We invited people from the arts to help start our conversations. Poets, writers, painters, composers, performance artists and others shared their reactions to the objects on display. We hope these voices will inspire you to join the conversation!
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Gil Asakawa is a writer, editor, and online content consultant with a BFA in painting from Pratt Institute, NYC. He is the Executive Producer for Development and Production for the Denver Post Website and the Editorial Board Chair of the Pacific Citizen, the national newspaper of the Japanese American Citizens League. Gil also writes the weekly "Nikkei View" column published since 1998 both online and in the Rocky Mountain Jiho, Denver's bilingual Japanese newspaper, and is the author of The Japanese American Guide. Mr. Asakawa also facilitates workshops and meetings and lectures across the state. (www.denverpost.com)
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Composer Gus Brockmann earned his undergraduate degree in music from Bethany College and just completed Master's degrees in music theory and composition and in trumpet pedagogy and performance, both from the University of Colorado. He is currently working at First Evangelical Lutheran Church in Longmont as Director of Worship and Children's Ministries. His work there includes writing and arranging music for the choirs and planning art and educational activities for the Sunday School Program, as well as for the whole church.
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Kim Dickey received her MFA in ceramics from New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in New York and her BFA in ceramics from Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Solo and group exhibitions of her work have been seen across the country and internationally, and she has presented slide shows, given video presentations, performances, and hosted workshops at various sites across the country. Installations of her work can be seen in public spaces nationwide, and in restaurants, hotels, and corporate buildings, as well as in private homes. Kim has received multiple grants and awards, has a great deal of curatorial experience, and lectures internationally. She has been an Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado at Boulder since 1999.
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Rebecca DiDomenico attended Pitzer for 2 years, then went on to receive her BA in English literature/creative writing from the University of Colorado. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Denver Art Museum, San Francisco Crafts and Folk Art Museum, and Imprimatur in Minneapolis, among others. She also has been featured in American Craft Magazine, Artweek, Westword, Colorado Homes and Lifestyles, and the Daily Camera. (www.didomenicostudio.com)
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Marcia Douglas was born in England and grew up in Jamaica. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in literary journals nationwide. She is the author of a novel, Madam Fate, (Soho Press: NY, 1999) as well as a poetry collection, Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom (Peepal Tree Press: Leeds, England, 1999). She teaches creative writing at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her novel, Notes from a Writer's Book of Cures and Spells, is forthcoming in 2005.
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Michelle Ellsworth has an MFA in dance from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a BA in history and philosophy from New York University. She is a dancer and performance artist whose solo performance works have been produced at Jacob's Pillow, Dance Theater Workshop, On The Boards, Diverseworks, Alaska's Perseverance Theater, The Sushi, The Telluride Experimental Film Festival, and The Solo Mio Festival. In addition, Michelle's video work has been presented at P.S. 122, the North Hampton Independent Film Festival, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, The San Souci Festival of Projected Dance, and Naropa University. Her cartoons, spreadsheets, and scripts have been published in CHAIN and The Nerve Lantern. Michelle has been a CU faculty member since 2000, teaching dance, theatre, and arts and sciences special courses. (www.michelleellworth.com)
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Musician and songwriter Nick Forster is the host and co-producer of etown, a weekly radio broadcast heard coast to coast on NPR® and commercial stations. During his 12 years with the Grammy-nominated, award winning bluegrass band, Hot Rize, Nick performed for audiences worldwide. He has been on countless radio and television programs, with numerous appearances on "A Prairie Home Companion" and "Austin City Limits". Rolling Stone Magazine calls Nick "an exceptional songwriter...unquestionably a virtuoso." His quick, warm wit, stellar guitar playing, and strong vocals are hallmarks of etown. (www.etown.org)
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Tim Hogan has served as collection manager of the CU Herbarium since 1991. Along with his responsibilities in the herbarium, he has pursued floristic studies throughout Colorado. Areas collected and reported on include the Sangre de Cristo Mts., the Needle Mts. in the San Juans, the Eagles Nest Wilderness in central Colorado, Boulder Mt. Parks and Open Space, and Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. He also serves on various boards and advisory groups interested in conservation biology and ecological restoration. (cumuseum.colorado.edu/Research/Botany)
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Naomi Horii is the publisher/editor-in-chief of the literary magazine, Many Mountains Moving. Her work has appeared in various venues, including newspapers, magazines, and for Celestial Seasoning. She has received fellowships from Colorado Council on the Arts and from the Rocky Mountain Women's Institute. She also received the Boulder Community Action Program Award for the Arts and the Anschutz Award. (www.mmminc.org)
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Sandy Lane, MFA graduate from the University of Colorado at Boulder, currently serves as the Coordinator of Drawing and Design in the Art Department at Metropolitan State College at Denver. She exhibits her work regionally and nationally and has been an active member of Edge Gallery in Denver since 1996.
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Jeffrey Ethan Lee's first full-length poetry book, invisible sister, was published by Many Mountains Moving Press, 2004. Lee won the 2002 Sow's Ear Poetry Chapbook prize for The Sylf (2003), published Strangers in a Homeland (Chapbook with Ashland Press, 2001), and won the first Tupelo Press Prize for literary fiction in 2001. He has published hundreds of poems, stories, and essays, and teaches creative writing at the University of Northern Colorado. (www.unco.edu/poetry/jeffrey.lee)
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Ella Maria Ray, department chair and curator of anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, holds a BA from Colorado College, and an MA and PhD from Johns Hopkins University. Her research addresses the ways Jamaican Rastafari women reconstruct their African identity. Her work also reflects an analysis of science and humanism through art. Dr. Ray has studied figurative sculpture and conceptual art independently with ceramic sculptor Arthur González. As an anthropologist and artist, she uses three-dimensional art to analyze the complex vision diasporic Africans are creating for themselves and for all of humanity as we enter the 21st century. She is interested in applying her research work to the local communities in metro Denver. Currently, she is completing an ethnographic novel based on her Jamaica research. (www.handlingeyedeas.com)
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Brenda M. Romero is an Associate Professor on the Musicology faculty at the University of Colorado in Boulder. She holds a PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of California in Los Angeles and received her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in music theory and composition from the University of New Mexico. In 2000, Brenda received a Fulbright Research Scholarship to conduct field research on the pantomimed Matachines music and dance in Mexico, which she has studied extensively. She has published various articles on Matachines and other New Mexican folk music genres that reflect both Spanish and Indian origins, focusing on how the music reflects cultural interaction. With support from the Society for American Music's "Sight and Sound" award, she is currently working on a CD, Caniones de mis patrias: Songs of My Homelands, Early New Mexican Folk Songs. (www.colorado.edu/music/)
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Reg Saner's essays and poems have appeared in more than 140 literary magazines and in fifty anthologies, including Best American Essays. His Climbing into the Roots won the Academy of American Poetry's first Walt Whitman Award. So This is the Map was selected for the National Poetry Series, and his collection Red Letters won a $5000 prize awarded by The Quarterly Review of Literature on the occasion of its 45th anniversary. He has been a "resident scholar" guest of the Rockefeller Foundation and has won numerous other awards including the State of Colorado "Governor's Award" for Excellence in the Arts, a Wallace Stegner Award conferred by the Center of the American West, and the Hazel Barnes Award of $20,000 conferred by the University of Colorado. Saner's backpacking, back-country skiing, and canyoneering have furnished materials for his nature writing and his latest book, The Dawn Collector: My Way to the Natural World, forthcoming from the Center for American Places, is set largely near his house on the edge of Boulder's open space.
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grew up in Chicago and now lives in Denver. She is an award-winning journalist who has written for publications in the United States, Canada, England, and New Zealand, among them, The Miami Herald, Chicago Tribune, Atlanta Journal & Constitution, Essence, The New Zealand Herald, and USA Today. This Side of the Sky, published in 2003, is her first novel and won a Colorado Book Award for fiction that same year.
