First Thursday Art Walk in Telluride: Jorgensen at Ah Haa School for the Arts

05 Oct First Thursday Art Walk in Telluride: Jorgensen at Ah Haa School for the Arts

[click “Play” to hear Charlotte Jorgensen’s conversation with Susan]

October 7 marks the Telluride Council for the Arts & Humanities’ final First Thursday Art Walk of the 2010 season. The popular day-long event is a chance for Telluride to flaunt its robust fine art scene. It is also a meet-and-greet for locals and guests: galleries, stores and studios stay open late until 8 p.m.

(The free Art Walk brochure is available at participating venues, hotels, and coffee shops and includes a self-guided map. Or go to http://www.telluridearts.org/humanities.html.)

October is Breast Cancer Awareness and Domestic Violence Month. Ah Haa is celebrating in support all month long with its Art of Being a Woman events, including its last gallery show of the season and the final Art Walk Event of 2010 with featured artist Charlotte Jorgensen. Jorgensen is the perfect choice: she is a woman whose work elevates the mundane – a bird’s nest, a conch shell, a tomato, a line of poetry glimpsed in a book – and makes magic. Women have practiced that sort of alchemy in their different ways for centuries.

All art is largely auto-biographical, although is some cases the reveal is subtle, announced through the artist’s choice of color, medium, even brushstroke. (We know, for example, that the great wrapper Christo likes to make a splash and reveals in controversy. In fact he says the debate around his pieces is part of the art.)  In Jorgensen’s case, the work tells the story of her life, that is, assuming the spectator has the Rosetta Stone that facilitates a translation of this particular iconography. Jorgensen has been journaling for 30 years.

Jorgensen is represented by Mary Williams Fine Art, Boulder. CO. Ah Haa marks her first one-woman show.

To learn more, click the “play” button and listen to Jorgensen’s interview.