Telluride Inside… and Out at Crow Canyon: Ortman links pottery, weaving and language
Telluride Inside...
Telluride Inside...
Telluride Inside...
In its 19th year, the Sheridan Arts Foundation’s Wild West Fest is a week-long celebration of Western arts, culture and customs, which brings inner-city youth along with artists and musical performers from across the nation to Telluride.
Let's play a game of free association: I say "Telluride couture" and you say what?
Telluride locals most likely would answer with two names: Sue Hobby and Luci Reeve. Fabric confections created by these two talented ladies have shown up everywhere you've wanted to be over the years: in way too many local theatrical productions to name, as well as on the stage of the Telluride AIDS Benefit and at countless other nonprofit auctions.
Here's a question for Telluride locals, guests too: What do a dead bird and elephants have in common? Give up? OK, here it is. Amy Jean Boebel of Sapsucker Studios named her gallery for a dead bird found outside her door at 299 South Spruce, where she is showing the latest in a series of elephants – The Elephants III – by local artist Ally Crilly. And it's a perfect fit: all summer long Sapsucker is featuring strong women artists who refuse to pull their punches. (More on that in the weeks to come.)
Susie X. Billings is a well established mixed media artist, who shows her work locally at the Telluride Gallery of Fine Art. A protean talent (has to do with change, not meat), Susie is intent on proving all life is art, daily to herself, and on magical occasions, to her students.
The name "Holbrooke" is listed in the Telluride phone book. It is also gets top billing on the marquee of the world stage.
Telluride Inside... and Out scratched the surface of Denver's robust art scene, visiting two major public spaces and our favorite gallery.
On a beautiful albeit very windy Spring afternoon, we made a pilgrimage to see Henry Moore (1898 – 1986) in the Denver Botanic Gardens and were blown away (very nearly literally). The show, the very first major outdoor exhibition of the artist's works in the American West, features 20 monumental sculptures, primarily bronze, some fiberglass, by the celebrated Brit, from a reclining " Naked Maya" stretching nearly 30 feet long and dominating a grassy knoll to an tender depiction of a mother cradling a child, standing under three feet tall, hidden in a clearing. Telluride's First Thursday Art Walk is a blast.
The first Thursday of every month – April Fool's Day is the last of the winter season – the Telluride Council for the Arts & Humanities organizes a walkabout to showcase the town's fine art scene. Art venues and retail shops stay open late until 8 p.m.
A relatively new must-visit in the line of march, is Amy Boebel's Sapsucker Studios, 299 South Spruce.
In case you were wondering, Sapsuckers Studios got its name from a dead bird owner/artist Amy Boebel found stiffening outside the door of her studio space before she turned it into a gallery.
The bling at Telluride's Lustre Gallery, 171 South Pine, is as extravagantly fabulous as a Nebuchadnezzar of champagne.