Years ago when I was starting out as an artist, I lived in a coal shed behind Su Lum’s Cooper Street house, which I had turned into a little apartment, albeit without plumbing. It was tiny and I had no room to make art. Finding studio space on an hourly worker’s budget seemed nearly impossible. I had cleaned years of debris out of an old unheated barn on Cooper Street to use as a studio for a while, but it was slated for development and I had to clear out.
Carbondale Arts presented my solo exhibition at the Carbondale Arts Gallery, on display July 8 – August 11, 2022. The public was invited to the opening reception on Friday, July 8, from 6-8pm at The Launchpad.
Tania Dibbs creates the live/work space of her creative dreams in historic downtown Basalt.
Tania Dibbs in the Basalt gallery that also happens to be her home. Image by Ross Kribbs
From the outside, Tania Dibbs’s new studio looks relatively nondescript: a simple, barn-like metal structure with a short gravel driveway and a garage door. Tucked beneath a hillside in the Elk Run neighborhood of Basalt, it’s particularly modest in comparison with some of the homes surrounding it.
If this post is too long to hold your interest, please skip to the movie at the end.
The ArcticCircle.org is a residency program for creatives of all types on board a tall ship that sails in the international waters of Svalbard, north of Norway. The program’s mission statement says “the Arctic Circle is a nexus where art intersects science, architecture, education, and activism – an incubator for thought and experimentation for artists and innovators who seek out and foster areas of collaboration to engage in the central issues of our time.” Yea, I didn’t really know how that would translate into my time on the ship either. Basically, participants either brought supplies for experiments or projects that they worked on during our journey, or like me, just came to experience the trip and to work from those experiences later. There was an opportunity to disembark at different shorelines, glaciers, or areas of interest twice a day unless we were sailing. There were some epic hikes, a visit to an abandoned Soviet era mining town, a visit to small research station at 79° north, a visit to Smeerenberg, the site of a 17th century whaling outpost, slide presentations of our work at night, occasional dancing on the deck, nighttime viewings of the aurora above the masts, a costume party, and lots of sailing.
our ship the Antigua
Remains of a blubberoven at Smeerenburg from the 17th century whaling outpost of Smeerenberg
The Rocky Mountain PBS Arts District story on Tania aired January 9, 2015 highlighting artwork both old and new. Tania’s new body of work, Anthropocene can be viewed on her website or at her pop up gallery at 308 E. Hopkins in Aspen until March 31, 2015 open daily from 10a-10p.
Yes, there are contemporary art rules – codes to let one another know whether or not you are a contemporary art insider or poser.
Number one is that anyone who is anyone does not sign their works of art, with few exceptions. You might as well dot your i’s with hearts. This was once a little tough for me to buy, having started my career in realism where there was a good chance that a painting hung with an unobtrusive signature on it led to more sales. You are aiming to be such a somebody that people know its your work without needing a signature, and if you are not there yet, pretend you are, because a signature yells that you are not even going to get there. Your signature is not part of the work. A frame is not part of the work. Your collector list is not part of the work. All of this is both true and not true. (more…)
The city of Black Rock is created on the “playa” of the Black Rock Desert for the annual weeklong Burning Man Festival. We flew from Reno to the playa on a terrifyingly small and old charter plane that seemed barely able to make the 50-minute flight. (more…)
Because my website had not been properly set up in the first place I was faced with the dilemma of constant manual fixes or a complete revamp of the site, so I decided to stop fixing what was basically broken and to start over. This would provide me with the opportunity to implement some upgrades and redesigns that would have been tough to integrate retroactively. I had a pretty solid idea of what features and functionality I needed in a website and how I wanted it to look. I had no idea that translating this into a working site would be such a challenge.
Finding someone to take the job is relatively easy. Finding someone who can actually deliver is astonishingly difficult. It seems there are several types of developers out there. (more…)
