Beyond Boulder: In rural Colorado, art students draw on the landscape
Traveling east of Denver, as the landscape flattened, and trees and houses became scarce, George Perez (BFA 14) stared out the car window and wondered where in the world he was going.
Perez, who graduated with a degree in fine arts, was headed to Byers, Colorado, where the 2017 Art and Rural Environment Field School was being held. The intensive three-week field course is designed for students interested in exploring the unique relationship between art and the Western American environment.
His reaction to the unfamiliar landscape became a transformative experience for Perez, who had never seen the sparsely populated grasslands of the High Plains of eastern Colorado.
The landscape was like a culture shock, Perez said. It was such a different type of environment. I didnt even know a landscape like that existed in Colorado.
Perez is an artist in Denver and an artist-in-residence泭at the Denver Childrens Museum that will wrap up next month.泭Recently, he participated in a group show titled, Archives As Muse, an eight-person show with the nonprofit ArtHyve. He泭conducted research with the help of the archivist/librarian in the泭Western history and genealogy collections in the Denver Public Archives as inspiration for art.
The pace of life in the rural areas was much slower than what Perez was used to in Boulder and Denver. Not finding inspiration for a photography project, his usual medium, Perez became antsy and eager to get started on a project. But what?
It felt like I should be doing something, like digging a hole for a couple of hours, said Perez, whose primary medium was photography. My aha moment happened that day when I realized artwork could be less 2-D-based and parallel more泭a performance or a conversation.
Realizing that digging a hole could be a potential, Perez started making art.
The revelation led to an art project that showed his field school experience from a different perspective. To do that, he attached a cell phone to his belt and made a video of his trips to the hardware store and the laundromat while pushing a wheelbarrow that held his items. The waist-high viewpoint shows his hands on the wheelbarrow handles泭and the scene in front of him as he walks along and talks with the friendly townsfolk who stopped to offer him rides.
There were no restrictions on the art I chose to do at the field school, he said. I felt like I could make artwork in a different environment and learn from that. You have a surge of energy. Youre radiating to be productive.
Richard Saxton, associate professor of sculpture and post-studio practice, is founder and director of the Art and Rural Environments Field School.
More and more, Im seeing students with no experience of being in unfamiliar territory, of knowing how to encounter things that are different from what they know, Saxton said. The field school gives them a sense of how big the world is and how many different things there are to make artwork about. They internalize their rural experiences and make art that tries to represent those experiences.
While living and working together in rural environments, students create artwork specific to the landscape using a variety of mediums, from sculpture and printmaking to photography and ephemeral assemblages. The field school is designed to expand students definition of what a studio practice can be while exposing them to new vistas.
Although the focus is art, the field school is open to students in any major, as well as non-CU students.
Two weeks of the three-week course are spent in Colorado making art in any medium. One week of the field school takes place on the road. Last year the group visited parts of Kansas and Oklahoma. During long hours on the road, students conducted readings and discussed wide-ranging topics, such as deep looking, local history, sociology, environmental issues and poetry.
Professional artists who work in the rural milieu were invited to give workshops and talks. At the end of the field school, they held an open reception, art show and barbecue for the residents in the Byers area.
The students create a community