#66: Francis Roces

Last week, we introduced Powerhaüs Artist-in-Residence (PAIR) Program fine-art resident Charlie Boots; now meet his fashion-designing counterpart, Francis Roces, a familiar face to those in Denver’s fashion scene. He’s been plying the needle and thread for nearly thirty years, and is best-known around here for his clothing line, KimonoDragons, which imaginatively blends quirky fabrics and an Asian sensibility into one-of-a-kind pieces for men and women.

Selected for the three-month PAIR residency by local fashion celebrity Mondo Guerra, Roces is working with Powerhaüs Studio mentor Mona Lucero on improving the business side of his fashion house; his fun fashion will be on public display next at the June 8 Paint the Runway benefit for the Denver Art Society and Camp ArtReach.

We asked Roces to answer our 100CC questionnaire; read his replies at Westword.com.

#67: Emily K. Harrison

Emily K. Harrison is a theatrical powerhouse: In addition to guiding and directing Boulder’s inventive square product theatre, she’s an actor, teacher and booster of alternative theater along the Front Range, forever advocating for her own company and others engaged in the same kind of newfangled, original play-making. Harrison has a lot of ideas about theater and what it should bring to the community — as evidenced by her answers to our 100CC questionnaire, which she turned it into something all her own. Continue reading for Harrison’s eloquent answers and a look at what’s on square product’s plate in the fall and beyond.

Read what Emily had to say at Westword.com.

Emily K. Harrison and Jason Maxwell, in “The Ding Dongs.”

#68: Charlie Boots
Who is Charlie Boots? Yesterday you might not have known his name, but today Boots (aka Aaron Mulligan) is ready for his closeup. The young artist will make his public debut this weekend as the first-ever visual-arts fellow of the Powerhaüs Artist-in-Residence (PAIR) Program at Powerhaüs Studio, a three-month studio residency and mentorship offered by Westword MasterMInds and studio-mates Mona Lucero, Lauri Lynnxe Murphy and Jimmy Sellars. He’ll be joined by new fashion resident Francis Roces, selected for PAIR by fashion celebrity Mondo Guerra.

Here’s how Boots describes himself:

Born and raised a mutant of suburbia, he hesitantly claims Colorado Springs as his home town. His early attempts at art produced sub-par drawings of superheroes and Japanese cartoon characters. Perhaps wisely, Boots gave up on art until it became his only option, after dropping out of a high school math class. Since then, he has studied sculpture, ceramics and drawing at the University of Northern Colorado and, beginning in 2010, painting at Metro State University of Denver. It is in the field of painting, under the tutelage of Carlos Fresquez and other outstanding mentors, that Boots has found a meaningful way of passing the time. Boots has since shown his paintings with RAW: Denver at City Hall, at the Artwork Network Gallery, and at the Center for Visual Arts. Primarily, he paints in the traditional oil medium, focusing on the human form and pop culture iconography. Some have called his work “interesting.”

That’s a good first introduction, but you’ll learn more when Powerhaüs powers up for the first monthly Powerhaüs Lounge & Popup Shop, which promises to become a fixture at the studio enclave on the last Saturday of every month. Along with a sale of affordable art and fashions by Mona Lucero, the event will introduce new, local talent in a variety of disciplines, with help from host Onus Spears, who will conduct a chat-fest with Boots and Roces this month. Visit the Facebook event page for details.

In the meantime, we decided to prime the pump by inviting Charlie Boots to answer our 100CC questionnaire. His insights follow; keep watching the 100 Colorado Creatives series on the Show and Tell blog for our 100CC post on Francis Roces.

Read his responses at Westword.com.

Charlie Boots, “Bored.”

#69: Bruce Price

A painter who started out as a musician, Bruce Price learned from his mentor, the pattern painter Clark Richert, at the Rocky Mountain School of Art + Design, and eventually stretched and bent those lessons into something that suited him better. The resulting work, abstractions expressed in a looking-forward way, have morphed into new dimensionalities that challenge the flatness of traditional painting. It looks simple, sometimes rough, but there is a careful structure behind it all.

That’s evident in Price’s smart show that just opened at the Denver Art Museum (it runs, as part of the multi-exhibition Spun, through September 22), featuring works on paper — really more mixed-media collages than paintings — from over the last few years. That show includes fascinating three-dimensional paper constructions called “Follies.”

That more sculptural style of work will be explored more closely in another show, Purity Is Death, Transgression Divine, which opened Thursday, May 23, at the Emmanuel Gallery on the Auraria campus. Purity takes the dimensional works larger, in the form of painted canvas boxes — work a viewer must walk around to take in fully. There will be reception from 5 to 8 p.m. Thursday; the exhibit continues through June 28.

We asked Price, who now teaches at RMCAD and is a member of the Plus Gallery stable, to take our 100CC questionnaire, and his answers follow. Not surprisingly, they are minimal, yet open-ended.

Read his answers at Westword.com.

Bruce Price, “Folly #4,” 2012, acrylic, fabric, sand and paper, 6″ x 3.5″ x 8″6″.

#70: Mare Trevathan

Mare Trevathan gets around. The theatrical jill-of-all-trades works her chosen field from every angle: as an actor, director, teacher, talking-book reader, collaborator and public-relations expert, going from one spotlight to another as the muse moves her. Trevathan is not only a familiar face on some of the city’s best stages, from Curious Theatre and the LIDA Project to the Denver Center Theatre Company, but she also finds space on some of its smaller ones, from Off-Center@The Jones to the Denver Children’s Theatre at the Mizel Arts and Culture Center.

Every December, Trevathan joins GerRee Hinshaw, Melanie Owen Padilla and Jim Ruberto to put on the comic variety show Balls! A Holiday Spectacular, a holiday-season fundraiser full of good cheer and — sometimes — sock puppets. She works with schoolkids through Think 360 Arts and, more recently, joined Boulder’s women-run LOCAL Theater Company.

In May, Trevathan put on her director’s hat for Off-Center@The Jones’s season closer, SWEAT: Improv on Bikes, which is more or less exactly what it sounds like: a long-form, musical improv performed by actors who are actively pedaling.

While wrapping our heads around how someone directs such a show, we asked Trevathan to wrap her head around our 100CC questionnaire.

Read her answers at Westword.com.

Mare in 2012 with GerRee Hinshaw, Melanie Owen Padilla and Jim Ruberto putting on their comic variety show “Balls! A Holiday Spectacular.”

#71: Lauri Lynnxe Murphy

In Denver’s close-knit arts community, everyone knows Lauri Lynnxe Murphy. Even when she’s gone, as she was for a couple of years while she was earning a graduate degree in Ohio, she remains a force here. Murphy sometimes shrugs it off, asking, “Why me?” But while she’s so wholly immersed in her work and her process, Murphy is also equally engaged in the world around her: She’s opinionated, enjoys great enthusiasms and is an expert on survival as an artist who is doing exactly what she was born to do. People look up to her — and they like her, too.

A member of Westword‘s first class of MasterMinds, Murphy remains occupied with the import of that designation: She still stands on the front line, fighting for artists’ rights and paying it forward by staying involved in the MasterMind selection process. And first and foremost, Murphy is an artist’s artist, bursting with commitment and the need to create.

Her list of accomplishments is almost too long to relate here, so we decided to let Murphy speak for herself by answering the 100CC questionnaire.

Read her eloquent answers at Westword.com.

Lauri Lynnxe Murphy, “Swoop,” detail. Art collaboration with bees.

To view the video about endo/exo, please click here. We also encourage you to visit the exhibition page on our website to view all of the works by Theodore.

In addition, David B. Smith gallery is hosting on Thursday, June 13, from 7-8 an artist talk with Michael Theodore during the closing week of this exhibition.

endo/exo, a kinetic art installation by Michael Theodore from David B. Smith on Vimeo.

Image: Matt Scobey, design rough for a quilt collaboration with Rebecca Peebles.

#72: Matt Scobey
Matt Scobey is a practical artist and jack-of-all-trades creative with a jones for graphic design, illustration, hand-lettering, whimsical puzzles and patterns, and grassroots collaborative projects. Some of those collaborations have been with the art collective Bored of Directors, others with underground publications, art museums and film festivals.

Scobey has also worked hand in hand with Create Denver, building an installation at the Spire during Create Denver Week 2011; this year, he’s contributing flexible design elements to a co-working element of the city agency’s City Beautiful 2.0 exhibit, which opens at the McNichols Building on Friday, May 10, with a reception from 5 to 8 p.m.

How does a young artist like Scobey, with many skills and interests that sometimes fly under the radar, make it in the big city? We asked him to answer our 100CC questionnaire; Scobey’s take on the artist’s life follows.

Read his responses at Westword.com.

#73: Norman Broomhall and Jean Albus

Norman Broomhall raises chickens, sells vintage objects and mirrors antiqued by hand, plays the guitar and takes photographs; Jean Albus is a photographer, as well. Both are inspired by the call of nature and, together, they’ve created Into the Within, an installation that’s been creating a buzz since it opened at Hinterland Art Space on April 12.

The heart of Into the Within — which has something to do with magpie nests, secret places and a kind of spiritual naturalism — is a walk through a thicket, realistically recreated by the artists inside Hinterland and lined with nests, hidden altars, images and bits of everyday flotsam and found objects. It is haunting, magical and supernatural — and about to end its run at the RiNo gallery.

But first, Broomhall and Albus will host a First Friday closing reception at Hinterland from 6 to 10 p.m. on Friday, May 3, offering a last chance to experience their symbolic woodland world. Visit Hinterland online for details.

Though Albus lives in Montana, she’s shown work in local galleries and calls Denver “my big city — only eight hours away.” And because her participation in Into the Within is so necessary to its impact, we asked her to join Broomhall in tackling our 100CC quiz as a duo, because, well, because. Every now and then, an honorary Coloradan passes through our state.

Read their answers to the 10CC quiz by Susan Froyd at Westword.com.

Ten finalists were selected from a cadre of musicians, entertainers and visual artists who auditioned and entertained the judges and spectators in April at the Riverwalk. The performers you will see from June through September are:

• Ijahmus Rhyme, Rapper
• Izotov Dance Academy, Dance Studio
• Tammy D, Guitar/Vocalist
• SCTC Players, Song/Dance
• Sisters and Strings, Jazz and Blues Band
• Fingers ‘n Frets, Steel Guitar
• Edison in the Attic, Band
• Stephen Dey, Guitar/Vocalist
• Premiere Ballet, Ballet Company
• Meggy, Guitar/Vocalist

Street Beat is sponsored by the Pueblo Urban Renewal Authority, Pueblo Creative Corridor, Legacy Bank, K. R. Swerdfeger Construction, Pueblo Bank and Trust, All Star Exteriors, R. Peter Sonntag DDS, Colorado State University-Pueblo, Black Hills Energy, Greater Pueblo Chamber of Commerce and Pueblo City & County Foundation.

The Pueblo Performing Arts Guild promotes the production, enjoyment and collaboration of the arts for the purposes of economic development and an enriched quality of life in Pueblo.