Around the Block

By Miriam Brown ’21

Arts and Crafts Director Jeanne Steiner creates textile work inspired by high-rise architecture, such as in New York City and Chicago. Printmaking professor Jean Gumpper creates woodcuts inspired by the open landscapes of Hawaii, Michigan, and Colorado. In their new exhibition “Woodcuts and Weavings,” their art works together to create a new environment entirely.

Steiner and Gumpper have done three shows together in the past, and the owners of the Bridge Gallery in downtown Colorado Springs were among their visitors. They invited Steiner and Gumpper to install new work in a two-person exhibit at the Bridge Gallery, which Gumpper said is unusual for a gallery.

Steiner and Gumpper had a vision for the space to be contemplative, arranged in a manner that leads visitors to experience and ponder new things as they move through the exhibition.

“My hope is that we have created a ‘quiet’ environment in which to view the complexities of the woodcuts and weavings,” Steiner said.

Though their work is inspired by such different landscapes, they both are fascinated with spaces that make them pause. For Steiner, changing reflections in the glass of high-rise buildings cause her to stop and pay closer attention. For Gumpper, images of springs in the desert and signs of the changing seasons remind her of the beauty of new beginnings in the midst of continuous change.

“We feel there is a conversation among the pieces in the show, and we hope the viewers participate in that conversation by looking closely,” Gumpper said.

Visitors can view the exhibit at 218 W. Colorado Ave. from noon–4 p.m. on Saturdays, or by scheduling an appointment with jgumpper@coloradocollege.eduor jsteiner@coloradocollege.edu.

Leah Veldhuisen ’19

Lisa Marie Rollins is an acclaimed playwright, director and poet based in the San Francisco Bay Area. This semester, Rollins is a visiting lecturer at CC, teaching two classes and directing a play at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs. Among many other accolades, Rollins has been a Sundance Theatre fellow and a writing fellow with the San Francisco Writers Grotto, and has written and directed award-winning plays and poetry.

With her work, Rollins is particularly interested “in ensuring that institutions that produce and develop plays move to a place where they are considering deeply what kind of ‘diverse’ plays they are putting up.” She explains, “my work is to require anti-racist, anti-heterosexist, anti-homophobic practices in how you assemble and hire creative teams and select or commission plays.”

Currently, Rollins is teaching a course called Rewriting America: Playwrights and Cultural Identity. The class is focused on “plays from multiple American diasporic identities,” Rollins explains. “We are having lots of discussions about how these playwrights and their characters imagine ‘America’ and the challenges they encounter or struggles they endure either around identity or around the notions of ‘success’ and the ‘American Dream,’” she continues.

During Block 6, Rollins will teach Writing for Performance, in which she’ll use “immigrant or people of color narratives including some strong feminist perspectives.” With these courses, Rollins hopes to push students to consider themselves in relation to the world around them. “There is so much fear in the ways we communicate, fear about making mistakes and being called out, fear of being ridiculed, of being ostracized, of being rejected from community or from people we love, so much fear. I think about Audre Lorde and her question to us after she told us that “your silence will not protect you,” Rollins says. “My hope is that I can provide a place to begin to find and voice those small truths.”

In addition to teaching, Rollins is directing the world premiere of former CC Professor of Theatre and Dance Idris Goodwin’s play “American Prom.” It is the story of a segregated prom in current-day America, and “asks us to push ourselves to acknowledge the world as it is, so we can actually find a way to begin to change it, to change ourselves,” Rollins says. The play is showing at UCCS until Feb. 10.

By: Miriam Brown ’21

When Carlton Gamer first joined the Department of Music at Colorado College, the school’s trademark Block Plan system wasn’t even in the works yet. Now a professor emeritus, Gamer will turn 90 this year, and CC faculty are throwing him a concert in celebration.

Gamer is most known for being a composer of over 70 works and a musical theorist whose articles have been published and cited in a number of academic journals, books, and dissertations. At CC, he taught courses on piano, music theory, music history, and comparative musicology — but he also co-taught courses in the feminist and gender studies, Asian studies, mathematics, and political science departments.

“Over the years, I’ve taught a number of interdisciplinary courses, and I love to do that.” he says. “When you’re teaching a course with somebody, they’re your teacher, and you’re their teacher. So for me, teaching has been an ongoing educational experience.”

If the faculty support for Gamer’s birthday celebration is any indication, then the feeling is mutual. Ten years ago, Professor of Music Ofer Ben-Amots, co-chair of the CC Department of Music, and Susan Grace, artist-in-residence and associate chair, decided to celebrate Gamer’s 80th birthday by producing a concert with performances of some of his best work. This year’s concert will feature artists such as Grace, pianist Steven Beck, former student Mark Arnest, George Preston of KCME classical radio, visiting dance professor Sue Lauther, and the Veronika String Quartet. They will perform a piece that Gamer composed in the very beginning of his career, but they will also perform another that he finished last week.

“I just hope they’ll enjoy the music,” Gamer said. The Carlton Gamer Birthday Celebration Concert is Wednesday, Feb. 13, 7:30 p.m. in Packard Hall.

By: Miriam Brown ’21

Most students never meet or interact with artists whose work they study in class. But thanks to Colorado College’s artist-in-residence program, students in the classes Human/Being Anthropological Perspectives
and Southwest Arts and Culture learned about Virgil Ortiz’s art from Ortiz himself.

Ortiz, a Pueblo artist who lives in Cochiti Pueblo, New Mexico, joined CC’s campus this fall as a Mellon Artist-in-Residence. His exhibit at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College titled “Revolution: Rise Against the Invasion” combines the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 with a sci-fi twist, imagining what the event might have looked like in the year 2180 to make it more accessible for the next generations.

For the first and second Wednesdays of Block 4, Ortiz met with Assistant Professor Scott Ingram’s anthropology class and Assistant Professor Karen Roybal’s Southwest studies class to teach them about his background, the revolt, and his art, including his FAC exhibit. In addition to these meetings, Ingram’s class met with Ortiz in Bemis School of Art on the third Wednesday of the block for an informal question and answer session, and students have had an open invitation to attend any of Ortiz’s studio hours.

“Virgil is one of the most open, kind people that I’ve ever met in my life,” said Cristina Garcia ’19, a Southwest studies and religion double major. “It’s amazing to see his enthusiasm about his work, and also the fact that he gives all the credit to his community and where he comes from. It’s amazing to see that he’s never forgotten that, [and] that he really expands people’s minds of what indigenous art looks like.”

As co-chair of the Native American Student Union, Garcia had met Ortiz twice before, at the FAC and even at Ortiz’s house for dinner. Other students reported that Ortiz gave them his personal email, invited them to his home back in New Mexico, and even sent copies of his work to a student who wanted to recreate them as drawings.

In the final meeting with Ingram’s class, students took turns thanking Ortiz for his honesty, patience, and humility in sharing his work and life with them.

“This time with you is more than just learning … [it’s] transformative,” Ingram said to Ortiz. “Rise Against the Invasion” is on view at the FAC now-Jan. 6.

By Ritik Shrestha ’22

 Student performers at CC are pushing the boundaries of expressionism with exciting pieces.

An example of this innovation can be found in the collaboration between the Art of Songwriting course taught by Assistant Professor of Music Iddo Aharony and Contemporary Poetry taught by Professor of English Jane Hilberry. With the help of artist Reiko Yamada, CC’s innovator-in-residence, both classes have come together to create a workshop that allows students to explore the relationship between songs and poetry and how both aspects can be combined to open a whole range of possibilities in performance.

Aharony explains that “language has music in it, and music has language, so the overlapping nature of these the two fields means they really aren’t that different.”

Through four sessions, students have participated in a variety of activities such as learning how to communicate and collaborate without speaking, studying different aspects of performance, and using the poem “Failing and Flying” by Jack Gilbertas inspiration to create their own project. Even though these workshop topics might not be similar to each other, they were designed to show students how the dividing lines between fields can be blurred to create one unified piece. “One of the most fruitful ways is to collaborate,” explains Hilberry “it requires everyone to bring their skills together but also give up some control.”

Students in the songwriting and poetry workshop are enthusiastic about the whole experience. When asked about her experience, Maya Day ’20says, “the workshop has taught me how to collaborate and mix mediums, and it has expanded the possibilities of poetry for me.”

Now that the block is coming to an end, the students of this workshop are taking the skills they have learned and presenting them in a final performance called “Broken Songs: A Poetry and Songwriting Collaboration,” Saturday, Dec. 15, at 3 p.m. in Packard Hall.

Groups of students will finally be able to show off the pieces they have been working on for the last few weeks. When asked about the content of the show, the instructors were hesitant to give many details but stressed that audience members should come in with an open mind about what a performance is because  the poets and songwriters of the class have merged their talents to produce a show that is far from traditional. “Each performance is special and shouldn’t be missed because it will never be replicated in exactly the same way,” remarks Yamada.