WESTERN BOOK CONFERENCES & FESTIVALS

At Colorado’s Artposium, Different Takes on Dwellings

By Emily Wortman-Wunder, Guest Writer, 6-10-11

	The Salida Steam Plant Events Center played host to the Artposium over Memorial Day weekend. Photo by Emily Wortman-Wunder.

Colorado Art Ranch 2011 Artposium: “Dwellings”
Where: Salida, Colorado
When: May 27-29, 2011
What: Multidisciplinary readings, talks, workshops and slide shows on topics of critical importance (in this case, housing and the human impulse to make a home).
Cost: $200 (includes four meals)

So, an architect, an anthropologist, a poet and a Shelter Cart walk into a small-town event center and what do you have? An Artposium.

And what the heck is an Artposium, you may ask? While that’s a question best answered by attending one, I’ll do my best to simulate the experience. So grab your invitational postcard, invest your $200, and get ready for some awesome conversation.

Friday night: I arrive in Poncha Springs, stiff and glassy-eyed after the three-hour drive from Denver. I peer at the Google map on the seat beside me: is this really the right place? I’m on a short gravel road between an alfalfa field and a remote country gas station. The sun is in my eyes and with the windows up the car is too hot and with them down it’s too windy. I wonder if I’m trespassing. I pass a stark new building surrounded by cars: is it a house? A Pentecostal church? Or is it my destination: the opening reception of the “Dwellings” Artposium, held at the studio of Salida artist Roberta Smith? I brave a sudden onslaught of shyness and go inside. It is the reception. Whew. I get some wine and beef stew and mingle with the crowd of local writers, artists, artisans, and activists.

Here’s the first thing you need to know about the Artposia: they’re held once or twice a year all over Colorado and each one is integrated into the local arts community. Each Artposium also hosts a month-long residency for artists, writers, composers and creators of all stripes. So far I’ve attended Artposia in Durango, Trinidad, Denver, and Salida, and there isn’t one where I haven’t come away with a richer knowledge of the history of the state I’ve lived in for 20 years. (Full disclosure: I completed an Art Ranch residency in Durango in 2007. It was one of the best things I’ve ever done.)

Saturday morning: The Artposium gets into full gear at 8 a.m. at the Salida Steam Plant Events Center. The theatre is dark except for a large projection screen, a warmly lit lectern, and the peculiar contraption, something like a shrunken and technified covered wagon, that sits quietly just behind the lectern.

The basic structure of the Artposium goes like this: a morning of talks and readings in a darkened lecture hall; an afternoon of workshops and exploration; an evening of readings, another morning of talks. The goal is to bring together a dozen or so diverse perspectives on the topic at hand, and then explore on your own through whatever medium you work in, whether it’s words, collage, ideas, or activism.

Thus, this morning’s Artposium features the anthropologist Christina Kreps talking about how different people around the world make a home, and how specifically the omo sebua, or great house, of the Nias islanders in Indonesia fulfills practical, spiritual and ceremonial needs.

She’s followed by local entrepreneur and artisan Craig Nielson, who talks about portable houses, global displacement of populations, homelessness, and the portable shelter he designed, built and is marketing to humanitarian organizations. The shelter turns out to be the covered wagon contraption standing behind the podium; he calls it a Shelter Cart. This particular one is known as Wilma.

The morning’s talks are punctuated by readings from the River City Nomads, Salida’s poetry performance troupe, and after a few readings related to dwelling in the body and the bio region I’m thinking that every small town should have a poetry performance troupe. Just before adjourning to lunch everyone comes up and takes turns mattress-testing the Shelter Cart (it’s cozy).

Saturday afternoon: After a tasty lunch of quinoa and chicken wraps (all meals except Saturday dinner are included in the price of the Artposium), we move to one of the four workshops to do a little contributing to the conversation. I choose novelist and essay writer BK Loren’s workshop called “Nomad’s Land: The Internal Sense of Home.” Other workshops are given by Danny Wicke, architect; Sandy Dorr, poetry, and Dean Dablow, photography.

After BK’s workshop, I find myself jotting notes for future work and wishing I could start an essay right now. Instead, I grab some still-warm chocolate chip cookies from the plate in the hall and head over to Danny Wicke’s workshop to design a house that can be built for $20,000. Pretty soon my group is deep in a discussion of porch sizes and siding types, and whether we’ll be able to afford enough windows to take advantage of the abundant passive solar energy available in Salida.

Saturday night: After dinner, which is on our own, we gather again for an alumni reading. Slides of prints, gardens, stone basins, houses built or dreamed of or lived in; readings of essays and poetry. We spill into the lively Salida night, catch up over gin and tequila, call it a day.

Sunday morning: As always, Sunday is the best day. Danny Wicke describes the work of the Rural Studio in Alabama—an architectural training program that pits Auburn University college students against the challenges of building for one of the poorest communities in the United States. He is followed by photographer Leigh Davis’s discussion of her work photographing every sort of dwelling, from the single dorm rooms of the women living in a Brooklyn YMCA to a group of elderly New Mexican monks forced to leave their monastery. We get another installment of the River City Nomads and I jot frantic notes.

Sunday afternoon: The final panel discussion wraps up in early afternoon and I get ready to head home. I’ve got reading lists as long as my arm and my brain feels not merely exercised but actually shaped in a different way, as though after many months of thinking mostly about how to structure words into paragraphs I’ve found a whole new space in my brain, one that thinks about the shapes of rooms and how to frame images and knows the power of a person’s home space as you approach it, whether that home space is on the sidewalk or in a house with an award-winning design. This is the Artposium experience: start you thinking, and then turn you loose.

The next chance to tap into the artposium experience is August 13, in Lake City, Colorado, at the “Hardrock Revision.” It’s shorter and cheaper than regular artposia, and in some ways it will be even more exciting: this is the day that members of the public get to discover the fruits of an ongoing residency/collaboration between writers, sculptors, landscape artists, and a historian to devise a community-based solution for the abandoned Ute Ulay gold mine. For more information visit http://www.coloradoartranch.org/hardrockrevision.htm.

Emily Wortman-Wunder lives in Centennial and has had stories published in Seed Science Magazine’s Annual Fiction Issue, The North American Review, The Ontario Review and West Branch. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her story “The Hitch-hiker Rule” recently appeared on New West.

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