This collection of Tara Carter’s sculpted birds is just a small sample of birds that frequent Telluride. Not all of them stay here year-round, but the hearty ones stick it out (we’re looking at you, Black-billed Magpie). Then there are the breeding warblers who make their annual trip to the box canyon. These beautiful little birds come to the area, create a nest, and abandon it until they return the next year. And you can't forget about the migrants who stop through town for some rest and recuperation on their larger journey. Much like the people who make up our community, all of these birds contribute in their own way to make Telluride a place we love to be in. Some may stick out more than others, but that's what keeps our little town so interesting.

Jesse Crock is a Colorado-based artist with a love of climbing, cycling, and the outdoors. The rich color and sharp contrast of his acrylic paintings attempt to capture the vibrant Colorado landscape of the places he travels. Jesse is an art teacher who finds that he often connects his work with the playfulness of his students and is inspired by the energy they bring to the classroom. As an outdoor enthusiast, he brings the viewer’s eye to places that are not often painted.

Each year Wagner Custom Skis builds hundreds of custom skis for people all over the world. Each ski varies in length, width, sidecut, tip/tail shapes, rocker/camber profiles, and is made up of a different combination of handpicked materials with diverse stiffness and flex patterns. But, what makes each ski even more special to its owner is the unique topsheet they choose. This is where Telluride Arts and the Boulder Creative Collective get to join in the fun. This year’s “Artist Series” ski designs have been curated by four different Colorado artists, each personalized with their distinctive art.

What is a monument but a memorial to a location or a moment in time? What we choose to memorialize and make monuments to reflect our history, our culture and our need to remember. Trine Bumiller’s 129 paintings depict all of the U.S. national monuments that were created to honor and protect places of cultural, environmental, and cultural importance. To add another layer, the paintings are all rendered in hues of pink to represent all phases of feminism, from baby blush and sexy hot pinks to reds of passion, rage and love.

Telluride Arts put out an open call for entries of x-rays, as well as optional small artifacts, short stories, poems, etc. that tell the story of how “you broke and/or got back together”. Nearly 30 people submitted their x-rays, and over 50 x-rays were received and will be displayed, representing a full range of injuries and procedures. The narrative told through these portraits of our broken insides is a unique, and sometimes dark, reflection of the lifestyles we choose to live. 

Fawn Atencio has recently been exploring how we connect to land as a form of identity. “I am interested in how places tell stories, create memories, and transfer meaning,” says Atencio. Growing up in Colorado, her grandparents were avid fishermen and women who, year after year took Atencio and her siblings to explore, fish, and camp in the Rio Grande National Forest. “The landscape seemed very magical to me as a child. It wasn’t until I spent an extensive period of time Asia and northern Africa as an adult, that I realized how much of my identity is formed by the American Western landscape.”

As the specter of the automation and artificial intelligence continue to advance, slowly replacing more and more blue-collar jobs, Dave Pressler imagines a parallel universe in which his classic robot characters must show up for factory work the same way we begrudgingly did at the turn of the 20th century. “We’re having another industrial revolution right now, but most people aren’t really talking about it,” explains Pressler. “There’s all this rhetoric about immigrants coming in and stealing blue-collar jobs, but it’s not really true. It’s the same thing that happened in the 1800s when local furniture-makers and garment makers were suddenly replaced by factories powered by steam and assembly-line workers. We’re seeing the same kind of job displacement that we did at the start of the 20th century, but this time it’s being driven by automation and AI.”

Telluride Arts’ HQ gallery in Telluride, CO presents, Mid-Summer Mardi Gras, a group exhibit featuring seven artists from New Orleans, Louisiana. The show will be on display beginning July 31, 2019 and runs through the month of August 2019.

Micheline Klagsbrun’s latest body of mixed media work on paper originated in a found object: a ledger containing observations of the 1874 Transit of Venus, a phenomenon occurring every 243 years when the planet Venus moves across the face of the sun, twice. Astronomers over the centuries, dating back 5000 years ago to the Sumerians, have tracked her movements and seen her as divine. The Transit of Venus becomes an entry point into a variety of inter-related ideas, celestial and astronomical, scientific and mythological, all of which become themes in the work. The depths of ocean and cosmos are evoked by Klagsbrun's creative use of cyanotype, a 19th-century photographic printing technique that produces deep indigo shades over which she layers drawings in ink and pencil.

Addressing the intersection of art and science through a series of mixed media paintings, the work is an abstract visualization of the processes occurring beneath the forest floor. The Mycelia series incorporate white fibers that represent the Hyphae, fine branching tubes that are important structures required for the growth of tree species. Other pieces are a composite of observational drawings and patterns taken from early botanic studies. Inspired and informed by the writings of British naturalist Robert Macfarlane, the artist is pleased that the show is opening a month after the publication of his new book Underland. The connection between the human and natural worlds and the urgency to address current issues regarding the health and future of our landscape is what Nemirov is interested in communicating through visual works that depict the mystery and complexity of the invisible process that is the mychorrhizal network.

What do you attract? What do you emit? How do you balance the two? Magnetic/Radiating is the exploration of balance between attracting and emitting. Stored in the soft folds. Tucked in the deep tissue of our bones. Woven into our neurons. We carry our pain from trauma, from recent events, from our childhoods and/or from previous lives. Stored like a secret in our bodies. Through introspection, internal processing and arduous work the pain is liberated. The pain is unwound. Detached from our physical body. Energy is released. When cultivated it can be converted to beauty. Radiating into the world.

Jim Herrington is a photographer whose portraits of celebrities including Benny Goodman, Willie Nelson, The Rolling Stones, Cormac McCarthy, Morgan Freeman and Dolly Parton have appeared on the pages of Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Esquire, GQ, Outside and The New York Times as well as on scores of album covers.

Favianna Rodriguez is an interdisciplinary artist, cultural strategist, and social justice activist based in Oakland, California. Her art and praxis address migration, economic inequality, gender justice, sexual freedom and ecology. Her practice boldly reshapes the myths, ideas, and cultural practices of the present, while confronting the wounds of the past.  Favianna’s signature mark-making embodies the perspective of a first-generation American Latinx artist with Afro-Latinx roots who grew up in working-class Oakland, California during the birth of internet, and in the midst of an era of anti-immigrant hate and the war on drugs. 

In her exhibit, Chromatic Concepts, Megan Padilla explores and studies the perception, depth, and stunning gradients of color through the nature of alcohol inks, creating original abstract pieces that are both dramatic in composition and color. The alcohol inks provide vibrant, colorful effects. It offers little control, while the harmony in color combinations deliver some sense of order through fluid movement and a visual experience to engage the viewers. Padilla is able to manipulate the medium by utilizing various techniques and tools that create colorful, contemporary elements and textures.

Home Fire was composed alongside a series of moves that set Emily Palmquist voyaging from west to east and west again. This fluttering about left Palmquist and her work double-taking for a sense of place and connection. The results invite viewers to step into a narrative of mixed origins where the familiar comingles with the projected, the past, the day-dreamed, and other deviating realms.  

Ron Scharfe’s abstract modern art paintings are the result of color and form interacting, and the beauty and movement emerging from their interplay. Scharfe is inspired by exploration. “When you explore, the unexpected happens: color upon color; form upon form…movement creating shapes, which are suddenly rearranged into some other order. Mimicking impermanence, revealing and yet disguising what lies beneath.”