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  • ARTISTS IN ACTION
  • RUBY ROOMS
  • Membership & Application
  • Contact Us
Creating Art for Social Change

Current  Artist  Full  Members:

Laura BenAmots .  Hellen Dunn

Cathleen Meadows . Ceil Horowitz . Hannah Star Rogers

Current Guest Artist Member: Marsha Gold Gayer

Laura BenAmots                   Painter & Installation Artist 
http://www.benamotsart.com 
http://www.battleportraits.com

BenAmots is largely driven by the co-dependent tensions between strength and vulnerability, belonging and isolation, hope and struggle. Motivated by 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. 

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.  

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.

"Floating Bed of Lost Dreams" sex trafficking awareness
"Battle Portraits:wounded lions wounded lambs" 6/12x9' ptngs

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). 

'Honeycomb Skies' installation
'Honeycomb Skies' installation
"At What Cost..." oil & powdered pigments on canvas 8ftx7ft
"Fossil Fuels" Sacred Watersl on prepared panel 24"x48"
"Bride Among the Ruins" Anonymous Madona Series Assisi IT 
Hellen Dunn                Sculptor,Installation,Conceptual & Video 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 Conceptual Artist
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 Capturer
https://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
Hannah Star Rogers                      Poet, Art & Science Researcher 
https://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

* * *

Dwarf-Crested Irises in Canaan, West Virginia

The realist masters have avoided

the Appalachians and I have to assume

That this is because fayeland is difficult

to paint. What to do with the sounds of mushrooms

unfolding through fallen hemlocks? How to ensure

the advancement of each tiny waterfall with the

enhancements that are the landscapists’ gift?

Excerpt from “Dwarf Crested Irises in

Canaan, West Virginia,” which first

appeared in Faerie Magazine 38

(Summer): 2017.

* * *

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 



Art & Science Exhibit Curatorship

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.

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. 

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.

Guest Artist: Marsha Gold Gayer
https://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.