Antiques Roadshow Makes a Stop in Colorado

Antiques Roadshow stopped in Colorado for the first time in fourteen years on Wednesday, May 29, landing at Denver Botanic Gardens' Chatfield Farms.

The long-running show is produced by WGBH out of Boston and airs on local PBS stations. Over the past 29 seasons, it's visited all but two states; this was its fourth stop in Colorado.

Antiques Roadshow was supposed to come to Denver in 2020, but COVID canceled that taping. Four years of pent-up excitement led to 20,297 people entering a lottery for a ticket to the Chatfield Farms filming, according to executive producer Marsha Bemko. Only 2,000 tickets were allotted, and each ticket holder could bring two items and one guest to their timed slot.

Bemko has been with Antiques Roadshow for 25 years, and her first stop happened to be in Colorado. "I didn't want to do the show when I first was asked to do it," she recalls. "I said, 'No, no, no, it's not my kind of show.' And then someone at GBH convinced me to do it, and I fell in love with doing the show."

While Bemko has seen some unique items during her time with Antiques Roadshow, her favorite parts of the job are the educational value and joy it brings people. There are no actors involved, she points out, and you can feel the excitement the show brings to each city it visits.

"Our experts are sort of the gods and goddesses of knowing," Bemko says. "They are a wealth of information; it's a chance to get some answers that you can't find online or anywhere else."

Among the items appraised at the Littleton event were muskets, sports memorabilia and even a taxidermied raccoon brought by the Denverite team, which was appraised at $200.

Josh (the production company asked that no last names be used) brought a number of family heirlooms to be appraised, including a Civil War-era musket and a favorite rocking chair. "The rocker has been in the family for a long time, and I still use it," Josh says. His items were not appraised for much value, but Josh was glad to know his antiques — particularly the musket — were legitimate.

Christina and Jon had been invited to the show by Christina's brother-in-law, an appraiser of Asian art, and brought some old-school skis and tennis rackets. "They are not highly valuable, maybe $75 or $100, but it was really cool to hear the history and their assessment," Christina says.
Antiques Roadshow films at five locations each season, gathering enough footage for about fifteen one-hour episodes. All of the appraisers are professionals who volunteer their time to assess the items brought to the filming; only a handful of these treasures will actually be seen on TV.

Lark Mason III is a second-generation appraiser of Asian art who's been with the show for about five years; his father has been an appraiser for Antiques Roadshow since episode one. "I grew up surrounded by Asian art. When I was a child, I lived in Hong Kong for a year, and then my wife and I moved to China for two years after college with our son," he says. "I just love Asian culture. And then you grow older and go, 'Wow, the art is gorgeous.'"

One of the pieces he appraised during this stop was a hand-carved mask from the Japanese Meiji period depicting Noh dramas. One side of the mask had a carving of the character, the other an inscription of the character's actions in the drama.
"What we think is this was probably an example of a really fine craftsman. A carver's complete set of his or her Noh masks," Mason says.

This item was one of the few selected to be filmed by the Antiques Roadshow crew.

To learn how much it was appraised for, watch the Chatfield Farms episodes of Antiques Roadshow when they air on Rocky Mountain PBS next spring.