson calls out ‘monumental mismanagement’ of LA fires by California government after losing his home

Trump is not the only person ripping Newsom for what is happening in California.

In the aftermath of the deadly Los Angeles wildfires, actor Mel Gibson, along with a number of other elite residents, accused Newsom and elected officials of mishandling the prevention and response to the disaster. 

“As a citizen here, Newsom and [Los Angeles Mayor Karen] Bass, they want us to trust them to reimagine the city, our city, and how they think it should be. I mean, look at what they’ve done so far to this town,” Gibson said in a previous exclusive interview with Fox News contributor Raymond Arroyo. 

“You got nothing but rampant crime, acute homelessness, high taxes, mismanagement of water, firefighters, defunding the department, and we’re supposed to trust them with millions of dollars to sort of remake where we live? It’s our city, it’s the city of the people, and they have another plan. … There’s still people from the Woolsey Fire still living in trailers. … When have you ever seen the government ‘build back better’? … At the very least, it’s insensitive.”

MEL GIBSON CALLS OUT ‘MONUMENTAL MISMANAGEMENT’ OF LA FIRES BY CALIFORNIA GOVERNMENT AFTER LOSING HIS HOME

The Palisades Fire ravages a neighborhood amid high winds in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, Jan. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Ethan Swope)

The massive and deadly fires broke out in the Los Angeles area on Jan. 7, forcing tens of thousands of residents to flee for safety as their homes and businesses were destroyed.

Gibson also told Arroyo the elected officials’ mismanagement is another reason why Americans continue to flee the city. 

Other celebrities, including Justine Bateman, called out Newsom and other Los Angeles officials to be removed from office because of the fires.

The governor’s office previously shared a letter addressing water hydrants running out of water, stating that “while overall water supply in Southern California is not an issue, water mobility in the initial response was an issue.”

“That is why @CAGovernor Newsom has ordered a full, independent review of LADWP. This cannot happen again,” the post read. 

California GOP leaders call for accountability after state can’t account for $24B spent on homeless crisis

Prior to the Los Angeles wildfire crisis, California leadership were being scrutinized for not being able to explain what happened to $24 billion meant to curb the homelessness issue. 

California GOP leaders are calling for more accountability after the state auditor found that despite roughly $24 billion spent on homeless and housing programs during the 2018-2023 fiscal years, the problem didn’t improve in many cities.

The report also uncovered that the California Interagency Council on Homelessness (Cal ICH), which is responsible for coordinating agencies and allocating resources for homelessness programs, stopped tracking whether the programs were working in 2021.

CALIFORNIA GOP LEADERS CALL FOR ACCOUNTABILITY AFTER STATE CAN’T ACCOUNT FOR $24B SPENT ON HOMELESS CRISIS

Gov. Gavin Newsom; people at a homeless encampment in California (Getty Images)

The audit found it also failed to collect and evaluate outcome data for these programs due to the lack of a consistent method.

California Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher laid the blame on the Newsom administration. 

“This is standard Gavin Newsom – make a splashy announcement, waste a bunch of taxpayer money, and completely fail to deliver,” Gallagher said in a statement to Fox News Digital. 

“Californians are tired of the homeless crisis, and they’re even more tired of Gavin’s excuses. We need results – period, full stop.” 

Despite the audit’s findings, Cal ICH said it has made improvements in data collection after AB 977 took effect on Jan. 1, 2023.

In a previous statement, Newsom’s office said, “The State of California’s doing more than ever. We’ll continue to do more. But this will be my final words on this: If we don’t see demonstrable results, I’ll start to redirect money. I’m not interested in status quo any longer. And that will start in January with the January budget. We’ve been providing the support to local government that embraces those efforts and focuses on a sense of urgency — and we’re going to double down. If local government is not interested, we’ll redirect the money to parts of the state, cities and counties that are.”

Biden admin sends billions to California’s over-budget, behind-schedule ‘train to nowhere’

Adding to the list of missteps made by California leadership: the decades-delayed and over-budget “train to nowhere.”

California Republicans have reported that the state’s long-awaited high-speed rail network is nearly $100 billion over budget and decades behind schedule.

Former Republican California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who left office in early 2011, first introduced the high-speed rail system project, and his Democrat successor, Gov. Jerry Brown, continued the project.

Shortly after taking office in 2019, Newsom acknowledged in his first State of the State address that he would scale the project down from its original ambitious plan, saying it would cost too much and take too long to stay the course.

Months later, the Trump administration penned a scathing letter to California, informing the state that it was rescinding the multibillion-dollar grant awarded for the project under the Obama administration.

BIDEN ADMIN SENDS BILLIONS TO CALIFORNIA’S OVER-BUDGET, BEHIND-SCHEDULE ‘TRAIN TO NOWHERE’

Ongoing construction of the California bullet train project is shown in Corcoran, left, and Hanford. (Getty Images)

However, in June 2021, the Biden administration said it would reverse the decision and restore the funding. The Biden administration then sent California more than $3 billion in federal taxpayer funds in 2023. 

In December 2024, several prominent California Democrats called on the U.S. Department of Transportation to approve a grant application for $536 million in federal funds to move forward with the project. 

If approved, the federal funds will be boosted by $134 million in state money from California’s “cap & trade” program, according to the Sacramento Bee.

The project was originally planned as a $33 billion project consisting of 1,955 miles of railway connecting San Francisco to Los Angeles. Since then, the cost has ballooned to $113 billion and the project’s scope has been dramatically scaled down to a 171-mile railway connecting Bakersfield, Fresno and Merced that isn’t expected to be operational until 2030.

Overall, if the project is completed in 2030, it will have taken a decade longer than expected while costing $80 billion more and being 91% smaller than originally planned. Because of its repeated shortfalls, the project has been dubbed by critics as the “train to nowhere.”

Newsom’s office did not immediately provide a response. 

Proposition 36 overwhelmingly passes in California, reversing some Soros-backed soft-on-crime policies

During the presidential election, Trump went after his opponent, former Vice President Kamala Harris, on the decades-old criminal justice policy crippling California.

Harris was not actually involved with pushing Prop 47 and did not take a stance on the issue throughout the campaign. 

The ballot measure overwhelmingly passed in the deep-blue state and rolled back some of California’s most controversial soft-on-crime policies.

Proposition 36, the Homelessness, Drug Addiction and Theft Reduction Act, sought to undo portions of Proposition 47 by increasing penalties for some crimes, including classifying the possession of fentanyl as a felony.

PROPOSITION 36 OVERWHELMINGLY PASSES IN CALIFORNIA, REVERSING SOME SOROS-BACKED SOFT-ON-CRIME POLICIES

Business and police in California (Getty Images)

When Proposition 47 passed in 2014, it downgraded most thefts from felonies to misdemeanors if the amount stolen was under $950, “unless the defendant had prior convictions of murder, rape, certain sex offenses, or certain gun crimes.”

Proposition 47 also reclassified some felony drug offenses as misdemeanors.

The initiative has been blamed by law enforcement officials and businesses for the rise in theft and smash-and-grabs that plagued California in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Newsom remained opposed to the effort, saying it “takes us back to the 1980s, mass incarceration.”

He also touted that California’s $950 threshold is the “10th lowest, meaning tougher than states like Texas ($2,500) or Alabama ($1,500) or Mississippi ($1,000).” His office noted that “Prop 47 did not change that threshold and neither did Prop 36.”

California unemployment fraud scandal grows to $11 billion, with another $20 billion under scrutiny

California Labor Secretary Julie Su attempted to put the blame on Trump’s first administration for “failing to provide guidance to foil sophisticated unemployment schemes” after state officials reported that at least $11.4 billion in unemployment benefits paid during the COVID-19 pandemic involved fraud.

Officials added that another $20 billion in possible losses was also being investigated.

In January 2021, Su said that of the $114 billion the state paid in unemployment claims during the coronavirus pandemic, 10%, or $11.4 billion, involved fraud and another 17% was under investigation. 

CALIFORNIA UNEMPLOYMENT FRAUD SCANDAL GROWS TO $11 BILLION, WITH ANOTHER $20 BILLION UNDER SCRUTINY

Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks during a press conference in Fontana, Calif., on Feb. 17, 2022. (Watchara Phomicinda/MediaNews Group/Press-Enterprise via Getty Images)

“There is no sugarcoating the reality,” Su said in a previous press conference. “California has not had sufficient security measures in place to prevent this level of fraud, and criminals took advantage of the situation.”

Nearly all the fraudulent claims were paid through the federally supported Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program. The program was approved by Congress to provide unemployment assistance to those who usually wouldn’t be eligible, such as independent contractors. 

Officials added that the program’s broad eligibility requirements made it an easy target for criminals, including from Russia and Nigeria. In December, 21,000 prisoners scored more than $400 million from the state, including 100 prisoners on death row. 

“It should be no surprise that EDD was overwhelmed, just like the rest of the nation’s unemployment agencies,” Su said. “As millions of Californians applied for help, international and national criminal rings were at work behind the scenes working relentlessly to steal unemployment benefits using sophisticated methods of identity theft.”

The governor’s office did not immediately provide a response.

Fox News Digital’s Brie Stimson, Aubrie Spady, Bradford Betz, Stephanie Giang-Paunon, Morgan Phillips, Thomas Catenacci, Jamie Joseph and Charlie Creitz contributed to this report. 

Editor’s note: This story is part of Governing’s ongoing Q&A series “In the Weeds.” The series features experts whose knowledge can provide new insights and solutions for state and local government officials across the country. Have an expert you think should be featured? Email Web Editor Natalie Delgadillo at ndelgadillo@governing.com.

San Francisco’s fortunes have shifted dramatically in the last half-decade, pinballing between a citywide affordability crisis and acute concerns about public safety and vacancy in the downtown area brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s also been a tumultuous time for mobility in the Bay Area, with big ridership losses and fiscal crises at the region’s public transit agencies and the advent of autonomous taxis in San Francisco.

Jeffrey Tumlin, the outgoing director of transportation at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), has had a front-row seat for the churn. The SFMTA operates buses and subways within San Francisco — a transit operation known locally as Muni — while also overseeing city streets and planning for walking, biking and driving infrastructure.

Tumlin is a longtime San Francisco resident and former director of strategy at NelsonNygaard Consulting Associates, an international planning firm. He took on the job at SFMTA after starting and leading the Oakland Department of Transportation. He started the job just a few months before the pandemic began, and completed his five-year contract at the end of last year. Before leaving the job, Tumlin spoke with Governing about managing a dense city transportation network, handling new transportation technology, and rebuilding the finances of public transit. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Governing: You started in this role at SFMTA right before the pandemic started. What did you think you were going to be able to do at this post prior to the onset of the pandemic? 

First of all, I didn’t want this job. In order to recover from the experience at Oakland DOT I made the mistake of going on an intensive, 10-day meditation retreat. At some point during which I realized I love consulting, and I was very good at it, but you don’t have responsibility when you’re consulting. I realized that it was time for me to serve in a deeper capacity. So I told the SFMTA board members, fine, I will take this job, and they didn’t believe me. They made me promise out loud, twice, that if I took the job that I would commit to staying for the full five years of the contract. And of course, this was three months before lockdown. There were times during some of the worst days of COVID where I had to remind myself that I had made a promise to serve for five full years.

SFMTA is sort of unique in that it’s public transit, but it’s also streets and parking and some other things. What does that combination of responsibilities allow someone in your post to do? 

Well, it meant that during COVID we could strike over 20 miles of streets and do transit-only lanes. Being responsible for all mobility and managing the entire right of way means that it’s a lot easier for us to think through the trade-offs necessary to make the entire transportation system work. Because we manage cars and bikes and buses and trains and pedestrians, we can sort out the tensions, for example, between the bikeway network and the transit-priority streets.

We can also very skillfully plan for the future. A lot of the challenge of being in a transportation job is you have to simultaneously manage the transportation system for today while also building out the transportation system necessary to accommodate the future. Here in San Francisco that means our commitment to 82,000 new housing units. One of our challenges is how do we make sure that people can continue to drive when they need to drive? Ironically, that often means reprioritizing existing space on our roads to prioritize the most space-efficient modes of transportation. I need to make sure that for everyone who doesn’t need to drive, transit is faster, more frequent, more reliable, cleaner and safer. And I need to make sure that walking and biking are safer and more joyful for people of all ages and abilities. And that is because when I walk or bike or take the bus, I take up one-tenth of the roadway space that I do when I drive a car or take an Uber or a Waymo. Planning for the complex geometry of the city is a big part of our jobs. The tradeoffs that we have to deal with are inevitably controversial.

Your counterparts in other cities are often asking society at large to make those tradeoffs. 

Yeah. And that’s why despite the fact that Muni has one of the worst financial impacts coming out of COVID, we are stronger than almost any of our other counterparts because we were able to quickly adapt during COVID particularly around transit speed, reliability, cleanliness and safety.

I do want to ask about the pandemic’s effect on revenue. Do you think SFMTA is going to be able to manage the fiscal cliff? 

Yes, we are going to be able to rebuild the financial base of SFMTA. SFMTA, we’re an enterprise organization, and historically our main revenue sources have been transit fares, parking fees and fines. We get a fixed chunk of the city general fund. And then we get a bunch of state operating assistance. All four of those funding categories have been in decline. Parking revenue is far more important to us than transit fare revenue and our downtown parking garages have been in long-term decline largely due to Uber and Lyft. Business travelers don’t rent a car at [San Francisco International Airport] SFO to come to a convention in downtown San Francisco. Our parking garage revenue, and we have a 25 percent sales tax on private commercial parking, those revenues were steadily dropping pre-COVID, and then COVID tanked them when the downtown office core emptied out as a result of work-from-home. So we have to replace those parking revenues.

Setting aside the fiscal crises that have resulted from revenue losses, how else did the pandemic change the way you think about what public transit is going to be like in the future? 

We pivoted very quickly during COVID. I think the lasting impacts will show up in a couple ways. One is culture. During the pandemic we all realized a few things. One is that working in a municipal government is deeply meaningful work. If you want to make a difference in climate or equity or safety or economic recovery, there’s no better place to do that than in a municipal transportation agency. So people were able to see just how meaningful our work is and that has helped a lot with morale. They also realized that we needed to adjust far more quickly than government agencies are designed to and fortunately, the emergency directive here in San Francisco effectively suspended all of the bureaucratic rules. So it trained staff in being phenomenally innovative and nimble and in taking risks, including making mistakes and then recovering from mistakes, and teaching others what you learned. Those are big, big cultural changes.

On the mechanical side, having what may well be the densest network of transit priority treatments — I don’t know this for sure but we have not been able to find another city of our tiny size that has matched us — the transit system is just so much faster and more reliable than it has been in anyone’s lifetime. That has changed travel patterns all over the city. In a city where our downtown subway station is at around 40-45 percent of pre-COVID ridership recovery, we have lines that are over 120 percent of pre-COVID ridership. The improvement in speed and reliability has changed the way San Franciscans think about transit, and it has meant that our public approval rating is the highest that it’s been since we started collecting data in 2001.

It wasn’t just COVID that changed things. You had Waymo and Cruise, the advent of autonomous taxis in the city. Can you talk a little bit about your perspective on the arrival of those things? You were very skeptical that they were ready for prime time. 

Well that is a very long story. We started off with two autonomous vehicle operators. One of them we worked really hard to try to get them to do well in San Francisco, largely by trying to get performance data so that we can track their trends and try to establish a level playing field to allow the best autonomous vehicle providers to thrive in San Francisco and minimize the harm on the city of what still is a rapidly evolving technology. We’ve watched performance for Waymo continue to improve. Although obviously they still have challenges. They just drove into wet concrete two days ago. But in other ways they’ve made enormous strides in being able to operate safely in the complex streets of San Francisco, while minimizing unintended negative consequences. Their competitor, Cruise, really struggled and was taking greater and greater risks until ultimately the state regulators found them withholding critical reporting information around a specific safety incident that resulted in their suspension in California. That is disappointing to me. Cruise, which was founded here in San Francisco, should have had a path to success, if they had figured out how to be a better partner with cities and with safety regulators.

These types of services will eventually be in other places too, the way Uber and Lyft came from your neck of the woods to other parts of the country. What do you hope people learn from the rollout of these services in the Bay Area? 

I wouldn’t recommend that anyone be the beta test site. What you want to do is let somebody else be the beta test site and then be a rapid follower so that you can take advantage of the upside of new technology while minimizing the downside. Our early experience with autonomous vehicles found a lot of downside. Particularly when vehicles would get confused, they would simply become immobilized wherever they happened to be and require a human to come rescue them. They would tend to get confused in the most critical bottlenecks in our transportation system — complex intersections with a lot of traffic, on our train tracks. The early experimentation with autonomous vehicles here in San Francisco significantly worsened the performance of the overall transportation system.

But that corner has been turned a little bit? 

It has. The streets in San Francisco can handle a fair amount of chaos, and as a municipal partner what we want to do is make sure that new technology scales within a certain tolerance of chaos. Waymo has been fairly effective at scaling when they are ready. Again, we expect problems. It’s the transportation system. There are always problems and we can handle problems at a certain pace. But beyond that, it becomes disruptive to the transportation system and disruptive to the understaffed and underfunded municipal transportation department itself.

What we’re also seeing is that Uber and Lyft, both of which were founded in San Francisco, made an awful lot of promises around helping to reduce congestion, improve the efficiency of the roadway system, improve safety, and in actuality we’ve found the opposite. The thing we hope that mobility technology providers do is to not overstate their case. For many new mobility technologies, in order for them to make money, what they need to do is appeal to the convenience of the privileged, and oftentimes that comes at the expense of the efficiency of the transportation system as a whole. We remain concerned that autonomous vehicle companies will have the same negative impact on the overall transportation system performance as we saw from Uber and Lyft. Granted, I use all of these modes of transportation, because they are convenient. But if too many people avoid taking the bus, which can move 10 times as many people per square foot of road, then you end up in a situation where you have a lot of Ubers and autonomous vehicles that are stuck in traffic with nobody moving. There’s always this tension between user convenience and system efficiency, which is something we need to manage.

I heard you once say that San Francisco was the most conservative city you’d ever worked in. Obviously that’s not its reputation in most of the country. What kind of conservatism is it? 

San Francisco is a beautiful city that is precious to all of us who live here, and for those of us who’ve lived here for any length of time, we’ve seen a lot of change. Most of that change was not necessarily for the better. So San Franciscans tend to be afraid of change and reluctant to accommodate change, even though working to preserve the status quo creates real problems. So that’s what I meant. We are progressive in our social values and very conservative when it comes to the city itself.

The broader cultural idea of San Francisco is kind of up for grabs too. How do things feel there at the moment?

I love being in San Francisco at the cusp between a bust and the next boom. This is always the best time to be in San Francisco. I’ve lived here for 35 years, so I’ve been through three boom-bust cycles. This is the best time to be in San Francisco, as it struggles to reinvent itself. And oftentimes in its boom cycle it invents what’s next for cities.

A good example of the split in San Francisco politics has to do with housing policy. There’s widespread agreement that protecting the people who live here, particularly the most vulnerable — low-income people, immigrants, seniors — we want to make sure that people are not evicted from their homes. But at the same time our reluctance to accommodate new housing production for so many decades is contributing to making the city deeply unaffordable. Our fear is that San Francisco is no longer a welcoming place to immigrants, to the next generation of weirdos and misfits that drive San Francisco culture. If it’s only affordable to the very wealthy or to people who win the affordable-housing lottery, then it just becomes a museum of itself. I think San Francisco is finally finding its way into a way of producing housing again that also protects vulnerable populations who are currently here.

I think we’ve also turned the corner a little bit in the transportation debates, where there’s been very little change in transportation for decades, and always a debate over the degree to which we should accommodate the convenience of motorists versus other users and versus roadway safety. We’re in the midst of what still feels like a cultural war in transportation where people assume that it’s zero-sum because our streets are not getting any wider, and we’re having to make choices and tradeoffs within the existing street right of way. That’s where this tension comes between accommodating the people who are here now versus accommodating the next generation of folks who are coming in, where we know we need to allow more people to move in streets of a fixed width. Again, the laws of geometry require that we do a better job investing in making transit fast and reliable and making walking and biking safe and joyful. That is the challenge.

Do you know what you’re doing next? 

I’m taking a long break. My goal is at least six months.

If you have an event taking place in the Denver area, email information to carlotta.olson@gazette.com at least two weeks in advance. All events are listed in the calendar on space availability.

Monday

Sipping N’ Painting Hampden — “Northern Moon,” 6:30-8:30 p.m., Sipping N’ Painting Hampden, 6461 E. Hampden Ave., Denver, $35. Registration required: sippingnpaintinghampden.com.

Lo Moon — 7 p.m., Marquis Theater, 2009 Larimer St., Denver, $35 and up. Tickets: marquisdenver.com.

Full Sail — 7 p.m., Dazzle at Baur’s, 1080 14th St., Denver, go online for prices. Tickets: dazzledenver.com/#/events.

Your Friend Did What? — 7:30 p.m., Comedy Works Downtown in Larimer Square, 1226 15th St., Denver, $14. Tickets: comedyworks.com.

Graduate Woodwind Quintet – Juniper Winds — 7:30 p.m., Grusin Music Hall, Imig Music Building, 1020 18th St., Boulder, pay what you can. Online streaming available; cupresents.org.

Marty Friedman — With Nikki Stringfield & Patrick Kennison, 8 p.m., HQ, 60 S. Broadway, Denver, $30 and up. Tickets: hqdenver.com.

“Heart Strings” — Works by Lilian Lara and MCA Denver teens, through Feb. 2, MCA Denver, 1485 Delgany St., Denver, go online for admission prices; mcadenver.org.

“Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits” — Through May 11, Denver Art Museum, 100 W. 14th Ave. Parkway, Denver, go online for prices: denverartmuseum.org.

“De la Tierra: Reflections of Place in the Upper Río Grande” — Through May 23, History Colorado Center, 1200 Broadway, Denver, go online for prices: historycolorado.org/exhibit/de-la-tierra.

“Seeds of Inspiration” — Through May 26, Denver Botanic Gardens, 1007 York St., Denver, go online for prices; botanicgardens.org.

“Vanity & Vice: American Art Deco” — Through June 1, Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art, 1201 Bannock St., Denver. Go online for prices. Tickets: kirklandmuseum.org.

“SUSTAINED! The Persistent Genius of Indigenous Art” — Through Dec. 31, Denver Art Museum, Denver, go online for prices: denverartmuseum.org.

CARLOTTA OLSON, The Denver Gazette