2024 EXHIBITS & EVENTS
>CURRENT - 2024<
>UPCOMING - 2024<
FRAME - MAY + JOSEPH TISINGA + PATIO + ORIGIN STORY + LAUREN SAMBLANET + YUKIKO TOMINAGA + FIRE THROUGH DRY GRASS + MG BERNARD & GENEVIEVE WALLER + FRAME - SEPTEMBER + JAVIER FLORES AND STUDENTS + MADELIFE + JEREMY DENNIS + FRAME - NOVEMBER + CALL - REGRET + ANNA TSOUHLARKAKIS
>PAST 2024 <
KALI SPITZER AT CREATIVE NATIONS + ERIC NORD + AGING OPENING RECEPTION + MITCHELL SQUIRE + JAMES HOSKING + DANIELLE SEEWALKER + MARISSA NICOLE STEWART + SHINE + ANNE WALKER + AGING BODIES - PANEL + OCCUPIED + AGING BODIES, MYTHS & HEROINES + FRAME - MARCH + USAMA ALSHAIBI + ORPHANS OF WAR
AGING BODIES, MYTHS and HEROINES
Image: Courtesy James Hosking
November 9th 2023 - February 28th 2024
(Gallery & Window)
Aging Bodies, Myths and Heroines
André Ramos-Woodard, Danielle SeeWalker, Carlotta Cardana, Donigan Cumming, James Hosking, Magdalena Wosinska, Marissa Nicole Stewart, Mitchell Squire, Roddy MacIness, Sherry Wiggins & Luís Filipe Branco, Will Wilson and others
Curated by Todd Edward Herman
Aging Bodies, Myths and Heroines looks at the social and ethical implications of the observational image and challenges some of the myths and misunderstandings often imposed upon elder members of contemporary western societies.
Aging Bodies… speaks to how photography has influenced our perceptions of the human organism relative to the passage of time, to the many ways the medium has become instrumental to the construction, preservation and revision of personal and collective memory, as well as to photography's ability to obscure and elucidate notions of falsehood and truth.
This exhibit operates somewhere in-between two representational tropes; those who adopt an heroic attitude towards the aging process, seeming to remain ‘forever youthful' and those who experience significant bodily decline and illness to the extent that the outer body is seen as misrepresenting or imprisoning the inner self.
Both modalities serve to objectify and therefore skew our capacity to empathize with those depicted. Such pervasive imagery of the elderly as either sub or super-human beings form part of a repertoire of the 'pornography of old age' within consumer culture. To be clear, these are not the points of view this exhibit is hoping to advance.
Aging Bodies… does not claim to be an exhaustive study in either gerontology or the mechanisms of representational bias. It does, however, deliver a small selection of playful, critical and tender images made by and about elder artists; redirecting viewers back to the lived body and divergent self-images of the middle aged and old.
— Todd Edward Herman 2023
Daily camera by Ella Cobb
Daily Camera (Instagram) by Ella Cobb
Denver Post by Ray Mark Rinaldi
Rocky Mountain PBS by Lindsey Ford
Lenscratch by Rupert Jenkins
DARIA by Madeleine Boyson
Boulder Magazine by Kalene McCort
AGING BODIES - OPENING RECEPTION
AGING BODIES - MITCHELL SQUIRE
As part of the Aging Bodies, Myths and Heroines exhibit in the main gallery East Window is honored to present
Artist Talk with Mitchell Squire
Friday, December 15th 2023
7:00 - 9:00 pm
Photo: Niko Laurita
AGING BODIES - BEAUTIFUL BY NIGHT
POSTPONED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE
Sorry for any inconveniences
Beautiful by Night Screening
Director James Hosking
I am a Chicago-based photographer, filmmaker, and visual artist. My work has screened internationally and appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Mother Jones, The Atlantic, and many other publications.
I developed a multimedia project examining identity, aging, and labor among veteran drag performers in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood entitled Beautiful By Night. It included a documentary that I directed, produced, and edited. I had a multi-year collaboration with the Tenderloin Museum in San Francisco that included screenings, public programming, and a solo photo exhibit of this work. The project was included in the 2020 group show Come to Your Census: Who Counts in America? at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. It was the focus of a solo exhibition at the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities gallery during January and February of 2022.
I was a 2022-2023 HATCH resident at the Chicago Artists Coalition. HATCH is a juried program that offers the opportunity to develop new work and produce collaborative exhibitions. My two-person show with fiber artist María Villaseñor-Marchal, Raveling, was on view from April to June 2023. It was partially supported by an Individual Artist Support grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency. I presented a new series of collages made from LGBTQ+ archival material and inspired by the text of found personals. In the Chicago Reader, critic Annette LePique wrote: “Hosking’s work is an act of mediumship; it is a way for the past and present to meet and for the desires and lived experiences of those often denied the light to feel the glow of day once more.”
I was also recently a 2022-2023 CPS Lives artist. CPS Lives is a nonprofit that pairs Chicago based artists with a public school during the academic year to collaborate on a project. I photographed LGBTQ+ members of a local high school’s Pride Club. The work was on display at Chicago’s Jude Gallery in July and August 2023 and will be on view at Chicago’s Heaven Gallery in November 2023.
I’m the recipient of a 2023 Individual Artists Program grant from Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE). The grant will support the ongoing development of my archival LGBTQ+ collage series. Pieces from the series were selected for Once: 2023 Emerging Artists Exhibit at the Cleve Carney Museum of Art in Glen Ellyn, closing January 7, 2024. New selections from the series will also be on view in Art from the Archives at Gerber/Hart Library & Archives in Chicago, closing March 31, 2024.
—James Hosking
AGING BODIES - ERIC NORD
Photo: Niko Laurita
As part of the Aging Bodies, Myths and Heroines exhibit in the main gallery East Window is honored to present
Lecture/discussion with Eric Nord
Thursday, January 25th 2024
7:00 - 9:00 pm
Eric Nord’s discussion will examine our varied perceptions of the passage of time relative to the process of aging; the palpable changes in the way time is experienced by elders; the collectivity of time and the collapsing of memory, where yesterday and 20 years ago feel nearly the same distance away from now.
Eric Nord is a musician, visual artist and the co-owner of Leon Gallery in Denver Colorado. He attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City and The University of Denver. Eric has worked in the financial, administrative, and production departments of some of the world’s most prestigious institutions including, The New York Shakespeare Festival’s Public Theater, The Brooklyn Academy of Music, The New York Society for Ethical Culture, Sperone Westwater Gallery, and The Denver Center for the Performing Arts. He also served as Executive Director of the E. E. Cummings Centennial Celebration, producing poetry readings, manuscript exhibitions, panel discussions, and walking tours, throughout New York City, in partnership with The New York Public Library’s 42nd St. Branch and Jefferson Market Branch, The 92nd Street Y, The Poetry Society of America, and The Metropolitan Transit Authority.
His own art has been exhibited in recent years at Redline, Understudy, The McNichols Building – ArtHyve’s Archives as Muse, and The Vicki Myhren Gallery. His music compositions have been performed Off-Broadway, at The Public Theater, and at the N.Y. Public Library.
AGING BODIES - DANIELLE SEEWALKER
As part of the Aging Bodies, Myths and Heroines exhibit in the main gallery East Window is honored to present
Artist Talk with Danielle SeeWalker
Wednesday, January 17th 2024
7:00 - 9:00 pm
Danielle SeeWalker is Húŋkpapȟa Lakȟóta and citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota. She is an artist, writer, activist, and boymom of two, based in Denver, Colorado. Her visual artwork often incorporates the use of mixed media and experimentation while incorporating traditional Native American materials, scenes, and messaging. Her artwork pays homage to her identity as a Lakȟóta wíŋyaŋ (woman) and her passion to redirect the narrative to an accurate and insightful representation of contemporary Native America while still acknowledging historical events.
Alongside her passion for creating visual art, Danielle is a freelance writer and published her first book in 2020 titled, “Still Here: A Past to Present Insight of Native American People & Culture.” She is also very dedicated to staying connected and involved in her Native community and currently serves as City Commissioner for the Denver American Indian Commission. Danielle has also been working on a personal, passion project since 2013 with her long-time friend called The Red Road Project. The focus of the work is to document, through words and photographs, what it means to be Native American in the 21st century by capturing inspiring and positive stories of people and communities within Indian Country.
AGING BODIES - MARISSA NICOLE STEWART
As part of the Aging Bodies, Myths and Heroines exhibit in the main gallery East Window is honored to present
Artist Talk with Marissa Nicole Stewart
Friday, February 9th 2024
7:00 - 9:00 pm
The history that comes from being an African American in the United States follows each generation as a collective whole. You cannot separate the individual from the history, nor the history from the individual.Uniquely, African Americans are forced to wear their history on their skin, because of this it follows them in everything they do, including how they are perceived in society. They are always analyzed and measured to standards that are not their own; they are always required to have resilience in the face of systematic oppression. In photographs I aim to question: Must a black body always stand in the place of a civil movement or a political statement? Will a black body ever be a human body? Will a photograph of a black body be just a photograph of an individual apart from their race? My subjects have their history embedded in their appearance and their stories written in the wrinkles of their skin. I photograph my subjects and use archival photographs of my subjects in a way that invites the viewer in and makes them want to get to know the individuals within the photographs.
Within further exploration I have focused on the female members of my family to narrow in on lineage, motherhood and worth gained from creating a home . This research bloomed ideas around oral history, family albums, voids within family trees, storytelling, and the black woman historical experience. Navigating through identity and understanding the process to keep a family history intact when the systems it exists within are designed to keep it apart.
Marissa Stewart was born and raised in Toledo, OH and is currently 29 years old. She is based in Columbus, OH and her practice is surrounded on the ideas of black families, matriarchal lineage, race and oral history. Her work is born from a want to engage her audience in questioning their way of thinking by creating work that forces quiet contemplation and active reflection into one's self. To explore the voids that take root in these ideas and to experiment with storytelling. She uses traditional photographic techniques -black and white film, darkroom processes, and gelatin silver paper as well as, archival photographs, and color film.
Stewart completed her BFA in Photography from Bowling Green State University in May 2018. She received her MFA in Photography and Integrated Media from Ohio University in 2022.
AGING BODIES - ANNE WALKER
As part of the Aging Bodies, Myths and Heroines exhibit in the main gallery East Window is honored to present
Artist Talk with Anne Walker
Wednesday, February 21st 2024
11:30am - 1:00pm
Dr. Anne Walker’s professional and research interests include the overlap of art, communication, and storytelling across differences. Her dissertation study at the University of Denver’s department of Communication Studies focused on the grief experiences of older women during the pandemic through an arts-based method of narrative and photography. As a graduate teaching instructor at DU, she taught various communication courses focused on communication skills such as listening, reflecting on other people’s experiences and collaborating across difference through dialogue. She also designed and taught an intergenerational communication course which connected college students with older adults in the community through photography and storytelling.
Her presentation at East Window will center on the photos and stories drawn from her dissertation examining older women, grief, and storytelling; exploring common themes in the narratives of these older women’s experiences of grief during the COVID-19 pandemic. 18 women aged 65 and older agreed to participate in Walker's study by taking 5-6 photos that illustrated their story of losing someone meaningful during the pandemic. These photos served as catalysts in a one-on-one storytelling interview where participants shared how these photos represented their experiences of grief and loss. Walker will explain key moments of the research process as well as share specific photos and stories from participants.
A short workshop will follow the presentation.
Photography Niko Laurita
AGING BODIES - Q & A
As part of the Aging Bodies, Myths and Heroines exhibit in the main gallery East Window is honored to present
Panel discussion with Rupert Jenkins, Roddy MacIness,
Sherry Wiggins, Amy DelPo and Anne Walker
Friday, February 23rd 2024
7:00 - 9:00 pm
Photography by Dona Laurita
KALI SPITZER AT CREATIVE NATIONS
EXTENDED THROUGH FEBRUARY 4th
November 17th 2023 - January 26, 2024
East Window, Creative Nations Arts Collective and The Dairy Arts Center presents:
Explorations of Resilience and Resistance / Our Backs Hold Our Stories
Photographs by Kali Spitzer
Curated by Todd Edward Herman
Opening Reception
November 17th 5:00pm - 8:00pm
Creative Nations Arts Collective / The Dairy Arts Center
2590 Walnut St, Boulder, CO 80302
Kali Spitzer is an Indigenous, femme, queer, photographer living on the traditional unceded lands of the Tsleil-Waututh, Squamish and Musqueam peoples. Kali's work embraces the stories of contemporary BIPOC, queer and trans bodies, creating representation that is self determined. Her collaborative process is informed by the desire to rewrite the visual histories of indigenous bodies beyond a colonial lens.
Kali is Kaska Dena from Daylu (Lower Post, British Columbia) from her father who is a survivor of residential schools and Canadian genocide. Kali's Mother is Jewish from Transylvania, Romania. Kali’s heritage deeply influences her work as she focuses on cultural revitalization through her art, whether in the medium of photography, ceramics, tanning hides or hunting. She has documented traditional practices with a sense of urgency, highlighting their vital cultural significance.
Kali studied photography at the Institute of American Indian Arts, the Santa Fe Community College, and under the mentorship of Will Wilson. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at galleries and museums internationally including, the National Geographic’s Women: a Century of Change at the National Geographic Museum (2020), and Larger than Memory: Contemporary Art From Indigenous North America at the Heard Museum (2020). In 2017 Kali received a Reveal Indigenous Art Award from Hnatyshyn Foundation.
MARCH - APRIL : ARE YOU OK
March 1st - June 22nd 2024
(Window)
Are You OK? A Trans Survival Project
Photography by Jesse Freidin
Boulder Weekly Article by Jezy J. Gray
For the past few years I’ve been terrified not just for myself and my queer community, but for the innocent and sweet young people who are the most directly affected by our nation’s incredibly dangerous anti-trans legislation. It has felt like a fire slowly burning underground for decades, and now the fire is here and it wants the destruction of innocent lives. I started ‘Are You OK?’ as a response to the fear and anger these bills awoke in me, as a way to pass the microphone to the kids and families who find empowerment in sharing their stories, and more importantly as a visual remedy to trans stigmatization.
People who live through trauma and pain cannot be photographed like everybody else. They must be elevated, they must be allowed to take up space. Through this series I created the kind of trans portrait that I wanted to see - that of a person standing in their power, their support networks flanking them, unconditional love filling the frame and a brief moment where the sitter can breathe without fear of violence and without the burden of stigma. It’s a fictional space, but it is also healing. Not every trans child is fortunate enough to have such deep support, and not every trans child has the financial privilege to access affirming healthcare, or a safe place to live, food to eat and life free of violence or oppression. This series is about those that do, in hopes that the love they receive may spill over to those that need it most.
Before each portrait I do a short meditation exercise with each participant where we close our eyes, breathe into our most empowered selves, and show up together for a moment of self-actualization. In the past three years I have archived the first hand accounts of over 150 trans/non-binary youth from over half the states in the country.
Are You OK? documents the experiences and stories of trans and non-binary youth living in the United States during this time of horrific anti-trans legislation. Flanked by their supportive families, these outspoken and deeply loved youth present their strength to the world in a revolt against the country’s attempt to erase them.
—Jesse Freidin
NOUF ALJOWAYSIR
Artist Talk and Screening of Ana Min Wein? (Where Am I From?)
May 10th 2024
7-9:00pm
Nouf Aljowaysir in person
Ana Min Wein (Where Am I From?) is a short film and visual diary that constructs my genealogical journey using two different voices, my own and an AI ‘narrator'. It combines generational storytelling and AI to meditate on identity, migration, and memory.
After immigrating to the US from Saudi Arabia at a young age, my identity and belonging have continually shifted with time. I begin Ana Min Wein by trying to answer "Where am I from?" by recollecting my childhood and tracing my family's memories and migration through Saudi Arabia and Iraq, hoping to find an answer. As the AI character attempts to support my journey, it reveals stereotypes and biases derived from its training and algorithmic composition.
By juxtaposing oral storytelling against AI, Ana Min Wein exposes the eradication of my ancestors' collective memory. Compared to our social practices of building cultural meaning and identity through ancestral stories, AI technologies are trained to generalize for consumerist speed and gain. I highlight traditions of passing down stories through generations to expose the superficiality of AI, the reduction of cultural identity, and the prominence of the Western gaze in our technologies today.
Nouf Aljowaysir is a Saudi new media artist based in Brooklyn. Her work examines the underlying logic of Al systems from a personal and intimate lens. She has exhibited projects in galleries and festivals globally, including the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), Tribeca Film Festival, Centre Pompidou and others. Aljowaysir has been awarded residencies at ThoughtWorks Arts in NYC and Somerset House in London. At Somerset House, she created her latest work, Ana Min Wein? (Where am I From?), which recently won the Lumen Prize in the Moving Image category.
March 21st - July 27th 2024
SALAF (Ancestor)
Photography / Installation by Nouf Aljowaysir
A series of visual portraits symbolizing the limitations and failures of artificial intelligence in reconstructing and interpreting the artist's identity.
In the summer of 2020, Nouf Aljowaysir began exploring her genealogical journey through a personal and an Al lens. She interviewed family members and began following the migrational patterns of her ancestors across Arabia and Mesopotamia spanning five generations.
While researching and collecting digital archives relevant to her family's stories, Aljowaysir discovered that the only visual records lacked indigenous self-expression, and emanated from a British Empire that purposefully crafted the East (ie, the "Orient" or "Other") to be exploited and controlled. As Aljowaysir tested these images with computer vision Al models, this process revealed "failures" manifested as mislabeling, generalizations, and stereotypes. They failed to recognize the majority of veiled women as women. They haphazardly tagged several bedouin images with modern-day warfare labels such as "soldier, "army," and "military uniform," confidently asserting high confidence values in their evaluations. These "failures" uncovered not only the prejudice systemically-embedded within commercial Al tools, but the broader problematic results that arise from using a historical training dataset that lacks an understanding of "Middle Eastern" imagery.
Salaf symbolizes the artist's frustrations with the Western colonial gaze and the lack of native localized self-expression. Aljowaysir deliberately erased the oriental stereotypical figures from her datasets, using an Al segmentation. technique called U-2 Net, and trained an Al on this absent dataset. These deliberate reversals of technology's functions symbolize the erasure of her ancestors' collective memory while confronting Al's reduction of history and identity.
– Nouf
Photos by Dona Laurita
Opening Reception
March 21st 2024
7-9:00pm
Nouf Aljowaysir in person
This program is funded in part by grants from Boulder Arts Week and ThoughtWorks Arts
SHINE - FEBRUARY 15TH
February 15th 2024
7 - 9:00pm
FREE
East Window in collaboration with Out Boulder Presents:
SHINE: A Love Letter to the Trans Community
Curated by Charlotte Piper
Featuring Alex & Styler with Briggs from Queer Denver and youth from OUT Boulder
Including a special performance planned by Melissa Ivey
What is Trans Joy?
It is a celebration of living life to the fullest despite how society tries to dim our SHINE. Embracing our authenticity and individuality. Trans Joy means existing in light of the efforts of outside organizations and individuals to discard and discriminate against transgender humans. With this event, we bring together established transgender elders to lift up and shine their light on young trans artists, poets, and creators to celebrate how we all SHINE together. This is a celebration of transgender artists and their significant contributions to the LGBTQIA community. SHINE is a multimedia, spoken word event coming to Boulder in February 2024.
With SHINE, we are here to demonstrate the beauty, creativity, and validity of the transgender experience. We hope to shine a light on these stunning humans, who are the future of our world, and provide them with an outlet to have their voices heard. With SHINE, we are opening the stage to this influential and diverse group of humans in order to provide them a platform to share their thoughts, words, and hearts with us as future change agents. This is our love letter to the trans community and an event that we are very proud to present to the Boulder community.
Melissa Ivey (she/they) is a local two spirit, Indigenous artivist, performer, and music educator. She is well known in Denver as the "Musical Doula", using her voice and platform to bring art, music, and activism together to build connections within the queer/trans and Indigenous communities. Melissa has performed everywhere from BIPOC Open Mic NIght at the Mercury Cafe to the stage of Red Rocks and at the Denver Art Museum. Melissa has a special performance planned for SHINE.
Crisosto Apache (they/them) is from Mescalero, New Mexico, on the Mescalero Apache reservation. They are Mescalero Apache, Chiricahua Apache, and Diné (Navajo) of the Salt Clan, born for the Towering House Clan. They hold an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and are a professor of English. They are also an editor-at-large for The Offing Magazine. Apache’s books are GENESIS (Lost Alphabet) & Ghostword (Gnashing Teeth Publishing) winner of the Publishing Triangle’s 2023 Betty Berzon Emerging Writers Award and a finalist for the 2023 Colorado Author’s League Award in poetry. They also have been a two-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize.
Before Alex Vaughan (they/them) could be Alex, Trey acted as their front man for 25 years until at age 40, Alex came to the awareness of sharing their true self as transgender and nonbinary. Personal trainer, performer, podcaster for "How To Be Queer" and "I Swear I'm Real", Trey and Alex dance together in grit, joy, euphoria and alignment.
Styler Rising (they/them) has been a part of the queer community for the past 35 years, and they own and operate Denver’s first queer focused gym, Metamorphosis Fitness. They also own Styler Rising Consultants, a company dedicated to education and advocacy for the queer community through public speaking, business training, and queer based programming. For the last seven years, Styler has created a sober safe space for the queer community, and has focused on helping folks reconnect with their bodies while processing their trauma through movement and exercise. Styler will be performing a very special piece for SHINE.
Briggs (they/them) is a young queer activist who grew up like most, in an unsupportive home. They realized first that they were queer and then later on trans, both realizations that drastically changed the course of their life. Briggs remembers vividly the way they were treated and the lack of resources for young queer folks as a child and has started to dedicate their life to highlighting Queer Youth. Currently, they are the founder of a grassroots organization titled Queer Denver, which they hope can be the organization they wished they had as a kid.
Raymond (He/Him) is a sophomore in high school who uses poetry as a way to move through the complex existence of being a teenager. He finds trans joy with his friends, who have been with him every step of the way.
Bennett (They/Them) is a Non-Binary sophomore at New Vista High School, and a fully fledged theater kid. They would highly consider themselves a nerd, having a blast creating DnD campaigns they are often the dungeon master for in the time they aren't writing characters. Bennett strives for change in the world around them, knowing that a safe space for Queer people is one where they are comfortable being themselves, and aspires to send messages of Queer joy out through writing, in all of its forms including poetry, lyric, and storytelling. They are thankful to have grown up in an environment of Queer safety from their family, who supported them through their transition, leading them into their path of an avid Queer rights advocate.
APRIL - USAMA ALSHAIBI FILMS
APRIL 5th 2024
7-9pm
Free
Short Films and Artist Talk with Usama Alshaibi in person
Join us for an evening of short films, an artist talk and the world premier of Testimony by Usama Alshaibi.
Usama Alshaibi was born in Baghdad, Iraq and spent his formative years living between the United States and the Middle East. He’s an active filmmaker and artist, who works in documentary and fiction, often blurring the line between the two. His films have screened widely at underground and international film festivals, media exhibitions and museums. He’s received grants from organizations such as the MacArthur Foundation, the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, the Playboy Foundation, and the Creative Capital Foundation for the Arts.
His first feature documentary, Nice Bombs, which was shot in Baghdad right after the start of the United States invasion of Iraq, had a theatrical release in Chicago and New York, and a broadcast premiere on the Sundance Channel. His experimental narrative film Profane won several awards, including best feature film at the Boston Underground Film Festival. His second documentary feature, American Arab, had its world premiere at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), and was nationally broadcast on television through PBS World Channel. He’s been producing and directing short films and music videos since 1998.
Usama lived in Chicago for over 17 years and worked as a digital archivist at the Chicago History Museum, and as a radio host and producer for Chicago Public Media. Currently, Usama is a Teaching Associate Professor at Colorado State University
Images courtesy Usama Alshaibi
This program is funded in part by a grant from Boulder Arts Week
FRAME - MARCH 29th
March 29th 2024
The Literary Ladies Present
F R A M E
A Literary Salon
Back for a new season!
7-9pm
4550 Broadway Ste C-3B2 Boulder CO 80304
Curated by Toni Oswald and Sarah Elizabeth Schantz
“Friday Reignites the Ancestral Matchstick in the Eternal East”
Dino Enrique Piacentini grew up in Los Angeles, lived in San Francisco for twenty years, and has also, at various times, set down stakes in Houston, Oaxaca, Champaign, and Prague. His writing has been published in Gulf Coast, Confrontation, Pembroke, The Globe & Mail, The Atticus Review, and The Massachusetts Review, among other places, and his debut novel, Invasion of the Daffodils, about a Mexican-American family living on an island off the coast of California during the Korean War, will be published by Astrophil Press in Fall 2024. He was a collaborating writer for the Aura Contemporary Ensemble’s Words and Music concert and served as Fiction Editor at Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. He has taught creative writing at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; the University of Houston; the Boldface Emerging Writers Conference; and Inprint Houston. Before becoming a writer, he worked as an arts administrator at The Mexican Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Asian Art Museum, and Galería de la Raza. Currently, he lives in Denver, where he teaches creative writing at Lighthouse Writers Workshop and the University of Denver.
Ali Meyung holds an MFA from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, where she currently serves as adjunct faculty and associate director of the Writing Center. She is a martial artist, educator, artist, cat & glitter lover from Denver, Colorado.
Taylor Bratches is a writer, intuitive trance channel, energy healer, DJ and psychedelic facilitator living in the Boulder area. As a writer, she works in various forms and received her MFA in Poetry from the University of California, Irvine in 2019. Her poetry has been longlisted for several prizes including the Montreal International Poetry Prize and most recently, Frontier Poetry's "Nature & Place" Prize. She is also a music journalist and critic for the digital electronic music platform Resident Advisor, where she contributes album reviews and runs a feature series. She is in the process of writing a memoir. She is also a mystic and trance medium who channels both verbally and physically, and has studied a range of spiritual practices in various traditions over the course of her adult life. She channels an esoteric form of energy work -- a healing practice that shares similarities to classical Tantra, medical Qigong, and more. She makes a living primarily as an energy healer, working at several integrative healing centers in both Boulder and Denver. She is also a psychedelic facilitator, and received her training and certification through SoundMind Institute. She was also a speaker at the MAPS convention "Psychedelic Science" this past June.
A first-generation college graduate from rural Iowa, Julia Madsen earned an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University and a PhD in English/Creative Writing from the University of Denver. Her first book, The Boneyard, The Birth Manual, A Burial: Investigations into the Heartland (Trembling Pillow Press), was listed on Entropy’s Best Poetry Books of 2018. Her chapbook, “Home Movie, Nowhere,” was published with DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press in 2021.
Max Davies With nearly 30 years of experience within the music, arts, and film industries as a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, instructor and producer; musician Max Davies has a wealth of real-world practical knowledge that underlines the core of his musical background. From performance to production, songwriting to instruction, his empirical knowledge translates into every project he is involved with. His versatility has been showcased by his work with many musicians including: Thurston Moore, Lydia Lunch, Gregory Allen Isakov and many others. His solo releases have been described by Guitarist Magazine as: "Vivid", and: "Quite something" by Guitar World. His most recent album of prepared guitar instrumentals, entitled: Inventions For Broken & Prepared Guitar was lauded by guitarist John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers as a collection of "really good ideas". Other work includes compositions for Centre Pompidou in Paris, the University of Colorado, the American College Dance Festival, Naropa University, Everest Awakening and The Poetry Project in NYC. His music has been featured in numerous films including Valley Uprising and for Jovovich-Hawk's fashion line and he has been a featured performer on the nationally syndicated radio program E-Town. Other musicians and performers he's worked with include: Junior Burke, John Trudell & KWEST, Knackeboul, Janice Lowe, Steven Taylor, Christopher Paul Stelling, Clark Coolidge, LAPCAT, Toni Oswald, Gasoline Lollipops, Ic Explura, Greyhounds, poets Anne Waldman and Eleni Sikelianos and many others.
Maggie Snyder is an internationally exhibited fine artist, musician, educator, and multimedia producer. Maggie received her MFA in Conceptual Video and Experimental Film from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 2015, and she is the recipient of several awards for her work in art and design, including the 2022 Gener8tor Arts Accelerator grant, the 2020 Best In Show Award at the 40th Annual Secura Fine Arts Exhibition, a 2019 Honored Instructor Award for Photography, and the 2018 M-List Award for Innovation in the Arts. Maggie is a co-founder and former member of the feminist art collective SPOOKY BOOBS and currently plays in the Denver-based noise rock band Wingwalker and the Denver-based all-female metal band Blood of Lilith. She likes heavy music, dark beer, and cats.
The Curators
Toni Oswald is a writer, singer, and visual artist who has performed and shown her work across the Unites States and Europe. She has released four albums under the altar ego The Diary of Ic Explura & writing publications include The Oyez Review, Bombay Gin, Heroes are Gang Leaders Giantology, The Tattered Press, Zani UK, HOAX & Shame Radiant. She is currently working on a novel about a girl clown set in the 1950s entitled The Gorgeous Funeral, as well as a collection of short stories set in Los Angeles called Dying on the Vine. Her book Sirens, was released by Gesture Press in 2020. She likes gold teeth, cats, and trees, and lives with her husband Max, and their cats Kiki Pamplemousse Fontaine and Charlie Chaplin in Boulder, Colorado.
Sarah Elizabeth Schantz is primarily a fiction writer living on the outskirts of Boulder, Colorado with her family in a Victorian-era farmhouse they rent from the city where they are surrounded by open sky, century-old cottonwoods, and coyote. Her first novel Fig debuted from Simon & Schuster in 2015 and was selected by NPR as A Best Read of the Year before winning a 2016 Colorado Book Award. She is currently working on a collection of short stories titled Tales of Dead Children and two novels, Roadside Altars and Just Like Heaven. She teaches creative writing as an adjunct at Naropa University, faculty for Lighthouse, and through her own workshop series and author services, (W)rites of Passage.
Photography by Dona Laurita
APRIL 14th ORPHANS OF WAR
Visit the ORPHANS OF WAR webpage for all the details
April 14th 2024
1:00pm - 7:00pm
Free
Please note this event will be held at
NICHE EVENT SPACE
4571 Broadway, Boulder, CO 80304
A day of reflection and discussion on the impacts of the Vietnam war
Organized by James Holdsworth and Amanda Coslor
East Window Gallery is honored to host a day of film screenings, poetry, story telling, visual art, music, food, reflection and discussion on the lasting impacts and multifaceted experiences of the Vietnam war. James Holdsworth, an adoptee from Vietnam, will bring folks together to share and reflect on this time in history. A multi-generational gathering and an open forum for discussion on the divergent effects of the Vietnam war. We will hear stories from adoptees out of Vietnam pre and post Operation Babylift. We will also hear from Vietnam Veterans, parents of adoptees and their children about how their unique as well as shared experiences continue to shape their lives today. Sister Mary Nelle Gage and Ruth Routten, two of the organizers of Operation Babylift, will be present to share their stories on this complex time in history.
FRAME - MAY 3RD
May 3rd 2024
The Literary Ladies Present
F R A M E
A Literary Salon
7-9pm
Curated by Toni Oswald and Sarah Elizabeth Schantz
Jessica Lawson (she/her/hers) is Denver-based writer, teacher, and queer single parent. Her debut book of poetry, Gash Atlas, is a nightmarish cartography of violence from Columbus to Trump, a work that Joyelle McSweeney says “turns the log-book of patriarchy inside out.” Gash Atlas was selected by judge Erica Hunt for the Kore Press Institute Poetry Prize. Lawson’s chapbook, Rot Contracts, explores the heated aftermath of family rupture through the cold lens of the law, asking what we have left when our most primal bonds are broken. Twice nominated for the Pushcart, Lawson’s work has appeared in The Rumpus, Entropy, Paperbag, Dreginald, and elsewhere.
Cyrus Smith-Gathers is a Florida Atlantic University alum and recent graduate of the Regis University Mile High MFA program. His short story Chasing Summer can be found in the latest edition of the North American Review. Cyrus not only writes short stories but also screenplays, having placed in several screenwriting competitions. When he's not writing, he's roller skating, or watching sports, usually college football.
Amber Ridenour Walker is the author of Surfacing (Free Lines Press) and i thought this would be cooler (Bottlecap Press). Her poems, short stories, and essays have appeared in 20 Minutes in Portland: A Special Edition of The Portland Review, Bombay Gin, Local Smoke, 580 Split, Tiny Spoon, Wisdom Body Collective, LEON Literary Review, and various limited edition chapbooks over the years. Amber holds an MFA from The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado. She moonlights as a librarian and she almost never visits her hometown of Manson, Washington.
Jennifer Wortman is the author of the story collection This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and MacDowell, she lives with her family in Colorado, where she teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop and serves as associate fiction editor for Colorado Review.
Toni Oswald is a writer, singer, and visual artist who has performed and shown her work across the United States and Europe. She has released four albums under the altar ego The Diary of Ic Explura & writing publications include The Oyez Review, Bombay Gin, Heroes are Gang Leaders Giantology, The Tattered Press, Zani UK, HOAX & Shame Radiant. She is currently working on a novel about a girl clown set in the 1950s entitled The Gorgeous Funeral, as well as a collection of short stories set in Los Angeles called Dying on the Vine. Her book Sirens, was released by Gesture Press in 2020. She likes gold teeth, cats, and trees, and lives with her husband Max, and their cats Kiki Pamplemousse Fontaine and Charlie Chaplin in Boulder, Colorado
Sarah Elizabeth Schantz is primarily a fiction writer living on the outskirts of Boulder, Colorado with her family in a Victorian-era farmhouse they rent from the city where they are surrounded by open sky, century-old cottonwoods, and coyote. Her first novel Fig debuted from Simon & Schuster in 2015 and was selected by NPR as A Best Read of the Year before winning a 2016 Colorado Book Award. She is currently working on a collection of short stories titled Tales of Dead Children and two novels, Roadside Altars and Just Like Heaven. She teaches creative writing as an adjunct at Naropa University, faculty for Lighthouse, and through her own workshop series and author services, (W)rites of Passage.
Max Davies is known for his diverse musical work on guitar and as a producer and multi-instrumentalist. His music has been featured in Artforum, Guitar World and Guitarist magazines, at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the American College Dance Festival, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and the Everest Awakening benefit album. He has worked with a variety of artists, musicians, and writers including: Thurston Moore, Anne Waldman, Lydia Lunch, Toni Oswald, Clark Coolidge, Cecilia Vicuna, Eleni Sikelianos Gregory Alan Isakov, and many others.
Leo Reis-Larson hails from the picturesque Hudson Valley in New York, where the natural beauty and local culture served as early inspiration. While pursuing studies in art practices at the University of Colorado, Leo found his artistic voice through the lens of photography. Although his primary focus lies in this medium, Leo is no stranger to experimenting with alternative photography practices and exploring diverse visual mediums. Influenced deeply by renowned photographers and teachers Albert Chong and Jeff Bark, Leo's work reflects a blend of historical reverence and innovation. Drawing inspiration from his mentors, he has crafted a distinctive style that navigates the rich narrative of photography's past while engaging with its evolving role in the contemporary art landscape. Leo Reis-Larson's art is a testament to the enduring power of photography, inviting viewers into a dialogue that spans generations and challenges conventions. With each image, he invites us to ponder the limitless possibilities of visual storytelling and the unfolding narrative of art history.
FIRE THROUGH DRY GRASS
JULY 25th 2024
Fire Through Dry Grass
A film by Andres Jay Molina and Alexis Neophytides
Screening
7-9:00 PM
FREE
Fire Through Dry Grass uncovers in real-time the devastation experienced by residents of a New York City nursing home during the coronavirus pandemic. Co-Directors Alexis Neophytides and Andres “Jay” Molina take viewers inside Coler, on Roosevelt Island, where Jay lives with his fellow Reality Poets, a group of mostly gun violence survivors.
Wearing snapback caps and Air Jordans, Jay and the other Reality Poets don’t look like typical nursing home residents. They used to travel around the city sharing their art and hard-earned wisdom with youth. Now, using GoPros clamped to their wheelchairs, they document their harrowing experiences on “lock down.” Covid-positive patients are moved into their bedrooms; nurses fashion PPE out of garbage bags; refrigerated-trailer morgues hum outside residents’ windows. All the while public officials deny the suffering and dying behind Coler’s brick walls.
The Reality Poets’ rhymes flow throughout the film, underscoring their feelings that their home is now as dangerous as the streets they once ran and—as summer turns to fall turns to winter—that they’re prisoners without a release date. But instead of history repeating itself on this tiny island with a dark history of institutional neglect and abandonment, Fire Through Dry Grass shows these disabled Black and brown artists refusing to be abused, confined, erased.
PERFORMATIVE ACTIONS FOR RADICAL SELF LOVE
August 9th 2024 - September 20th 2024
Opening Reception / Performance August 9th 7-9pm
Closing Reception / Performance September 20th 7-9pm
PERFORMATIVE ACTIONS FOR RADICAL SELF LOVE
Curated by MG Bernard and Genevieve Waller
Performance work by Ále Campos, Su Kaiden Cho, Venus Cruz, Steven Frost, Kalyn Heffernan, Juntae TeeJay Hwang, David Mramor, Natalie Sharp
A group exhibition that investigates the connections between queer identity, sexuality, and performance. Made up of documentation, props, and remnants, as well as live performances by local artists, we envision this exhibit as a gathering together of different perspectives on queer sexuality as expressed through the medium of performance art. With this show, we’re particularly interested in looking at the ways that sexuality is often an invisible aspect of identity that we perform publicly and privately, and the ways that LGBTQ+ sexualities can challenge and open up our notions of what is sexy and who is sexy...outside of mainstream culture and beyond the status quo.
SEPTEMBER 6TH - FRAME
September 6th 2024
The Literary Ladies Present
F R A M E
A Literary Salon
7-9pm
Curated by Toni Oswald and Sarah Elizabeth Schantz
(Details coming soon)
JAVIER FLORES and STUDENTS
October 1st - 5th 2024
Javier Flores and Students Exhibit
East Window will be hosting an exhibit of visual art by students of artist, educator and activist Javier Flores.
Details forthcoming.
MADELIFE STUDENT / MENTOR EXHIBIT
October 14th-19th 2024
Madelife Mentor / Student Exhibit
East Window will be hosting an exhibit of visual art, music and writing created by Made Life students and their mentors. This event will be held at East Window.
Details Forthcoming
Madelife is the ultimate launchpad for emerging artists and entrepreneurs, fostering collaboration, mentorship, and continuous growth. Madelife empowers and elevates artists and creative entrepreneurs through an expansive visual art workspace, design and sound studio in Boulder, Colorado. Participants are immersed in a vibrant creative ecosystem, featuring a unique mentorship-based Creative Accelerator program.
NOVEMBER 1ST - FRAME
November 1st 2024
The Literary Ladies Present
F R A M E
A Literary Salon
7-9pm
Curated by Toni Oswald and Sarah Elizabeth Schantz
(Details coming soon)
JEREMY DENNIS
November 1st 2024 - February 28 2025
(Window)
Nothing Happened Here
Photography by Jeremy Dennis
Jeremy Dennis (Shinnecock Indian Nation, Southampton, NY.) His series Nothing Happened Here, explores the violence/non-violence of post-colonial Native American psychology. Reflecting upon his own experience and observations in his community, the Shinnecock Reservation in Southampton, New York, specifically the burden of the loss of culture through assimilation, omission of his history in school curriculum, and loss of land and economic disadvantage. This series illustrates the shared damaged enthusiasm of living on indigenous lands without rectification.
The artist states, “The arrows in each image act as a symbol of everlasting indigenous presence in each scene. The images may be as compelling if the subjects were of indigenous descent, but the decision to use non-native subjects reveals a shared burden. The question remains of how to overcome this troubled past.”
Dennis was one of 10 recipients of a 2016 Dreamstarter Grant from the national non-profit organization Running Strong for American Indian Youth. He has received the Creative Bursar Award from Getty Images in 2018 to continue his series Stories—Indigenous Oral Stories, Dreams and Myths. His artist residencies include: Yaddo (2019), Byrdcliffe Artist Colony (2017), North Mountain Residency, Shanghai, WV (2018), MDOC Storytellers’ Institute, Saratoga Springs, NY (2018). Eyes on Main Street Residency & Festival, Wilson, NC (2018), Watermill Center, Watermill, NY (2017) and the Vermont Studio Center hosted by the Harpo Foundation (2016). He has been part of numerous group and solo exhibitions. Jeremy currently lives and works in Southampton, New York on the Shinnecock Indian Reservation.
JOSEPH TISIGA
July 5th 2024- October 19th 2024
(Window)
An Elegance Unknown To Scoundrels
Joseph Tisiga is a multidisciplinary artist based in Montreal and a member of the Kaska Dena First Nation. He maintains a multidisciplinary practice that is rooted in painting and drawing, but also draws from performance, photography, sculpture, and installation. His work reflects upon notions of identity and what contributes to this construct–community, nationality, family, history, location, real and imagined memories. Tisiga’s works look at cultural and social inheritance, the mundane, the metaphysical and the mythological, often all at once and on the same surface. This conflation of interests and perspectives plays itself out in the artist’s narratives, which are distinctly non-linear, cross cultural and supernatural. Tisiga recently held solo exhibitions at the Musée d’art de Joliette (Joliette) and the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University (East Landing). Other notable exhibitions include those held at the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), the Winnipeg Art Gallery (Winnipeg), MASS MoCA (North Adams), the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, (Santa Fe), and at the West Vancouver Museum (Vancouver). Tisiga’s work is found in institutional collections as well as in numerous private and corporate collections. Tisiga is the recipient of The Yukon Art Prize (2021), the Sobey Art Award (2020), and the REVEAL Indigenous Art Award (2017).
Joseph Tisiga - An Elegance Unknown To Scoundrels : 2014 - Watercolor on paper - Courtesy of the artist and Bradley Ertaskiran
CALL FOR WORK - REGRET
Call For Work for 2025 Month of Photography Festival
Opens in November 2024
Artists are invited to submit works that delve into the complex and universal theme of regret, remorse and adjacent emotions associated with choices made and opportunities missed. This exhibit will foster empathy and contemplation while challenging us to confront our own personal regrets and their relationship to our broader social and cultural positions.
More details on the submission process coming soon!
PATIO GALLERY GRAND OPENING
June 7th - September 27th 2024
Patio Gallery Grand Opening
Opening Reception: June 7th
7 - 9:00pm
FREE
East Window is delighted to announce the opening of our new outdoor patio gallery on June 7th 2024! In addition to our indoor main gallery, window gallery and bathroom gallery, visitors can now view even more compelling artworks 24 hours a day /7 days per week.
For this inaugural exhibit we are honored to present works by Lisa Berley.
Excerpts from her book FINDING NEFESH: A Collage of Loss
In loving memory of the artist’s son Aaron.
Lisa Berley visual artist and poet, works at the intersection of art and media. Berley began her pioneering work as an artist for Aurora Systems, developing one of the first computer graphics and animation systems for television. Lisa raised a family, wrote a blog, and exhibited mixed media/collage works in galleries across Long Island culminating in a one-woman show in Geneseo, New York. In 2016 Berley moved to Boulder, Colorado and after her son's accidental death from a fall, began using methods similar to her collage paintings to create hybrid erasure poetry/collage. Her nonlinear approach to poetry/collage, redacting found words to create new reductive fragments, mirrors her journey of profound grief. Unlost Journal Issue 17: “The Thing”, “Sweet Sorrow”, “Home Again”, and “Their Earth” Inverted Syntax Issue 3: “The selves looking”, “The Dream The Dream”, and “How It Changed”Inverted Syntax Issue 4: “truths”, “HE AT ONCE LET GO”.
DENEISHA LeARTISTE
East Window Presents
Deneishia LeArtiste "Origin Story" Screening, Workshop, and Artist Talk
June 22nd 2024
12:00 - 3:00pm
FREE
Bringing her personal biography to life with "Origin Story", Deneishia LeArtiste (she/her) joins East Window this June to share the pathways she has walked in this life. In collaboration with Melissa Ivey (the Musical Doula), LeArtiste's "Origin Story" became a ballad; a soundtrack. Both a reflection and a statement, "Origin Story" brings together powerful imagery, with poignant spoken word, and music directed, composed, and produced by Melissa Ivey. To celebrate the birth of "Origin Story" into the world, LeArtiste simultaneously released "Fu*k The Fairy Tale: The Art of Living Happily Ever After". She will share a short reading from this book during her time at East Window this June.
There will also be a short workshop and Artist Talk during this event.
Deneishia LeArtiste is a performance artist embracing the storytelling traditions of her ancestry. Answering the call of the Western European bard, the West African Griot, and the Ogallala traditions of teaching through tales, LeArtiste unites our communities by telling our stories. She processes and explores her ancestral experiences through poetry, visual arts, music, and movement. To date, LeArtiste has authored two books: "Everything Hurts" and "Fu*k The Fairy Tale: The Art of Living Happily Ever After". She currently resides in Hawaii, where she is celebrating her own version of happily ever after.
LAUREN SAMBLANET
MAY 17th 2024
Book Launch
With readings by Lauren Samblanet, Hillary Leftwich, Ashley Howell Bunn, Violet Mitchell
7-9:00 PM
FREE
Taking its cues from the New Narrative writing movement, like a dog considers how sexual identity is morphed, hidden, and denied by cultural forces like film, pornography, rape culture, and sexual semiotics. The speaker of like a dog, writes about her sexuality, sexual trauma, and relationships in the epistolary form to explore how the personal becomes collective and how overt sexuality is necessary for questioning dominant ideologies. The intimacy (or perhaps voyeurism) that is opened through the epistolary form is balanced with film analysis, focusing on the films of Lars von Trier, as a way to move away from the speaker’s experiences and into the social forces that seek to define us.
Amidst these letters are images from a handwritten journal where blood, hair, vaginal fluids, and bodily residues are used to direct the shape and content of the writing surrounding them. The tactility of the journal delivers the reader to the body, not as an intellectualized object, but rather as the physical, messy, oozing force that it is.
Not nonfiction or fiction, in between gossip and scholarly film analysis, like a dog exists in a liminal place. This liminal zone offers the speaker a site to rip away the layers of cultural conditioning surrounding sexuality and relationships, and to peek at what lies beneath. This interrogation of identity may not lead to answers but the speaker of like a dog is able to finally hear her own voice and to begin the work of rebuilding an identity that is bloomed from within.
Lauren Samblanet is a hybrid writer who cross-pollinates with other forms of making & other makers of forms. some of her writing has been published in a shadow map: an anthology by survivors of sexual assault, fence, dreginald, entropy, dream pop press, passages north, bedfellows, and the tiny. like a dog is her first book. she offers workshops through reinventing the creative process, which helps makers build more embodied, pleasurable, and emotionally safe creative practices
Hillary Leftwich (she/her) is the author of Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock and Aura, a memoir. She owns Alchemy Author Services and Writing Workshop and teaches writing at several universities and colleges along with Lighthouse Writers, a local nonprofit for adults and youth. She focuses her writing on class struggle, single motherhood, trauma, mental illness, the supernatural, ritual, and the impact of neurological disease. On the outskirts of the writing world, she is also a professional Tarot and Bones reader and teaches Tarot and Tarot writing workshops focusing on strengthening divination abilities and writing.
Ashley Howell Bunn (she/they) completed her MFA in poetry through Regis University and holds a MA in Literature from Northwestern University. She is an experienced yoga guide trained in many different styles. Her poetry has been published in a variety of online and print publications, and their first chapbook, in coming light, was published in 2022 by Middle Creek Publishing. She is a founding member of The Tejon Collective, an inclusive creative space. They offer somatic writing workshops through their personal business, Howell and Heal, and work as an adjunct instructor of English at Community College of Denver. She lives in South Denver with her child and partner.
Violet Mitchell is a poet and artist residing in Colorado. They earned an MFA in Poetry from the Mile-High MFA Program at Regis University. Violet teaches workshops with the Tejon Collective and has had their paintings featured in art galleries and their painting called ‘Earth-like’ was selected as the book cover for Issue 2 of Inverted Syntax literary journal. Their poems have been published with Heavy Feather Review, Word for Word, South Broadway Ghost Society, along with several other journals. They received the Robert A. O'Sullivan, S.J. Memorial Award for Excellence in Writing in 2019. They are currently working on a poetry manuscript about parallel universes intersecting with grief, entitled ‘Dear Universe, Everything In Me You Eat,” in addition to a graphic novel exploring gender dysphoria, euphoria, and the power of queerness. This graphic novel project will be accompanied by a custom made tarot deck based on characters and events in the story.
To make this event accessible to disabled folks, the author is requiring masks for the reading. Masks will be provided for those who forget.
Also please be aware that “Like A dog” explores sexual abuse/violence, explorations of biphobia and religious trauma so please note a trigger warning for those subjects.
YUKIKO TOMINAGA
May 20th 2024
7-9:00pm
SEE: LOSS. SEE ALSO: LOVE
Published by Simon & Schuster
Book Launch and Reading with the author in person
(More details coming soon)
A tender, slyly comical, and shamelessly honest debut novel following a Japanese widow raising her son between worlds with the help of her Jewish mother-in-law as she wrestles with grief, loss, and—strangest of all—joy.
Shortly after her husband Levi’s untimely death, Kyoko decides to raise their young son, Alex, in San Francisco, rather than return to Japan. Her nosy yet loving Jewish mother-in-law, Bubbe, encourages her to find new love and abandon frugality but her own mother wants Kyoko to celebrate her now husbandless life. Always beside her is Alex, who lives confidently, no matter the circumstance. Four sections of vignettes reflect Kyoko’s fluctuating emotional states—sometimes ugly, other times funny, but always uniquely hers. While freshly mourning Levi, Kyoko and Alex confront another death—that of Alex’s pet betta fish. Kyoko and Bubbe take a road trip to a psychic and discover that Kyoko carries bad karma. On visits back to Japan, Kyoko and her mother clash over how best to connect Alex with his Japanese heritage, and as Alex enters his teenage years and brings his first girlfriend home, Kyoko lets her imagination run wild as she worries about teen pregnancy. In this openhearted and surprising novel about the choices and relationships that sustain us, there are times where Kyoko is lonely but never alone and others in which she is alone but never lonely. Through these moments, she learns how much more there is to herself in the wake of total and unexpected upheaval. See: Loss. See Also: Love. is a testament to how grief isn’t a linear process but is a spiraling awareness of the vast range of human emotion we experience every day.
Yukiko Tominaga was born and raised in Japan. She was a finalist for the 2020 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, selected by Roxane Gay. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Chicago Quarterly Review, The Bellingham Review, among other publications. She also works at Counterpoint Press where she helps to introduce never-before-translated books from Japan to English language readers. See: Loss. See Also: Love. is her first book.
Author Photograph by Mayumi Yamada
SHELLEY NIRO
(Dates TBA)
For Fearless And Other Indians
Shelley Niro is a photographer, painter, sculptor, bead worker, multimedia artist and independent filmmaker. She is a member of the Turtle Clan of the Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) Nation at Six Nations of the Grand River, Ontario.
Niro consistently challenges myths, stereotypes and clichés of Native Americans by presenting work that counters outmoded representations of Indigenous people generated by centuries of colonization. Her work has been shown across Canada, the USA and internationally.
OCCUPIED - BRIAN FOUHY
EXTENDED THROUGH FEBRUARY 29th 2024
Learn more about Brian Fouhy’s Occupied HERE
How do you broach the question of asking to take photos of urinals without getting either laughed at or thrown out?
Photographer Brian Fouhy’s request was more often than not greeted with intrigue and enthusiasm, leading to surprising conversations about all the great bathrooms people have used; a place we all take a mental note of but never choose to talk about; that unspeakable, sometimes neglected room we all unavoidably need. These wonderful conversations led to Fouhy photographing over 100 bathrooms across the United States, 70 of which made their way onto the pages of OCCUPIED (Published 2021 by New Heroes & Pioneers), with 7 photographs of those urinals hanging in the East Window Bathroom Gallery. By including information surrounding the use of each urinal, such as the meal eaten in a restaurant, the weather conditions at the time, or the distance from relevant points of interest, Fouhy adds another layer to the experience beyond just a standard visit to the loo. These photographs will be showing in the East Window Bathroom Gallery beginning December 8th, 2023-January 27, 2024 with an opening reception planned from 7-9 pm on December 8th at our location at 4550 Broadway, Ste c-3b2, in Boulder.
ANNA TSOUHLARAKIS
November 8th 2024 - February 28th 2025
Opening Reception • November 8th • 7-9:00pm
Artist Talk • January 23rd 2025 • 7-9:00pm
Anna in person for both
Anna Tsouhlarakis works in sculpture, installation, video, and performance. She received her BA from Dartmouth College with degrees in Native American Studies and Studio Art. She went on to receive her MFA from Yale University in Sculpture.
Her work has been part of national and international exhibitions at venues such as Rush Arts in New York, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Crystal Bridges Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, and the National Portrait Gallery. Tsouhlarakis has participated in various art residencies including Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Yaddo, and was the Andrew W. Mellon Artist-in-Residence at Colorado College for the 2019-2020 academic year. She was awarded a Creative Capital Grant in 2021 and recently received a 2022 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award.
Tsouhlarakis lives in Colorado and Maine.
This exhibit is funded in part by the Boulder Arts Commission