Jim Baker's landscape photographs have been exhibited throughout the United States and represented in several private and museum collections. In 1988, he received an Individual Artist’s Fellowship from the Colorado Council on the Arts. He contributed an essay for the book Listen To The Trees by John Sexton and has written on the arts for national publications such as Outside Magazine. For the past ten years, his weekly radio interview program, All About the Arts, could be heard on public radio station, KAJX.
Baker received an undergraduate degree in meteorology from Pennsylvania State University and earned a M.F.A. in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design. He was executive director of Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, Colorado, from 1995 to 2006. Recently, he accepted the position of the president of Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine.
Robert Brinker's work has appeared in many museums and institutions, including P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), Beijing, China; and in Colorado at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and the Aspen Art Museum. In 2003 and 2004, he was a visiting artist at The American Academy in Rome. His work is also in the collections of Progressive Insurance, Altria Group Inc., and Henry Schein Inc.
Recent projects include a limited edition, handmade artist book, co-published with the Institute for Electronic Arts at Alfred University in Alfred, New York. He also created a series of large-scale digital prints with Jonathan Singer at Singer Editions, Boston.
Part of Brinker's background as an artist includes working as a press assistant for many fine printers, including Jack Lemon at Landfall Press, Bud Shark at Shark’s Ink, and Craig O’Brien at O’Brien Graphics. Brinker was also print shop manager at Anderson Ranch Arts Center from 1992–93. This is where he met Peter Voulkos, the late and great clay sculptor. Brinker worked with Pete as his exclusive printer for the last nine years of his life. They produced many unique and limited edition prints and works on paper during that period. It was an opportunity that has helped shape Brinker's work.
Robert Brinker holds a B.F.A. in 1992 from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is represented by Sara Tecchia Roma New York Gallery and lives and works in Aspen, Colorado.
Monica Chau's art utilizes digital processes integrated with mixed-media elements to create large-scale installations. She has received numerous grants and awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts / Western States Arts Federation grant in photography and a Durfee Foundation grant for travel to China. Her photographs can be seen in An Introduction to Digital Imaging by Joe Ciaglia (Prentice Hall, 2005).
Monica Chau holds an M.F.A. in photography from California Institute of the Arts. She was a Helena Rubinstein Fellow in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program and a Fellow in the American Photography Institute’s National Graduate Seminar. She has taught at many distinguished institutions such as the University of California–Irvine, American Film Institute, University of Houston, and New York University / Tisch School of the Arts. Currently, she is a faculty member at the International Center for Photography, New York.
Linda Girvin's art-making approach has always been to challenge the more accepted techniques/technology of fine art photography, pushing the viewer toward a unique, more physical perceptual experience, thereby opening up new avenues for an emotionally based dialogue. Currently she is working with a lenticular, vertical lens, a technology that allows her to animate the image and/or create an illusion of three dimensions on a flat plane. Interests in the psychology of perception and contemporary dance seem to have merged in her art.
After earning an undergraduate degree in perceptual psychology, Linda Girvin's life took an unforeseen life turn—a strong interest in art making led to an M.F.A. in photography from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. Since then, Girvin has had numerous one-person shows around the country and is represented by galleries in Denver, Chicago, and New York. Collections and museums that have acquired her work include the Progressive Art Collection, The Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida, and the U.S. State Department’s Art in The Embassies Program.
She has taught various workshops around the country, and this interest in teaching led her to positions on the faculty of both Edinboro University in Pennsylvania and the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her photographs are included in the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver’s exhibition, “Decades of Influence: Colorado 1985–Present”.
In Jody Guralnick's paintings, she is drawn to the kind of symbols that emerge from our collective cultural history, elements loaded with associations. These icons have called to her since childhood, and for years she has collected the scraps that now swim beneath the surface of her paintings. They are symbols that resonate from the personal to the universal.
Jody Guralnick received her M.F.A. in painting from Pratt Institute, New York, after earning a B.A. honors degree from St. Martin School of Art in London. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and is included in the Progressive Art Collection. She received a Colorado Council for the Arts Fellowship in 1998. Guralnick lives and works in Aspen, Colorado.
Pamela Joseph is a multimedia artist who has exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently in locations such as Paris, Barcelona, Copenhagen, and Beijing. In 2003 and 2004, she was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome. Her work has been described as “well-executed, powerful, and edgy” by the Colorado Council on the Arts, which awarded Joseph a Visual Arts Fellowship in 2001.
Her traveling interactive installation, The Sideshow of the Absurd, has been exhibited at seven museums and galleries in the U.S., garnering outstanding reviews and record-breaking crowds. Art writers in Florida, New Mexico, Colorado, and the Midwest have picked the show as a “favorite” exhibition, calling it “funky,” “freaky,” and “fascinating.”
The Hundred Headless Women (2001) was originally created for The Torture Museum, a segment of The Sideshow of the Absurd. The images are of women in perilous and threatening situations. Her creation of new wood-burned drawings has continued to the present. The title pays homage to Max Ernst’s brilliant novel of collages and engravings, The Hundred Headless Woman. The cutting board wall is being shown in the summer of 2006 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver's “Decades of Influence: Colorado 1985 to Present,” curated by Cydney Payton, the museum’s director.
The Hundred Headless Women images are being published as a handmade book, printed in China, through the auspices of the Institute of Electronic Arts at Alfred University in Alfred, New York, and MA Nose Studios, Inc., of Aspen, Colorado.
Charmaine Locke's first show of small sculptures was at the Max Hutchinson Gallery (1977) in Houston and was followed by several “Couples” shows in Texas, Louisiana, California, and Washington, D.C. (1979–early ’80s).
In her travels around the United States, she became aware of many artists working with their perception of the “house.” In 1979, she curated “The Image of the House in Contemporary Art” for Lawndale Annex, Houston, producing a catalogue and a panel discussion on art, architecture, and social issues relating to shelter. Her sculptures were include in another house-themed show, “The House That Art Built” at California State University, Fullerton. Later, Locke curated another show for Lawndale, “Sculpture: The Spectrum” (1988).
Recent exhibitions include the creation of a large-scale collaborative sculpture (with James Surls) for Mariposa Park, Corpus Christi, Texas; “Eye to Eye: James Surls and Charmaine Locke,” Art Center of Corpus Christi; and “The Creative World of James Surls and Charmaine Locke,” Anderson Ranch Arts Center (1999).
Locke served as founding member and director of Amazing Space, Cleveland, Texas and was on the board of directors of The Aspen-Snowmass Council for the Arts. Currently she a board member of Tomorrow’s Voices, Carbondale, Colorado.
Brad Miller was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. His early encounters with art took place in the museums of Portland and Seattle. Their meager holdings of contemporary and European art were offset by major displays of Asian and Pacific Northwest Native American art. These elegant nature-based images were most often decorated with universal patterns and symbols shared throughout the Pacific Rim. This work informed his earliest attempts at making art and are at the core of what he is still exploring today at the age of 55.
Miller's most recent works include photograms of water and ice, burned dendritic patterning drawn on large sheets of wood, and ceramic bowls heavily carved and worked with close-packing patterns. Recent works are in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Denver Art Museum.
Brian is a full-time designer and maker based in the midcoast of Maine near Camden. An honors graduate of Parnham College, he studied under the renowned designer John Makepeace and is the 5th from only a total of 8 Americans to have attended this distinguished program. A member of the Furniture Society, Brian has been awarded two consecutive residencies in the Furniture/Woodworking program at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, where he has taught on many occasions.
As a designer, Brian Reid has worked in a variety of styles, from postmodern to post-rustic. He is currently exploring traditional forms, such as the Queen Anne highboy and American game table, that display his unique technique of pattern marquetry. Recent furniture pieces are based on the applied decoration of traditional quilt patterns.
In 2003, he was a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and served as a sabbatical replacement for Wendy Maruyama at San Diego State University's Furniture Program in 2002. He currently teaches at the Center for Furntiure Craftmanship in Rockport, Maine.
Barbara Sorensen is a sculptor and printmaker who is interested in the landscape and the figure, and in how these relate to each other in the environment. She uses highly textured surfaces in both her large-scale totems and smaller vessel-referenced works. These environmental installations, originally created in clay, are now often cast in bronze or resins. Her boat series is a metaphor for the body—containers of our souls juxtaposing the external and internal, masculine and feminine.
After graduating from the University of Wisconsin and pursuing an art teaching career, Sorensen returned to the studio as a full-time artist, working in both Winter Park, Florida, and Snowmass Village, Colorado.
Her work is exhibited and collected in museums, galleries, and public and private spaces across the country. Her most recent shows include a one-person exhibition of sculpture featuring eighty-five works at Leu Gardens in Orlando, Florida, and an installation at the Duval Smart Gallery in Aspen, Colorado. Her work is in numerous museum collections including the Orlando Museum of Art, Florida; Everson Museum, Syracuse, New York; and Newark Museum, New Jersey.
Sorensen's art has appeared on the covers of Janet Mansfield’s book, Ceramics in the Environment (A and C Black, 2006) and Peter King’s book, Architectural Ceramics for the Studio Potter (Lark Books, 1999), accompanied by feature articles in both books.
James Surls was born in East Texas in 1943. He graduated from Sam Houston State Teachers College in 1965 and from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1968. From 1969 until 1976, Surls taught at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and then moved to Splendora, Texas, with the love of his life. Charmaine and he lived there for a little over twenty years, experiencing every emotion that a couple with kids, growing together and as individuals, can endure. They have lived in the Roaring Fork Valley of Colorado for the past nine years, and love it for a fact.
Along the road Surls made art and curated shows with the ferocity of a man possessed. Over the years, he has been represented by four different galleries in New York. Currently, he is represented by Charles Cowles Gallery, New York, Barbara Davis Gallery, Houston, and the Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe and Dallas.
His proudest accomplishment is that he still loves my wife and has seven beautiful daughters who are independent and capable individuals. The next proudest thing is being collected by museums around the country and having his work appear in solo shows and group shows. His most memorable exhibitions include: “Visions” (1984) at the Dallas Museum of Art, accompanied by a book called Visions: James Surls, 1974-1984. The 2003 show and catalogue at the Meadows Museum in Dallas, “James Surls—In the Meadows and Beyond." and Blaffer Gallery's “James Surls—The Splendora Years 1977–1997”.
But at the top of Surl's accomplishment list would be his involvement in the Lawndale Alternative Space and all those great years spent with so many great friends.