![Rough Ruby Arts Collective]()
Rough Ruby Arts Collective
Artists Creating to Make a Difference
Current Full Artist Members
Hellen Dunn . Steffany Suze Boucher . Cathleen Meadows
Hannah Star Rogers . Laura BenAmots . Ceil Horowitz
Current Guest Artist Member: Marsha Gold Gayer
Steffany received her MFA in Sculpture from Parsons School of Design in New York City.
Her work connects to the curiosities, abnormalities and anomalies in living beings affected by bio-engineering, industry, new technologies, changing environment and evolution.
She has shown her work throughout Illinois, Colorado, Brooklyn and New York City including collaborative, individual and invitational exhibits.
In addition, Steffany is a dedicated educator. Her teaching experience includes Pikes Peak Community College and Bemis School of Art, Colorado Springs; Parsons School of Design, NYC. She has taught in the subject areas of Art History & Appreciation, Foundation and Design: Studio Coursework (including: Three-Dimensional Design; Introductory: Architecture, Communication Design, Fine Art, Fashion, Illustration, Product Design; Design Theory; Design Laboratory; Drawing and Sculpture) and College Preparatory coursework.
She is currently undergoing training to become certified in sound therapy – sound frequency systems.
New York born painter, Laura BenAmots, spent her formative years abroad. She studied painting at the historic Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, earned her BFA from the Tyler College of Art & Design at Temple University and has an MFA with a split emphasis in Book Arts, Printmaking and Painting from the Philadelphia University of the Arts.
Career highlights include being awarded a 3-month Artist Studio Residency at the Machine Shop 2017-18, being featured artist in the online publication Collateral in 2017 and selection for the International Contemporary Artist Exhibition 2014 in Assisi, Italy. Other artist honors include selection for The Woven Tale Press Summer 2016 and 2012 recognition as Visual Artist of the Year for the Pikes Peak Region in Colorado.
Largely driven by the codependent tensions between strength and vulnerability, belonging and isolation, her paintings, drawings and installation projects have made it possible for her to approach the varied dimensions of human frailty.
As a conceptual artist I work with a wide variety of materials focusing on both personal and social issues. “A Lady’s Ode to Trump” is in reference to his atrocious disrespect for women. Themes of gun violence and abuse of women permeate my work. I’m currently working on a series of embroidered linen napkins related to school shootings with the hope of countering the seemingly instantaneous cultural amnesia that follows these atrocities.
Career Exhibit Highlights: 2018 “Artists in Action”; Juried Exhibit.2017 “Gun Shy” One-Person Exhibit & Artisst in Residence, Machine Shop; 2015 “Poetic Images-Constructing Meaning” 3-Woman Show Manitou Arts Center CO. 1997; “Composing A Life” Two-Person, One West Art Center, Fort Collins CO; 1995 “Inner Beauty Outer Sight” installation UMC Art Gallery, University of Colorado Boulder; 1993 “No Town An Island” Invitational Exhibit. Fuel Gallery, Seattle WA; 1992 “Chairs, Chairs, Chairs” Center for the Visual Art, Metropolitan State College, Denver CO; 10-year Traveling Exhibit. 1991 Rocky Mountain Women's Institute, 1-year Artist Residency, Denver CO; 1990 “Dolls for the 21st Century” Juried Exhibit, Springfield Museum, Springfield OR; 1987 “Scarecrow” Emmanuel Gallery, Denver CO.
I was taught this by the Waves
Time is a thing both large and small
and if you are growing in it, like water
you are healing from the change
and turning back toward what you
were newly native to some
other shape but always pooling
toward the beginning yourself.
I don’t think you will want to understand
The climate that we are facing has no face
That is it has no direction to turn toward
No way to know what way the wind blows
The torrent of the heat wind or bridle
Of the dove’s migration arcs into a heaven
Whose end cannot be imagined even by the mind.
Enter the water
But don’t stray as far as the swamp wrecks
Bottle green ducks slain on pilings
Mud dusted and bricking the dock rope
The reed clashing and a cast of the wind
Speckling the frame of the eyes with bent lashes
The scene hurtles toward a reckoning with
the vengeance of one last blackberry winter.
Afterwards you will not be as sure of May
It seems the the warming could always turn back
To the sea. If you are cold, hold my hand.
1.
Through tulip tree’s yet fragrant wood the tide
at night exposed its tender meat for snails.
The pods yet dangle as a weeping chime
as through them moves the ochre mangrove crab.
2.
The open shell its tongue unfolds in tide
its open whirl the sun pulls back and dries
The ocean curls around the pressing oars
overhead cadence and the foam unfurls.
3.
My wax now fused to freshly molusced sands,
peeled back the shell, poured in the boiling sea,
and from blue flesh yet she a gleaming white.
While ocean touched her brief array she glowed
Yet when I packed her in wool cloth she grayed.
If time should take me back to those late waves,
I would return to that great beach the pearl.
4.
Questions of Authenticity
Inside, my mother leans over a boiling pot of molluscs: every
shade of orange fighting conch and every size of lacy murex
from juvenile to several with mature purple lips. Beautiful
shell colors, enough to kill the animals inside, not so much to transform their lacquer to dull gray, or worse, crack the
bivalve hinges.
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Hannah Star Rogers is a poet, curator and art-science scholar. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the University of Edinburgh. Her poems and reviews have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Tupelo Quarterly, The Carolina Quarterly, and The Southern Women’s Review. Her flash fiction has been honored by Nat. Brut and Glimmer Train. She has received the Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship. She has held artist residencies at the Djerassi, ArtHub, Tofte Lake Center, Catswalk, the Arctic Circle in Finland, and National Park Service writing residencies in both Acadia, Maine and the Everglades, FL. Her scholarly publications on art and science have appeared in Leonardo, Configurations, and Photomediations.
When asked what she wanted to be at age 3, she said "artist." Ceil Horowitz is inspired by and driven to capture, depict and exalt the life of the "little guy", counting herself among them.Her hope is to inspire dialogue and discovery through her paintings. Most recently she traveled on a grant to the Druze village of Yarka in Israel's Carmel Mountains to draw the elders. Since 2012 she has spent her winters painting "Subway Musicians" in the NYC subway system. In addition, Ceil has just completed traveling to Colorado's first 100 breweries where she has created folk inspired on location "portraits" of the breweries.
