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  • Home
  • Artists
  • What We Do
  • Seeking Shelter 2024
  • Rough Rubies WITHIN 2022
  • Exo-Sanctuaries 2022
  • ARTISTS IN ACTION 2018
  • RUBY-ROOMS
  • Membership & Application
  • Contact Us
ARTISTS

    Laura BenAmots  .  Hellen Eberhardie Dunn  .  Cathleen Meadows    Ceil Horowitz  .  Hannah Star Rogers . LuDel Deal Walter

Guest Artists:  Lupita Carrasca . Marsha Gold Gayer

LAURA BENAMOTS                                                          painter, installation artist  www.benamotsart.com 
www.battleportraits.com

Her Art: BenAmots is largely driven by the co-dependent tensions between strength and vulnerability, belonging and isolation, hope and struggle. Motivated by both personal searches for her place in the human family, and a commitment to inspire dialogue about challenging social issues of our day, BenAmots' paintings, drawings and installations explore and express varied dimensions of human frailty and perseverance, humanity and the natural world.  Her Bio: New York born painter, Laura BenAmots, spent her formative years in the Middle East. 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 a MFA with a split emphasis in Book Arts, Printmaking and Painting from the Philadelphia University of the Arts.  Her Career: highlights and honors include: 2019 Creative Advocacy invitational Collective Voices exhibit in Stillwater OK: 2017-18 3-Month Machine Shop Artist Residency award, Abstract Contemporary Women exhibit invitational in CO; 2016 Featured Artist in the online publication Collateral; 2015 International Artist Residency at ArtHub; 2014 International Artist Residency and  exhibition in the International Contemporary Artist Exhibition 2014  in Assisi IT; 2012 recognition as Visual Artist of the Year for the Pikes Peak Region in Colorado.

"Battle Portraits:wounded lions wounded lambs" 6/12x9' ptngs
"Bride Among the Ruins"  Installation mixed media 6/12x12ft.  
'Honeycomb Skies' installation
"At What Cost..." oil & powdered pigments on canvas 8ftx7ft
"Fossil Fuels" Sacred Watersl on prepared panel 24"x48"
"I Am" oil & white gold leaf on prepared panel 18"x18"
"Floating Bed of Lost Dreams" sex trafficking awareness

Select Publications: Two books have been published about her work: BATTLE PORTRAITS Wounded Lions Wounded Lambs (published and distributed by the Art Book Project battleportraits.com) and Eros On Canvas: the erotic paintings of Laura BenAmots (co-published by Last Gasp Press, San Francisco CA and Smokemuse Press CO). 

HELEN E. DUNN                     sculptor, performance, video, installation artist 
www.helleneberhardie.com
https://sculptors.org.uk/artists/helen-dunn 
Born in rural England, Hellen considers London her home. A graduate of the Royal College of Art, she is a member of the Royal Society of British Sculptors and recipient of numerous international honors and awards. 
The 2004 Bursary from the Arts Council of Great Britain, awarded for her traveling installation Crystal Lotuses, brought her to Colorado where the installation was featured at the UCCS Gallery of Contemporary Art to rave reviews. She was subsequently awarded a yearlong residency at University of Colorado's Heller Center.
Her work spans the classical to the purely conceptual, lyrical to discordant. Deeply personal, it reaches for the universal as she documents her own journey and strives to reflect upon womanhood and societal connections. 
Her most recent projects include multi-media installations and video art titled "Interventionist Landscapes" exploring stillness and time. In addition, her work has expanded into varied art forms and  integrate vocalization and sound expression.
'Body Fragments/ Bone Chimes' PPCC Faculty Exhibit 2020
'Cocoon' from 'Body Fragments/ Bone Chimes' 
'Cocoon' from 'Body Fragments/ Bone Chimes' 
'Body Fragments/ Bone Chimes' 
CATHLEEN MEADOWS                        installation, activist, mixed media artist, art therapist
www.lockdowngeneration.com 

Cathleen Meadows is a conceptual artist, art therapist, poet and author. Her work expresses sensitive and evocative responses to internal emotions and external events.  She is a former member of the Spark Co-Op Gallery, an associate at Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute and visual artist for Colorado’s Young Audiences Program. The Machine Shop in Colorado Springs and numerous schools throughout the state have selected Meadows to participate for their artist-in-residence programs. 

"NO RECESS: THE LOCKDOWN IS" bodybag installation night

In response to barbaric heartbreaking gun violence, Meadows has created a two-fold project NO RECESS: THE LOCKDOWN GENERATION. (NoRecess/LockdownGeneration on Instagram, norecess:thelockdowngeneration on Twitter) The art component consists of a series of memorial installations using vinyl child-sized body bags and various other materials. The political component will be mailing (or personal delivery) of body bags and toe tags to politicians receiving NRA funding. Meadows will be collaborating  with local chapters of Moms Demand Action & Students Demand Action (everytownforgunsafety.org) and March For Our Lives (neveragain.com) for this portion of the project. 

Meadows is using the metaphor of “home” for her Eco-Sanctuaries installation using family photographs, grandmother’s china, fabrics, food, spices, bones, nests, garden sculptures, backyard memorial installation and more. 

"Wake Up Little Susie: Pregnancy and Power Prior to Roe v Wade" chessboard installation 
"A Lady's Ode to Trump" gloves installation
"Family Tree" Exo-Sanctuary installation detail
"NO RECESS: THE LOCKDOWN IS" bodybag installation day
"You"  Exo-Sanctuary installation detail

Recent  & Select Exhibits:

2018    “Artists in Action” Manitou Arts Center, CO

2017    “Gun Shy” The Machine Shop, Colorado Springs, CO

2015    “Poetic Images/Constructing Meaning” Manitou Arts Center, CO

1999 - 2001 Wake Up Little Susie: Pregnancy and Power Prior to Roe v Wade (a collaborative installation) traveled to over 30 universities and galleries throughout the United States 

CEIL HOROWITZ                                          street/people's painter & specimen collector  www.ceilhorowitz.com
painting in NY subway

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. 

"My Name Is" drawing from Druse village residency
"Subway Musicians" NYC 
"Self Portrait"  
Ceil's  training includes a degree from Hunter College in NY, studies at the Kansas City Institute of Art and an apprenticeship with New York painter Linda Scott. Her life's journey includes being born, with her twin, in LA during her parents cross country adventure, farming and construction in Alaska, parenting in Israel and Chicago, fabricating and designing high end jewelry in NY, painting and farming in Colorado. 
"Cocktail Dress Self Portrait" oil painting
"Rake One Down Pass it Around" Colorado Brewery project
"Garden Dress Self Portrait" oil on canvas
"Specimen" oil painting
LUDEL DEAL WALTER                                                    painter & assemblage artist
website under construction

LuDel was born in Worland , WY, where she spent the first thirty years of her life in the Wyoming mountains and praries and the family ranch. She grew up in a tight extended family with many aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins and brothers.

Of her work she writes: My story is the story of a family and the story of a place loss, dust and bones. But in that place, roots reach deep. The stories tell of a place of wind and silence, of disintegration and regeneration, of determination, connection, and grace .

Reliquary - mixed media sculpture
Nine patch quilt - mixed media painting
LuDel currently lives in Colorado Springs Colorado with her husband, Mark. She has "two miraculous daughters both with their own amazing stories."
Unwept Tears - mixed media found objects sculpture, approximately 4ft.x5ft.x3ft.
Blossom - mixed media painting approximately 4ft x7ft
Gone baby gone - mixed media painting 4ftx4ft
HANNAH STAR ROGERS                                 poet, art/science curator & researcher     
hannahstarrogers.wordpress.com
Poem Excerpts

To Sea

My wax now fused to freshly mollusced 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.

Excerpt from the title poem off the manuscript

To Sea

* * *

With the care required to

Pack and ship lichen beginnings worldwide

 

The prize the moss from its long term

Abode the only home it has ever known,

 

Estranged from plants by our insistence

On the move, our nature against theirs

 

Electro-pulses we knew we knew where

There before the stars could be measured


Always traveling

and using up.

Excerpt from

“Interfacing AM Frequencies Through t

he Core of a Willow Stem to Make a

Divining Rod for the Future,” which

first appeared in The Ekphrastic Review,

November 2018 


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.

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.

Art & Science Exhibit Curatorship
As a curator, her installation Making Science Visible: The Photography of Berenice Abbott, received an exhibits prize from the British Society for the History of Science and resulted in an invited lecture at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. She is past Director of Research and Collaboration and Guest Bioart Curator for Emerge: Artists and Scientists Redesign the Future. In 2017, she curated the exhibition, Art's Work in the Age of Biotechnology: Shaping Our Genetic Futures, hosted at the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh and sponsored by the NC Science Festival. She has served as a judge for Genspace’s Biodesign Challenge, a student competition of art, design, and biology projects held at the MoMA. She received her MFA in poetry from Columbia University and her Ph.D. at Cornell University on the intersection of art and science. 
GUEST ARTIST MEMBERS
LUPITA CARRASCO
www.carrascoart.com/
https://video.rmpbs.org/video/expressions-caring-5kxmqn/
Lupita Carrasco is an artist, wife, and mother of seven children. Since 2002, she has also been the sole carefiver to her mother, who suffers from schizoaffective disorder. Born and raised in San Diego, California, her tumultuous childhood and vibrant Mexican culture lend their voice to her artistic language. Existential connectivity, intimate wonder, and belonging are familiar themes found in her paintings. 
Lupita's work revolves around survival. Allowing herself to break open in the most vulnerable of places, she explores how trauma affects self-worth, self-care, and the ability to love and nurture others. Family, friends, and environment she is intimately acquainted with are at the heart of her work. Family, friends, and the environment she is intimately acquainted with are at the heart of her work. 
She pairs images from hikes, interactions between her children, mothering activities, and places she longs to be, showing a perceived interpretation of the self, familial relationships, and the monotony of domestic obligations. 
A mother perpetually caught between raising her own children and mothering a parent. Art is an avenue for processing her measure of the human condition.
MARSHA GOLD GAYER
www.marshagoldgayer.com
Marsha is a New York based artist and a Cooper Union graduate. She calls herself a "drawer" and has centered her work on evocative figurative imagery that is simultaneously tender, sexy, vulnerable, strong and disturbing. 
Marsha has exhibited nationwide. The Rough Ruby Arts Collective is very pleased to feature her as our current Visiting Artist Member.
Her work is engaged in explorations of gender identity and intimacy.