Creative Collaboration from Isolation

3×3 PROJECTS:
SELECTED TEAMS ANNOUNCED

Creative Collaborations from Isolation

Artists collaborate all the time, but not always from a distance. In our present reality of isolation, artists must find different avenues for the creation and presentation of work. With this in mind, the Fine Arts Center and Performing Arts at Colorado College have invited artists of the Rocky Mountain West and American Southwest to pitch collaborative, multidisciplinary projects to premiere in the online world this summer. Seven projects have been selected and will be funded in the amount of $3,000 per project. 

Selected projects were announced May 15, 2020. View the announcement below:

Tethered Mountains Project team leads: Su Kaiden Cho, Jasmine Dillavou, Jimmy GableThe performance of Tethered Mountain is layered with a contemporary dance and recorded poem spoken from two different cultural perspectives in two different languages. The poem ties the concept of migration, mountain movement and the Wild West prospect to its contemporary counterpart of cultural movement.Campfire Draw AlongsProject team leads: Donald Fodness, Michael Bernhardt, and Barry WhittakerThe DMB Collective (Donald Fodness, Michael Bernhardt, and Barry Whittaker) seeks to provide a public service intended to act as a beacon of hope in these troubled times. By drawing on the rich visual and oral traditions of the American West and Southwest, the DMB endevour to honor, reflect, confuse and resist the romanticized stereotypes of this region through the ubiquitous technologies we now rely on for connection. They will share descriptions of iconic images, suggestive of cowboy poetry spoken by an open campfire, creating an ambiance saturated with the smell of smoke and beans.HuerfanoProject team leads: Kevin Marchman, Fa’al Ali, Xochitl Portillo-MoodyHuerfano is a case-study and love letter to a place both fascinating and incomprehensible. The Sangre De Cristo mountains and the surrounding plains and valleys hold centuries of history and magic most people only glance at from car-windows. This project only seeks to take a step closer than arms-length to the land and stories we barely know exist.Healing, Reconciliation, and the Taos Santo StoryProject team leads: Jessica Kahkoska, Anita Rodriguez, and Miguel GandertThis multi-disciplinary collaboration imagines a cruelty-free future for the Taylor Museum Santos Collection. It aims to decolonize the preservation, curation, and the display (or non-display of) sacred objects, to dialogue democratically with the communities to whom said objects have religious significance, to propose concrete steps to reconcile past harms and imagine future exchanges, and to share these concepts with the public. This collaborative manifesto explores possibilities for simultaneously recontextualizing the past and reimagining future care for the Santos collection, centering its creators and their descendants as makers and negotiators of its meaning.Rocky Mountain LocustsProject team leads: Erin Rollman, Emily Swank, Adam StoneA quirky video looking at the 1875 swarm of Rocky Mountain locusts that examines the parallels (both literal and metaphorical) to our current situation, including how certain conditions can cause solitary, chill grasshoppers to morph into a crop-destroying cloud of locusts. It will serve as a companion piece to a live “drive-in” style short play that Buntport is creating to perform on their front lawn.Honoring Our HoodsProject team leads: Jessica Helen Lopez, Bobby LeFebre, Mariah BottomlyThis is a cross-collaboration between  New Mexico and Colorado writers/poets and a photographer that will aim to uplift our people, homes, neighborhoods, pueblos, urban gardens, communities-at-large, the distinct topography and geographies we come from and the sister cities we belong to through Ekphrastic writing and visual imagery. The project will culminate in an online photographic exhibit accompanied by the writings of two poets laureates that represent Albuquerque and Denver.  Our collaboration consists of the elements of healing, celebrating our varied cultural identities and the enduring legacy of art in times of isolation that work to bring people together through the lens of medicinal storytelling.Indigenous Futurities (IF): Dancing Earth in CyberSpaceProject team leads: Rulan Tangen, Quetzal Guerrero, Ian GarrettInternational Indigenous cultural collaborators breathe new life into ancestral creation stories like star maps to guide the future, emerging from destructive centuries of oppressive colonial systems and disease, to remake the world. Meeting in the liminal ‘space between,’ as an opportunity to relate to cyberspace as a realm of Indigenous liberation, with the power to intuit deep connections, activate reciprocal relations, and reimagine the future.