In fall 2020 and spring 2021, the project team of Erin Espelie (assistant professor of cinema studies and critical media practices and co-director of the NEST Studio for the Arts), Brianne Cohen (assistant professor of art and art history), Andrew Cowell (professor of linguistics), and Lori Peek (professor of sociology and director of the Natural Hazards Center) will host a graduate seminar, bringing together dozens of university participants, as well as national and international keynote speakers, visiting artists and a postdoctoral student.
After watching a documentary, “Symbols of Resistance,” on the bombings, Jasmine Baetz, an Master of Fine Arts student at CU Boulder who studies American ceramics, wondered why there was no mention of them on the Boulder campus. “I thought it was a pretty wild oversight,” she said. In 2017 she started a project to create a sculpture dedicated to “Los Seis de Boulder,” the six of Boulder. The concrete, clay and grout monument stands a few feet tall and depicts the visages of the Los Seis in mosaics, with each one facing the direction in which they died, Baetz said.
Stroke by stroke, two large murals are adding an eruption of color and expression to the new Aerospace Engineering Sciences Building at the University of Colorado Boulder. One is being done by a CU Boulder student, Ellie Marcotte, an art practices senior.
From working as a line cook to apprenticing with a violin maker, University of Colorado Boulder ceramics Professor Jeanne Quinn has never followed a straight path but is thrilled to draw upon her diverse experiences as the Department of Art & Art History’s newly appointed chair.
This collaborative project is part of a larger project that surrounds a public art sculpture to commemorate the activism of the Chicano Student Movement, during which Los Seis, as they became known, were killed in two separate and unexplained car bombs on May 27 and 29, 1974.
“A lot of my pieces tell a story,” says Boulder artist Melanie Yazzie. “It could be just about taking a walk that morning; it could be about planting flowers. The story doesn’t have to be huge. Sometimes the pieces are speaking about the injustices in the world and what’s happened to women, but sometimes a piece is about centering yourself and noticing the light and thinking good thoughts.”
Thirty years after retirement, Frank Sampson is steadily creating work in his studio behind his home in Boulder; creating art is not just something he does—it’s part of his spiritual makeup