2020-2022
March 1st - April 24th 2021
Facilitating a survey-exhibit about our experiences with shame began by asking the questions: What can we learn about how we regulate, uphold or challenge social norms, hierarchies or transgressions when shame is activated? How can this powerful moral emotion turn inward, to ourselves, to our bodies, often catalyzing self-harm, self-negation, self-reflection, self-evaluation as well as healing?
A forum for such queries seems particularly relevant at a time when our respective relationships to a climate of amplified national and global conservatism, xenophobia, racism, transphobia, homophobia, and ableism have been significantly challenged.
I invited photographers, writers, visual artists, and non-artists from around the world to make work that collectively addressed their experiences with shame. The nearly 300 photographs, collages, drawings, and texts that were submitted in response look at deeply intimate, broadly political, emotional, physical, social, sexual, interpersonal, intergenerational, and institutional aspects of shame.
“Shame Radiant” hopes to offer an opportunity for participants as well as viewers to explore more of the personhood and less of the pathology of our collective as well as our outlying experiences of shame.
Shame Radiant books have officially arrived! 250 copies have been printed and they are ready to be released into the wild. You can purchase copies below. Thanks again and please stay tuned for future calls from east window.
April 7th - June 28th 2022
A group exhibit curated by Todd Edward Herman, filmmaker, photographer and founding director of east window, is the culmination of an open call for work by nearly one hundred writers and visual artists around the world.
DISGUST is often seen as the bridge between our moral imperatives and the wilds of survival; the cusp of emotion and instinct. Activated in response to what we perceive or imagine as revolting, sick, infectious, diseased, contaminated and thereby threatening, disgust signals our awareness of fissures between feelings of safety and peril, stability and insecurity; of disjunctions that threaten facets of our personal identity and society at large.
Our collective actions relative to our experiences of disgust often bear witness to damaging prejudices and rhetorics, which attempt to conflate those who we perceive as different from ourselves, socially, culturally, politically, sexually, religiously, in age or ability, with vectors of physical or moral contamination. To be clear, this project aims to confront, subvert and transform these prejudices, not reinforce them.
The images and texts which comprise this international group exhibit freely explore issues of bodily function, ownership, control, choice or lack thereof. We see works grappling with violated physical and social borders and hierarchies; the violation of gender boundaries and fluidity; notions of contagion, purity, wellness, disease and how such constructs may be used to ostracize unwanted members of various social groups. What do these representations of our bodies, belongings and psyches, seen through the lens of disgust, really mean to us, that we should impose such powerful and dangerous abstractions upon them? What roles can disgust play in re-shaping other less negative social interactions and in constructing social values that are in turn supportive of those interactions?
The often volatile emotions expressed through the works in this project make it easy to assume that the only story they tell is one of adversarial engagement and oppression. However, is it possible that through these many evocations of violated personal and collective borders, a peculiar sense of solidarity is being revealed? For when an out-group, seen from any side, becomes so close as to be indiscernible from ourselves isn't that when it becomes most threatening?
-- Todd Edward Herman 2021
June 1 - July 28, 2020
Michael Bernard Loggins
FEARS OF YOUR LIFE features excerpts from Michael’s unique handwritten book of the same name. The author battles his fears by listing more than 138 of them. In a recent edition of the cult classic made famous by NPR's This American Life 60 new pages of illustrated portraits are included from the previously unpublished HOW FEARFUL CAN YOU BE? With a new preface by Harrell Fletcher. Michael’s books are available through Manic D Press.
Michael is a writer and visual artist who worked with Creativity Explored an art studio for adults with disabilities in San Francisco, California.
August 1 - 27, 2020
Daniel Green’s artwork conveys an intense and playful fascination with American entertainment and popular culture. Working on wood, cardboard, and paper, Green uses ink to draw figures from television, politics, sports, or history, and then carefully lists dates, titles of shows and songs, cities, and names. Within the dense repetition of his lists we find brief, but direct, personal statements, which comment on his immediate environment and concerns. Daniel’s work has been exhibited internationally.
Green began working at Creativity Explored, an art studio for adults with developmental disabilities in San Francisco, California in 2008. Creativity Explored was was launched by Florence and Elias Katz in 1983, sparked by a worldwide movement toward the deinstitutionalization of people with disabilities, and a growing advocacy for their dignity and self-determination. For over 36 years Creativity Explored has facilitated the careers of hundreds of artists with disabilities by offering space, support and representation.
Daniel Green’s artwork is reproduced with permission from www.creativityexplored.org
"August is a month of meaning, of repression and radical resistance, of injustice and divine justice; of repression and righteous rebellion; of individual and collective efforts to free the slaves and break the chains that bind us...The spirit of Black August moves through centuries of Black, Indian and multi-cultural resistance. It is an emblem of the spirit of freedom.”
September 1 - 27, 2020
east window presents excerpts from Kellye Eisworth’s TOPOGRAPHIES OF PAIN, a series of photographs exploring the ethical implications of the act of bearing witness to the pain of others. Eisworth states, "This relationship relies on the willingness of both participants to see and be seen by the other. Their shared vulnerability collapses distinctions between self and other, where the pain of revealing and the pain of looking at that which is revealed, converge".
Kellye Eisworth is a Los Angeles-based photographer. While much of her work is autobiographical, her photographs often enter into dialogues about larger social norms, exploring themes of memory, pain, vulnerability, and the concepts of innate and constructed identity.
The exhibit consists of five pigment prints on aluminum.
September 30, 2020
THREE SHORT FILMS BY SKY HOPINKA
7 - 9pm
Sky Hopinka is from the Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians. He is a videomaker, photographer, writer, musician and activist. Sky's poetic and visually complex moving image works explore personal positions of homeland, landscape, and the precarity and preservation of indigenous languages.
Paula Gillen : CELEBRITY MASK
October 1 - 28, 2020
east window presents excerpts from Paula Gillen’s CELEBRITY MASK. Gillen's collage series, which unpacks the notion that being a woman in society is very much like being one’s own doppelgänger, watching oneself being watched. Her collages overtly re-stage the techniques and content of mainstream media practices, subverting the original intention and revealing new social and political interpretations. Paula's current work continues to examine women’s roles, gender performativity and patriarchal hierarchies.
Six archival pigment prints are currently on view at east window.
For information on purchasing these works contact Paula directly: www.paulagillen.net
Please have a look at Paula's concurrent exhibit at Ten-Nineteen Gallery in New Orleans through October 17, 2020.
October 29, 2020
SHORT FILMS BY AMIR GEORGE
Running Time 11 minutes
Screens repeatedly between 7 - 9pm
Amir George is a filmmaker and curator, based in Chicago. He is the co-founder of Black Radical Imagination, a touring program of short experimental films and video, focusing on new stories within the diaspora and the boundaries and limitations historically given to people of color in film. As an artist, George creates spiritual stories and fragmented vignettes populated by characters who tend to dwell outside of social norms.
October 29th's program:
Black Gold: A treasure hunt.
Vicissitude: A change of fortune occurs for a winged being. Based on an experience with Erin Christovale. Music and Vocals by Titus Wonsey.
The Encompassed Wisdom of the Inevitable Manifestation: A spell casting of images guided by a voice in the night; recollections of Black Jesus.
Black Chains: Found footage music video for the rap artist formerly known as Supertoy.
November 1 - 29, 2020
I STILL EXIST : Graphics by Renée Millard-Chacon and Micaela Iron Shell-Dominguez
I STILL EXIST, raises awareness around issues of the missing and murdered indigenous women and girls who have long been victimized as a direct result of environmental exploitation and degradation. Renee and Micaela’s graphics strive to link the personhood liability of corporations to redistribute wealth to communities affected by their negligent and criminal behavior.
Renée Millard-Chacon is a writer, educator, Xicana activist, and most importantly the mother of two sons. She is an indigenous womxn of Dine/Azteca descent, fighting for future generations and committed to relating climate justice to social justice. She is the founder of several organizations, including Womxn From The Mountain.
Micaela Iron Shell-Dominguez is a Sicangu Lakota and Chicana, born and raised in Denver, Colorado. She is the Director of Operations and Secretary for the International Indigenous Youth Council and co-founder of Womxn From The Mountain. Micaela’s continued pursuit is to help spread awareness and stop the violence that our womxn and our two-spirit people have endured for centuries.
I STILL EXIST consists of six inkjet prints mounted on aluminum.
This exhibit is a collaboration between Womxn From The Mountain Collective and Spirit of the Sun. Please support Spirit of the Sun for victim advocacy training, self defense classes, and supplies.
For more information please visit: www.womxnfromthemountain.com and www.spiritofthesun.org
December 1, 2020 - January 5, 2021
Susanne Mitchell combines a variety of images and materials in her work tracking the legacy of colonialism from Africa to America. Mitchell’s unsettling juxtapositions generate complex metaphors for the painful history of colonialism in Malawi, where her extended family lives, as well as a means to contemplate current issues and future developments in Africa.
January 3 - 29, 2021
Our ideas of body image are constantly bombarded by the constructs of racism, sexism, ageism, consumerism and ableism. Disabled women are often seen as asexual. Traditionally they are taught to conform to non-disabled beauty standards by passing or hiding their impairments, thereby denying their self-value.
Sandie Yi creates a counter-narrative to myths and stereotypes about disability, which she calls Crip Couture, a form of wearable art that centers on the histories and narratives generated within and performed by the disabled body through everyday social, cultural and political interaction. Her work aims to facilitate dialogue between the wearers and the viewers of these objects.
Yi has merged the idea of prosthetics — which aim to create more-or-less standardized body form and function — and jewelry to make a range of garments, accessories and footwear. Rather than rejecting the notion of physical alteration, Yi has created intimate and empathetic bodily adornments, not as correctional physical aids, but as tools for engaging with newly embodied, deeply personal standards of physical comfort and self-defined ideals of beauty.
As a collection of wearable works, Yi’s Crip Couture has explored the impact of ethical and medical decisions made about the body; the boundary between ethics and aesthetics; the idea of the body in flux; and body ownership (reclaiming the body).
Yi’s wearable objects and their wearers call for a recognition of collective Crip experiences and suggest the possibility for a new genre of wearable art; Disability Fashion. Yi consistently reinvents the meanings of disabled bodies.
Four inkjet prints mounted on aluminum will be on view.
February 1-27, 2021
Sue Coe painter and printmaker, has worked at the juncture of art and social activism to expose injustices and abuses of power, since the 1970s. Thinking of herself as an activist first and artist second, Sue has trained her gaze on a wide variety of ills, translating such diverse topics as the perils of apartheid, the life of Malcolm X, and the horror that is the American meat industry into searing social-political artworks, exhibitions and books.
Coe has appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, The Progressive, Art News, The Nation, among countless others. Her works are part of numerous museum collections and exhibitions, including a retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, and a solo exhibition at MoMA PS1. Coe was awarded the prestigious Dickinson College Arts Award in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art, and most recently the Lifetime Achievement in Printmaking Award by The Southern Graphics Council in Atlanta, Georgia.
east window is honored to host her work this month.
On view: "We are Many. They are Few" - Copyright © 2020 Sue Coe - Courtesy Galerie St. Etienne Inkjet print mounted on aluminum - 72" x 48"
March 1 - 29, 2021
east window celebrates Month of Photography
with
Sonia Soberats’ relationship with photography didn’t begin until she lost her eyesight to glaucoma in the early 1990’s. Soberats uses the technique of Light Painting -- a photographic process utilizing lengthy exposures in total darkness, and hand-held light sources with which Sonia is able to feel, shape, and embellish her subjects. Sonia is a founding member of the New York based collective for blind photographers, Seeing With Photography. Sonia’s work poses fundamental questions about the relationships between perception, imagination, and creation. Her work has been exhibited in galleries around the world.
April 17, 2021
east window presents textile artist Heather D. Schulte's Stitching the Situation: A Collaborative Memorial Of COVID-19 In The U.S.
Stitching the Situation is an ongoing and collaborative project, recording diverse individual and community experiences in real time during the COVID-19 pandemic through community cross-stitching gatherings. This project is an extension of Heather’s textile work, Situation Report a daily cross-stitch documentation of the coronavirus case and death counts in the U.S. The Situation Report panels began as the artist’s way to record cases in the US, and translate them visually with stitch. As cases grew, she could not stitch each individual case or death herself, and began hosting in-person stitching sessions with her neighbors. These panels are now traveling to other areas, as it is safe to do so, inviting more people to contribute their hands and time, marking the impact of the virus on our lives, and sharing their own stories of these times with each other. In a time when gathering in person is difficult, the size and scope of the work offers a socially distanced opportunity to come together creatively, while still respecting public health and safety measures.
For more information about this project visit: www.stitchingthesituation.com
April 1-May 27, 2021
Gregg Deal (Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe) is a provocative contemporary artist who challenges Western perceptions of Indigenous people, touching on issues of race, history, cultural erasure and stereotypes. Through his work—paintings, murals work, performance art, filmmaking and spoken word—Deal critically examines issues and tells stories of decolonization and appropriation that affect Indian Country. Deal’s activism exists in his art, as well as his participation in political movements.
Deal was included in the National Geographic Society Magazine article “Native Americans are Recasting Views of Indigenous Life.” Deal was Native Arts Artist-in-Residence at Denver Art Museum and Artist-In-Residence at UC Berkeley. His art has been exhibited nationally since 2002. Deal has lectured widely at prominent educational institutions and museums, including Denver Art Museum, Dartmouth College Columbia University, and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. His television appearances include PBS’s The Art District, The Daily Show and Totally Biased with Kamau Bell.
east window is honored to host his work.
Above image from "The Others". Deal states “... a new series that re-appropriates old comic book images from the 40's and 50's of Indigenous characters. The dialog is replaced with lyrics from old Punk songs of the 70's, 80's and 90's that resonate with the scene or the greater Indigenous struggle. Each image has been redrawn, recolored and repurposed to embody aspects of stereotype, identity, historical consideration and the intersection of an aspect of American culture (Punk Rock) that has affected my life and has affected innumerable Indigenous youth through the years. These intersections are meant to illustrate the complexity of Indigenous existence, growing up in America amidst things we love and things we hate. While easily viewable as a series of works and speaks to people regardless of connection it has to specific music and bands, it stands on its own illustrating these Indigenous complexities.”
Read article in DARIA by Renée Marino
May 28, 2021
Screening: The Last American Indian on Earth
Running Time: 22 minutes
7pm
Free
A film by Gregg Deal documenting what happens when an unsuspecting public is confronted with the flesh-and-blood version of a stereotype, one that for most is the only authentic expression of what it means to be an Indigenous person of the American continent. This piece is a window into the funny, sarcastic, truthful, and even emotional journey of an artist using himself as an instrument of awareness, exploring questions of Indigenous identity and America’s problematic and often inept relationship with her nation’s First Peoples.
June 1-29, 2021
Chronic mental and physical illnesses are those various body and mind experiences rarely seen in public but which are always present. Individuals with these conditions undergo painful sensations that regularly call for constant care and dependency on self, partners, and technology. Hexus Collective’s installation Zones of Invisibility (Holy Body Bag) ruminates on the “invisibility of chronic illness” offering viewers a crucial understanding of the physicality, spirituality, and dimensionality of crip conditions.
Hexus is a semi-anonymous, artist-led, performance and curatorial collective seeking, finding and promoting mysticism through visual, performance and sound art. Their work is rooted in alterity theory and concerned especially with intersectional activism encompassing disability, queer folks, cyberfeminism, alliances with BIPOC communities, and anticapitalist analysis.
June 30, 2021
8:30 pm
Running Time: 32 min
SINS INVALID : AN UNSHAMED CLAIM TO BEAUTY IN THE FACE OF INVISIBILITY
This documentary witnesses a performance project that incubates and celebrates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and queer and gender-variant artists. Since 2006, Sins Invalid’s performances have explored themes of sexuality, beauty, and the disabled body, impacting thousands through live performance. Sins Invalid is an entryway into the absurdly taboo topic of sexuality and disability, manifesting a new paradigm of disability justice.
July 24, 2021
Readings, Music and a Full Moon
6:30pm
east window invites you to join us for an evening of live musical performance and readings of poetry and fiction by: Toni Oswald, Sarah Elizabeth Schantz, Junior Burke, Hillary Leftwich, Jade Lascelles, Max Davies, and surprise guests.
NoBo Art Center
4929 Broadway
Boulder, Colorado
80304 USA
Sarah Elizabeth Schantz is primarily a fiction writer living on the outskirts of Boulder, Colorado in a Victorian-era farmhouse with her family 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. In addition to being faculty at Lighthouse Writers Workshop, she runs her own creative writing workshop series, (W)rites of Passage. She is currently working on a novel titled Roadside Altars, a novella tentatively titled Just Like Heaven, and maybe a short story collection she'll call Tales of Dead Children. When she isn't reading, writing, or teaching, you can find her daydreaming, making collages, taking moonlit walks around the ponds and prairies that surround her rental, or soaking in a bath with so much salt it might as well be the sea.
Hillary Leftwich is the author of Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock (CCM Press/TheAccomplices 2019). Her hybrid memoir, Aura, is forthcoming from Future Tense Books in 2022. She is the founder and owner of AlchemyAuthor Services & Workshop and teaches creative writing at LighthouseWriters. She focuses her writing on class struggle, single motherhood, trauma,mental illness, the supernatural, ritual, and the impact of neurological disease. She is an intuitive Tarologist and has been reading Tarot for over 25 years coupled with her clair abilities. She is a registered member of the Tarosophy Tarot Association and The Monroe Institute, and is a student at The College of Psychic Studies. She teaches Tarot and Tarot writing workshops focusing on strengthening divination abilities, as well as writing. She lives in Denver with her partner, son, and cat, Larry.
Toni Oswald is a writer & musician 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, & her most recent publications include The Oyez Review, Heroes Are Gang Leader’s Gianthology, & The Tattered Press. She is currently working on a novel about a girl clown set in the 1950s entitled The Gorgeous Funeral, and a collection of short stories set in Los Angeles called Dying on the Vine. Her first book, Sirens, was released by Gesture Press in 2020. She likes gold teeth, cats, and trees, and lives with her partner Max, and their cats Kiki Pamplemousse and Charlie Chaplin in Boulder, Colorado.
Musician, producer and songwriter Max Davies' music has been described as "searing, soaring, and resonant". Guitarist magazine described his solo album "In The Realms Of The Mercury Halo" as "vivid", and "yearns with a sorrowful gravitas." His diverse musical work on guitar, and as a producer and multi-instrumentalist, has been featured at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the American College Dance Festival, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, the Everest Awakening benefit album, and has also been featured in live performance, on many albums, interdisciplinary collaborations, and films. He has worked with a variety of artists, musicians and writers including: Thurston Moore, Anne Waldman, Lydia Lunch, Toni Oswald, Clark Coolidge, Cecilia Vicuna, Steven Taylor, Junior Burke, Julie Patton, Gregory Alan Isakov, Gasoline Lollipops, and many others. His song Written in Water was recently featured on Australian label Cosmic Coffin's compilation Volume 1. His newest single, Meanwhile, was released earlier this year.
Junior Burke’s songs have been performed and recorded by a wide array of artists, including Bob Dylan and Richie Havens, earning him a Gold Record and a Cable Ace Award. Burke is also a novelist, whose most recent book, The Cold Last Swim, was published by Gibson House Press. He lives outside of Boulder.
Jade Lascelles is a writer, editor, drummer, and letterpress printer based in Boulder, Colorado. Her written and visual work has been included in several literary journals and anthologies, the Ed Bowes film Gold Hill, and gallery spaces across the western US. Keep an eye out for her book The Inevitable (forthcoming from Gesture Press in August 2021) and a soon-to-be-released covers album with the band Pantherette.
August 18, 6:30pm MDT
FRAGMENTATION / AMALGAMATION / TRANSFORMATION
NoBo's Thistle Community Gallery
4871 Broadway
Boulder Colorado 80304 USA
Many thanks to all of you for showing up for installment #2 of FRAGMENTATION / AMALGAMATION / TRANSFORMATION, a cut-up + collage + mixed media workshop on the theme of DISGUST.
Immeasurable thanks to Jenny Lorenne for facilitating another amazing evening! Thank you Harris Armstrong for this evening's documentation and NoBo Arts District for making Thistle Community Gallery available for tonight's workshop.
July 2-August 29, 2021
Never Forget
east window is honored to present Nicholas Galanin's Never Forget, a revisioning of the iconic Hollywood sign in Los Angeles California, one of the world's most evocative symbols for ambition, assimilation, misrepresentation and the impacts of settler colonialism. The sign, initially spelled out HOLLYWOODLAND, was erected to promote a whites-only real estate development in 1923. The burgeoning film industry of that time, advancing a white settler mythology of America as the land of the free & home of the brave, attempted to cinematize the surrounding landscape — the ancestral lands of the Tongva and the Cahuilla people, through the same lens. Never Forget directs us towards the possibility of transferring land titles and management back to local Indigenous communities, while reminding us that land acknowledgments become only performative when they do not explicitly support the land back movement. Never Forget refuses to legitimize settler occupation, and reframes a word of generic reduction to a call for collective action. Nicholas Galanin's original sculpture is made of Iron, Paint, and Steel, measuring over 59’ x 360’, and was constructed as part of the Desert X Biennial in Palm Springs, California earlier this year.
Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit / Unangax̂) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is rooted in his perspective as an Indigenous man, connected to the land and culture he belongs to. With incisive and critical observation, Galanin's work advocates for social and environmental justice, centering Indigeneity through concept, form, image, and sound. Galanin celebrates the beauty, knowledge and resilience of Indigenous people. His work counters assimilation; insisting on differences as strengths; working to envision, build and support Indigenous sovereignty. The artist's work has ranged across media, materials and processes over the past twenty years, including sculpture, installation, photography, video and music. Galanin holds a BFA from London Guildhall University in Jewellery Design and an MFA in Indigenous Visual Arts from Massey University in New Zealand, prior to which he apprenticed with master carvers and jewelers in his community; he is represented by Peter Blum Gallery in New York, his music is released by Sub Pop Records in Seattle.
Archival pigment print - Mounted on aluminum - 79" x 48" - © Nicholas Galanin and Lance Gerber - 2021
Photo: courtesy Nicholas Galanin
September 29, 2021
CUT-UP AND COLLAGE WORKSHOP WITH TONI OSWALD
Bus Stop Gallery
6:30pm
4895 Broadway
Boulder Colorado 80304 USA
Many thanks to all of you for showing up for Toni Oswald’s CUT-UP and COLLAGE workshop. Immeasurable thanks to Toni for facilitating such an amazing evening! And thank you NoBo Arts District for making The Bus Stop Gallery available.
September 1 - November 28, 2021
The Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange (CIPX)
Photographs by Will Wilson
Wilson (Diné) observes that American culture remains enamored of one particular moment in a photographic exchange between Euro-American and Aboriginal American societies: the decades from 1907 to 1930 when photographer Edward S. Curtis produced “The North American Indian” photographic series. For many people even today, Native people remain frozen in time in Curtis’s romanticised and stereotypical portraits. Wilson’s CIPX project intends to challenge the documentary mission of Curtis from the standpoint of a 21st century indigenous, trans-customary, cultural practitioner, supplanting Curtis’s Settler gaze and the old paradigm of assimilation with a re-imagined vision of the complex identities of contemporary Native people.
Wilson won the Native American Fine Art Fellowship from the Eiteljorg Museum, and was awarded a prestigious grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Wilson has held visiting professorships at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Oberlin College, and the University of Arizona. He managed the National Vision Project, a Ford Foundation funded initiative at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, and helped to coordinate the New Mexico Arts Temporary Installations Made for the Environment (TIME) program on the Navajo Nation. Wilson is part of the Science and Arts Research Collaborative (SARC) which brings together artists interested in using science and technology in their practice with collaborators from Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia Labs as part of the International Symposium on Electronic Arts, 2012 (ISEA). Recently, Wilson completed an exhibition and artist residency at the Denver Art Museum and is currently the King Fellow artist in residence at the School of Advanced Research in Santa Fe, NM.
June 1 - November 1, 2021
This exhibit was held at 1647 Pearl Street, Boulder, CO 80302
Kacy Jung’s series Gordian Knot addresses the ways in which culture and identity are shaped by capitalism. Jung states, "...with this work, I am trying to respond to questions that are always haunting me. What blinds us from the world and ourselves? What makes us and humanity distorted? How does capital influence our current social-political system? What is this system becoming and what is the American dream that we now believe in?"
east window thought the Pearl Street location was perfect for Kacy's work as it's a street with heavy commerce in Boulder Colorado. It's a complex area of development as well as many recently abandoned businesses, and of multi-generational as well as houseless residents.
Kacy Jung is a Taiwanese visual artist working with photography, photo-sculpture, and site-specific installation based in San Francisco. Kacy's works have been shown/awarded internationally. She is the acceptant of the Harlan Jackson Diversity Scholarship and Headlands Affiliate Artist Program. Her works have been shown at The Untitled Space Gallery in New York, Hastings College in Nebraska, Berkeley Art Museum in California, and multiple galleries in the USA and Taiwan.
Thank you to Andrew Ghadimi for making this space available to east window.
December 1, 2021 - January 28, 2022
THE SILHOUETTE PROJECT
Stories of Cancer Through the Lens of Love
Photographer Dona Laurita’s third incarnation of The Silhouette Project tells the stories of young people’s experiences fighting, surviving, and living with cancer, drawing attention to the underrepresented AYA (adolescent and young adult) cancer community. Through silhouetted images colored by text taken from spoken interviews, The Silhouette Project tells the stories that make these journeys unique and illuminate the aspects that unite the AYA community.
February 24, March 3, 10, 17, 2022
Ecological World Views in Southeast Asian Video
A big Thank you to everyone who made the "Ecological World Views in Southeast Asian Video" screenings possible. An amazing series guest-curated by Brianne Cohen, Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art History, Department of Art & Art History; thank you so much Brianne! Thank you to the Museum of Boulder and Kayla Simmering for housing the screenings and for their hospitality. Thanks to all of the CU Boulder students as well as members of the general public who showed up to make the discussions following each screening so engaging. And of course immeasurable thanks to Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn, Khvay Samnang, Nguyễn Trinh Thi and UuDam Tran Nguyễn for their vision and impeccable videos.
This series is guest curated by Brianne Cohen, Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art History, University of Colorado Boulder. Cohen researches and teaches courses on art concerned with public sphere formation, decolonization, political violence, and ecology and environmentalism. She co-edited the volume, The Photofilmic: Entangled Images in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture (Cornell University Press, 2016), and her book Preventive Publics: Contemporary Art and Nonviolence in 21st-Century Europe (forthcoming with Duke University Press in spring 2023) examines contemporary art that grapples with cross-cultural affiliation and the active imagining of nonviolence in 21st-century Europe. Her new research addresses questions of ecological devastation and the formation of critical publics in Southeast Asia, particularly in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Singapore.
UuDam Tran Nguyen, Serpents’ Tails (2015), 15 minutes
A short documentary of the acclaimed performance Rồng Rắn Lên (Serpents' Tails), an immersive installation of motorbikes whose exhaust systems seem to inflate, feed, and give flight to tubular “serpents”. In Nguyen’s metaphor, humanity wrestles with the by-products of its industry, which continue to wreak environmental imbalance and destruction.
Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn, My Ailing Beliefs Can Cure Your Wretched Desires (2107), 19 minutes
In this film Vietnamese-American artist Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn studies the relationship between humankind and animals, endangered and extinct species, and their symbolic and historic meanings. These investigations are specific to Vietnam’s current state of development, but the broad relationships mirror the global crisis of animal extinction.
Khvay Samnang, Popil (2018), 22 minutes
Khvay’s work critically interrogates the multidimensional character of rituals and politics; exposing the humanitarian and ecological impacts of globalization and its concomitant links to the waves of colonialism and migration which continually demarcate and define the spaces and temporalities of Southeast Asia. Popil develops a complex choreography based around the symbolism of the dragon; which both plays towards Euro-America’s tendency to employ the motif as a blanket symbol for much of East/Southeast Asia, as well as allows for an examination of the manner in which such iconography speaks towards a specifically Chinese or Cambodian mode of identity formation.
Nguyễn Trinh Thi, Letters from Panduranga (2015), 35 minutes
An essay film in the form of a letter exchange, Nguyễn’s personal and poetic film explores the complex legacy of cultural and historical occupation and its ongoing presence in the indigenous Cham community.
Stay tuned for more programs by east window in partnership with CU Boulder.
These screenings were funded through a Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
February 4 - March 31, 2022
Honey don't be afraid. White people aren’t real.
Dread Scott is a visual artist whose work is exhibited across the US and internationally. In 1989, his art became the center of national controversy over its transgressive use of the American flag, while he was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Dread became part of a landmark Supreme Court case when he and others defied the a federal law outlawing his art by burning flags on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. He has presented at TED talk on this.
His work has been included in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, the Walker Art Center, Jack Shainman Gallery, and Gallery MOMO in Cape Town, South Africa, and is in the collection of the Whitney Museum and the Brooklyn Museum. He is a 2021 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and has also received fellowships form Open Society Foundations and United States Artists as well as a Creative Capital grant.
In 2019 he presented Slave Rebellion Reenactment, a community engaged project that reenacted the largest rebellion of enslaved people in US history. The project was featured in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, Christiane Amanpour on CNN and highlighted by artnet.com as one of the most important artworks of the decade.
east window
4949 Broadway
Unit 102-B
Boulder, Colorado 80304
January 11 - March 31, 2022
AFRICAN-AMERICA: Contempt of Greasy Pigs
Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Andre Ramos-Woodard is a contemporary artist whose works evoke feelings of dreams and surrealistic narrative. Primarily working with photography and collage, he conveys ideas of communal and personal identity through internal conflicts. Ramos-Woodard is influenced by personal experiences he went through while discovering his own identity – he is queer and African-American, both of which are well-known targets for discrimination. He uses his art to accent the ideas of separation between him and the viewer, specifically those that may not resonate with the ideas of the “Other” or problems within minority groups in contemporary culture. Ramos-Woodard received his BFA from Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, and has recently completed his MFA at The University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Andre’s exhibit will opened east window’s new gallery east window SOUTH.
east window SOUTH
4949 Broadway
Unit 102-C
Boulder, Colorado 80304
Opening reception on Thursday January 13th, 2022 from 6:30pm - 8:00pm
April 7th - June 28th 2022
DISGUST: unhealthy practices
Curated by Todd Edward Herman
east window SOUTH
4949 Broadway
Unit 102-C
Boulder, Colorado 80304
PURCHASE BOOK HERE
DISGUST: unhealthy practices", a group exhibit curated by Todd Edward Herman, filmmaker, photographer and founding director of east window, is the culmination of an open call for work by nearly one hundred writers and visual artists around the world.
DISGUST is often seen as the bridge between our moral imperatives and the wilds of survival; the cusp of emotion and instinct. Activated in response to what we perceive or imagine as revolting, sick, infectious, diseased, contaminated and thereby threatening, disgust signals our awareness of fissures between feelings of safety and peril, stability and insecurity; of disjunctions that threaten facets of our personal identity and society at large.
Our collective actions relative to our experiences of disgust often bear witness to damaging prejudices and rhetorics, which attempt to conflate those who we perceive as different from ourselves, socially, culturally, politically, sexually, religiously, in age or ability, with vectors of physical or moral contamination. To be clear, this project aims to confront, subvert and transform these prejudices, not reinforce them.
The images and texts which comprise this international group exhibit freely explore issues of bodily function, ownership, control, choice or lack thereof. We see works grappling with violated physical and social borders and hierarchies; the violation of gender boundaries and fluidity; notions of contagion, purity, wellness, disease and how such constructs may be used to ostracize unwanted members of various social groups. What do these representations of our bodies, belongings and psyches, seen through the lens of disgust, really mean to us, that we should impose such powerful and dangerous abstractions upon them? What roles can disgust play in re-shaping other less negative social interactions and in constructing social values that are in turn supportive of those interactions?
The often volatile emotions expressed through the works in this project make it easy to assume that the only story they tell is one of adversarial engagement and oppression. However, is it possible that through these many evocations of violated personal and collective borders, a peculiar sense of solidarity is being revealed? For when an out-group, seen from any side, becomes so close as to be indiscernible from ourselves isn't that when it becomes most threatening?
-- Todd Edward Herman 2022
April 5 - July 28, 2022
Two Spirit Lakota
Photographs by Magdalena Wosinska
east window
4949 Broadway
Unit 102-B
Boulder Colorado 80304
Hours: 10am - 10pm
Magdalena Wosinska was invited to spend several weeks in Pine Ridge Indian reservation, photographing her series "Two Spirit Lakota". Twelve images excerpted from this series will be on view at east window from April 5 - July 28, 2022.
Wosinska's series shows an essential humanity, beauty and complexity of the Two-Spirit community in Pine Ridge, which is often subject to harsh or sensationalized headlines. The photographer states, “I wanted to show the pride, the freedom to be who you are, their confidence and empowerment".
Wosinska’s early personal work, documenting the lives of her friends emerging from the skate and metal music scenes, reveals her willingness to challenge accepted norms for a female photographer. In her efforts to explore complex topics, she documents diverse groups of people in diverse settings. From transgender skate crews, to cowboys in South Central, Wosinska brings a both compassionate and critical eye to settings that are thought-provoking, beautiful, and at times even controversial, always inspiring the viewer to abandon passivity and question what they are seeing.
Magdalena Wosinska was born in Katowice, near Krakow in Poland, in 1983. She arrived in the USA in 1991 and lived in Arizona before settling in Los Angeles in 2004.
Images: Courtesy Magdalena Wosinska
August 25 - October 28, 2022
GEOMETRIC FRUSTRATIONS
Marina Kassianidou is a visual artist whose work focuses on relationships between mark and surface. Her current practice combines painting, drawing, collage, installation, and site-responsive work. She lives and works between Boulder, Colorado, USA, and Limassol, Cyprus.
She graduated from Stanford University, where she was a CASP/Fulbright scholar, with degrees in Studio Art and Computer Science (both with Distinction). Upon graduation, she was awarded the Arthur Giese Memorial Award for Excellence in Painting by the Stanford University Department of Art and Art History. She obtained an M.A. in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London, UK. In 2015, she completed a Ph.D. in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, UK.
She has exhibited her work in Australia, Belgium, Cyprus, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Spain, the UK, and the USA. Group exhibitions include Mediterranea 16 Young Artists Biennial: Errors Allowed (Mole Vanvitelliana, Ancona, Italy), Tradition Today: Exploring Conditions to Recreate It (House of Cyprus, Athens, Greece), Limassol: The Aftermath of Development (First Municipal Housing Buildings, Limassol, Cyprus), Ar(t)chaeology: Intersections of Photography and Archaeology (NiMAC, Nicosia, Cyprus), WADS (Ars Electronica 2020), and The Immigrant Artist Biennial 2020 (New York, USA). She has had solo exhibitions at Gloria Gallery and Thkio Ppalies in Nicosia, Cyprus, The Center for Drawing, Tenderpixel Gallery, and Chelsea College of Arts in London, UK, North Branch Projects in Chicago, Illinois, Yes Ma’am Projects in Denver, Colorado, and the Moreau Center for the Arts in Notre Dame, Indiana. Her work is found in several private and public collections, including the Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture.
Selected awards include grants from the A. G. Leventis Foundation and fellowships at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, Ragdale Foundation, and Residencia Internacional de Arte Can Serrat. She is a recipient of the 2016 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant.
Her writings have appeared in the journals RevistArquis, The International Journal of the Image, and Journal of Contemporary Painting, among others. She has published the books How to Know: A Space (Nicosia: Thkio Ppalies, 2016), Μπαίνοντας στην εικόνα οι λέξεις (Nicosia: EI.KA, 2017), and Exercise Book (Nicosia: P. S. Artist Led Projects, 2018).
This exhibit received funding and support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and NEST studio for the arts.
August 8 - October 31, 2022
Leroy F. Moore Jr. and Ace Robles — KRIP HOP: Volume 1
east window presents excerpts from Leroy F. Moore Jr’s graphic novel, “KRIP HOP: Volume 1” illustrated by Ace Robles.
African American, disabled, poet and disability justice activist, Leroy F. Moore Jr. is co-founder of the Emmy award winning and internationally acclaimed Krip Hop Nation, whose mission is to shine a light on the talents, history and rights of Hip-Hop artists and other musicians with disabilities. Krip Hop politics, theory and art strive to bring disabilities from the margins to the center of Black cultural, economic, social and political life. Leroy's Krip Hop is a worldwide community of artists where people with disabilities can speak out, about, and back to the social structures that exclude people based on disability, race, sexuality, and many other marginalized identities.
Ace Robles is a Filipino American artist. He, his partner and daughter live in the Bay Area where he works hard in the service industry while making revolutionary art for the people.
November 5th 2022
Guerilla Joy a workshop facilitated by Jade Lascelles
Presented byThe Dairy Arts Center and East Window as part of the 2023 Month of Photography Festival
Jade spoke about pleasure activism (adrienne maree brown) and guerilla art. Participants did some writing and indulged in the sheer joy and curiosity of creating pieces of joyful art to bring out into the world as an act of resistance.
November 11, 2022
Poetry Reading by Crisosto Apache and Others
7-9pm
The New East Window Gallery
4550 Broadway
Suite C-3B2
Boulder Colorado 80304
Crisosto Apache is originally from Mescalero, New Mexico (US), on the Mescalero Apache Reservation, currently lives in the Denver metro area in Colorado, with their spouse. They are Mescalero Apache, Chiricahua Apache, and Diné (Navajo) of the 'Áshįįhí (Salt Clan) born for the Kinyaa'áanii (Towering House Clan) and are Assistant Professor of English at the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design. They hold an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Crisosto’s debut collection is GENESIS (Lost Alphabet). Crisosto’s second forthcoming collection is Ghostword out by Gnashing Teeth Publication mid-2022. Some of the poems in this collection have appeared in The Rumpus, Loch Raven Review, the Poetry Foundation’s POETRY Magazine, ANMLY Magazine, Digging Through The Fat, McGraw Hill Publishing, and most recently When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through (WW Norton), edited by Joy Harjo, et. al.
They continue advocacy work for the Native American LGBTQ / ‘two-spirit’ identity.
Joining Crisosto for this evening of poetry are Mariana Bastias, Benjamin Burney, and T.M. Spring, all of whom were carefully selected by our curator for the evening, Emily Berkes.
Mariana Bastias is a second-year undergraduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder, pursuing bachelor’s degrees in Creative Writing and Psychology, and intends on becoming a full-time writer. She intertwines her passion for storytelling into her poetry.
Born in Tulsa, OK, J. Benjamin Burney is receiving his master’s in Fine Art and Business at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Benjamin is a poet who specializes in creating immersive installations using performance and mixed media art. He is the Owner and Creative Director of Zoid Art Haus, a design house based in Denver, Colorado that uses storytelling to create experiences, products, and services geared toward making a more inclusive, equitable, and empathetic society.
Having experienced a near-death experience in 2013, T.M. Spring returned to this life committed to the path of art and storytelling. Photography is her daily meditation, a consciousness of presence and attention. Ms. Spring is a survivor of cancer, sexual assault, and domestic violence. She lives with a traumatic brain injury (TBI) and complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD), along with chronic pain and physical limitations from the traumas and her words illustrate her experiences and visions of love and interconnectedness among all living things of this Earth.
November 12th 2022
Transmissions in the Field of the Ecstatic a workshop facilitated by Toni Oswald
Presented byThe Dairy Arts Center and East Window as part of the 2023 Month of Photography Festival
A writing and visual art workshop on the theme of Joy. What makes you belly laugh? How do you feel when you dance with abandon? How do you experience sitting in the middle of a grove of trees? Participants explored the senses, wrote, collaged, and painted their way towards the joy of the creative act in an attempt to return to that sense of wonder that we all knew as children.
November 19th 2022
The Dairy Arts Center in collaboration with East Window will be hosting Cherophobia | A Creative Writing Workshop for Artists Regarding the Fear of Joy, Saturday November 19th, 5:00pm at The Dairy Arts Center, facilitated by Sarah Elizabeth Schantz.
Cherophobia is classified as an anxiety disorder related to participation in activities that could make a person happy as well as the actual experience of joy.
Through a series of writing prompts, participants will explore joy as a cycle of anticipation, event, and aftermath. Participants do not need to identify with the condition of cherophobia or even be familiar with the term; the only prerequisites needed are being human and curiosity.
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.
November 27th 2022
Indigenous People’s Month, Celebration and Community Gathering with The PlentyWolf Medicine Youth Program
1-5pm
The New East Window Gallery
4550 Broadway
Suite C-3B2
Boulder Colorado 80304
Thanks to everyone who helped to make such a wonderful gathering at East Window! Chief Lee PlentyWolf, Charlie PlentyWolf, Eryn Lula PlentyWolf, Red Feather Woman, The PlentyWolf Singers, Xae Rios, Felix Evans, Amanda Coslor all of the amazing craftspersons and of course all of you who showed up to support the PlentyWolf Youth Medicine Program and Indigenous Peoples Month.
December 9th 2022
Reading by Carolyn Kerchof
Boulder COVID Stories
East Window is happy to host a reading from Carolyn Kerchof's COVID Stories.
Kerchof will read excerpts from “Boulder Covid Stories: Notes from the Pandemic”. This event is to celebrate the author’s official launch of the book this month. The publication is a printed collection of creative nonfiction stories that are based on interviews with people who openly shared how the pandemic has impacted them. This carefully cultivated collection of nonfiction is a meditation on community and our anxieties about the spaces around us, both public and private. Q&A to follow Carolyn's reading
Kerchof is a communication designer who has worked in academic settings, care contexts, and on sustainability initiatives. Currently based in Boulder, Colo., the writer and graphic designer focuses her work on building community through print media. Over the course of her career, Kerchof has created over twenty magazines and zines.
Tune into KGNU’s Morning Magazine where Carolyn Kerchof will talk about the making of her book.