Fine Art

Brakes On the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, about the time the Gulf oil spill was about to capped, Drew Ludwig decided to take a walk. A long walk. In August 2010, he traveled by foot 120 miles from the Ninth Ward of New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico.

"I went to help. I went to work. I held lofty goals of an activist, and I wanted to use my hands."

And so he did, his hands and his unerring eye, recording images with his camera of people and places encountered along the way. Drew's motivation: break down the idea of "The Other," a complex concept lifted from the social sciences that defines the process by which individuals and groups create distance between themselves and those who do not seem to fit easily and comfortably into their cloistered worlds.

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Drew Ludwig, Valley Floor #1

Contest Dates:  May 19 – July 15, 2011
Exhibition:  July 30 – August 28, 2011
Location:  Ah Haa School Depot Gallery, Telluride, Colorado

The Telluride Institute is proud to announce the Atlas of the San Miguel Photo Competition, a first annual juried photo exhibition celebrating the San Miguel River Watershed. Amateur and professional photographers of all ages are encouraged to submit photographically generated works of art celebrating life in the watershed—in all of its many forms.

The photo competition is part of a larger exhibition at the Ah Haa School in August. The exhibition is divided into two components--an Invitational Exhibition featuring both local and nationally known artists and the Photo Exhibition featuring photos of the watershed.

[click "Play", Susan has a conversation with Will, Kate and Pia]

 

 

 

Pia at the Times Building 005 It's a game of fill in the blanks Telluride style and an example of synchronicity in action.

The initiative began with Will Thompson, owner of the Telluride Gallery of Fine Arts and an active member of the Telluride Merchants' Association.

Since the economic downturn, the need to deal with vacant real estate has been a challenge for business owners from coast to coast. From Seattle to Dayton, Chicago to Cleveland, they have turned to arts organizations and artists for colorful solutions. Empty spaces on Telluride's Main Street got Will's wheels turning.

[click "Play" to listen to Susan's conversation with Jeanne Mackenzie]

 

Jeanne Mackenzie Artistic immersions continue at Telluride's Ah Haa School for the Arts with guest instructor Jeanne Mackenzie. Her class, Plein Air Landscape Painting, takes place Monday – Thursday, June 20 – June 23, 9 a.m. – 4 p.m.

Jeanne Mackenzie lives in a rural setting near Fort Collins, Colorado, where she is a founding members of the Rocky Mountain Plein Air Painters group. Jeanne holds a BA in art and teaching credential from San Diego State University. Her work has been featured in Southwest Art Magazine’s Best of the West, American Artist Workshop magazine and International Artist Magazine-Master Artists. Jeanne is on the staff of the Denver Art Museum, where she teaches color theory, composition and painting.

[click "Play" to hear Susan's conversation with Jan Sitts]

 

Jan-portrait-300pix This summer, Telluride's Ah Haa School for the Arts offers a series of immersions featuring talented artists from all over the country. The first of these in-depth workshops takes place June 9 – June 11, 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. at Ah Haa's Stone Building, 117 North Willow.

In "Texture, Color, Feeling," students get to explore a variety of materials, textures and surfaces to create a finished image on canvas. The emphasis is on process, rather than the finished product, an abstract image, meant to be a surprise. Using white papers and textured materials to layer and imbed, plus paints and inks, the end result should have a dynamic sculptural effect.

Your instructor is Jan Sitts, a Sedona-based art instructor and professional painter for 35+ years.

Picasso at MOMA Telluride Inside... and Out spent last Friday and Saturday in New York City.

On Friday, we returned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see "Cezanne's Card Players," a fitting exhibit, so it would seem, for this high-stakes moment in history. Then again Cezanne's stoical models, all tradesman and employees of his family estate, appear totally content with their lot in life. Not so much like today.

We need to look further back in history to the 17th-century genre paintings of card players for our metaphor, images in which lusty, drooling drunks dominate. (The Met supplies example of his antecedents in the Cezanne show.) In his card players, Cezanne's emphasis is on rugged individualism and living in the moment, not on gambling and its attendants: greed and violence.

 

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1894 Map of Telluride

You are cordially invited to a presentation on mapping and the launch of a Community Mapping Project by Dan Collins on Monday, May 9th, at 6 pm in the Wilkinson Library project room. 

Dan is working on a set of maps that fold into the Institute’s ongoing efforts surrounding watershed and environmental education.  The central project involves creating an online map of local “artworks” (with the broadest possible interpretation of what that might involve) and linking it to a webmap that Dan is developing using some interactive mapping software...kinda like Google Earth, only better! 

[click "Play" for Susan's interview with Lin Schorr]

 

 

Mosaic art for auction kicker: Bidding helps doctors on the ground in Japan

Telluride local  and mosaic artist Flair Robinson, a regular instructor at the Ah Haa School for the Arts, is part of a group of artists participating in an online auction to benefit Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), whose extraordinary efforts have been showcased in the past locally at Mountainfilm in Telluride.

[click "Play" to hear Susan's interview with Flair Robinson]

 

Flair Robinson Telluride local Flair Robinson is aptly named. She is a woman with a flair for art; her medium is the ancient art form of mosaic. On April 1, Flair joints a global group of mosaic artists who have generously donated 126 original works to an online auction to benefit Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). The bidding runs through April 27.

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an independent international humanitarian organization which unites direct medical care with a commitment to bearing witness to the plight of the people it assists. MSF includes a network of 27,000 doctors, nurses, logisticians, water-and-sanitation experts, administrators, and other qualified professionals who deliver emergency medical assistance to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, malnutrition, natural disasters, or exclusion from health care in nearly 60 countries. The organization had boots on the ground in Haiti and is now active in Japan.

On Thursday, March 17, 5 – 8 p/m/. Telluride's Lustre Gallery hosts a reception for a trunk show featuring bling with a pedigree: historic art nouveau jewels, handcrafted in Barcelona from original molds and enameling technique created by artist Lluis Masriera. Representatives from Masriera...