Creative Capitol: The Art of Teaching Artistry

Colorado State Capitol

200 E. Colfax Avenue, Denver, CO 80203

February–October 2025

Curator: Daisy Fodness-McGowan

Admission: free

Review by Nina Peterson

Creative Capitol: The Art of Teaching Artistry attests to how teaching and making art are tactics of social transformation and how teaching artists are agents of this change. The Colorado State Capitol—the site at which officials formulate and enact the laws that govern our ordinary lives—is an apt location for the works, which make clear the link between arts education and the politics of everyday life.

A view of the Lieutenant Governor’s office entry at Colorado State Capitol building, where part of the exhibition *Creative Capitol: The Art of Teaching Artistry* is on display. Image by Nina Peterson.

Curated by Daisy Fodness-McGowan, Executive Director of Think 360 Arts for Learning, in coordination with Ruth Wilson, Administration and Partnerships Director for Colorado Creative Industries, the exhibition is installed in the Lieutenant Governor’s office, the Governor’s office lobby, and the basement rotunda of the Capitol building. It features artworks made by the artists who lead workshops and teach classes for Think 360 Arts. As stated in the exhibition texts, Think 360 Arts for Learning fosters “arts education in Title I and low-income public schools, libraries, and older adult communities in underserved urban and rural areas across Colorado.”

Cindy Cervantez Perrin, *Next Gen Creatives*, digital artwork on canvas. Image courtesy of the artist.

When I went to see the exhibition on a Monday afternoon, I came into the building via the Colfax Avenue entrance. After going through the metal detectors, I encountered an exhibition placard set on an easel in front of Lieutenant Governor Dianne Primavera’s office. I rang the bell on the left side of the office door and was allowed access to the Lt. Governor’s office lobby, where works by Cindy Cervantez Perrin, Jennifer Ghormley, Chelsea Gilmore, Kia Neill, and Elizabeth Stanbro hang on the walls amidst office supplies, a fridge, a copy machine, a microwave, a meeting table, and a sofa.

Two works by Kia Neill on display in Lieutenant Governor Dianne Primavera’s Office. On the left: *Through the Looking Glass*, digital collage of original photo and drawing, gold leaf, acrylic, and image transfer on weathered wood; on the right: *Moguls and Mines*, infused dye sub aluminum print of a digital collage. Image by Nina Peterson.

Here, the art is integrated in an administrative space of the Colorado legislature that also serves as a place where government workers prepare and eat food or perhaps take a break. I spoke briefly with a couple staff members, who noted a favorite: Neill’s digital collage Moguls and Mine. In the collage, an abstracted mountain range comes crashing into a matrix of dilapidated timber and structural detritus, which merges with washes of hot pinks and vibrant oranges. It looks like the architectural remains of Colorado’s mining history set against a neon Aurora Borealis.

An installation view of *Creative Capitol: The Art of Teaching Artistry*, Lieutenant Governor’s office entry, Colorado State Capitol building. Image by Nina Peterson.

Because the Lieutenant Governor was holding meetings, I did not have access to the remainder of the installation in her office. But it is noteworthy that Stanbro, who works with adults with dementia and PTSD, shows her art in the office that oversees programs related to healthcare and disability, including the Office of Saving People Money on Health Care and the Colorado Disability Funding Committee and Disability Policy. [1]

Stanbro’s teaching and practice enables these adults to enact a form of self-care and social nourishment in a society in which medical services remain exorbitantly expensive and reactionary politicians enact measures hostile to low-income people and people with disabilities. While legislation that increases access to affordable health care remains imperative, Stanbro’s teaching—and Think 360 Arts for Learning community education at large—facilitates individual control over an aspect of health through creative practice.

An installation view of works by Brenda Jones in the exhibition *Creative Capitol: The Art of Teaching Artistry*, Governor’s office lobby, Colorado State Capitol building. Image by Nina Peterson.

After consulting with the information desk for directions, I next found my way towards the Governor’s office lobby, which features artworks by Sandy Dolak, Brenda Jones, Dona Laurita, and Cindy Cervantez Perrin. Hung above a desk with pamphlets about the Capitol, Brenda Jones’s ceramic sculptures of cookware and food call to my mind the feminist adage “the personal is political”—a rallying cry for feminist activists during the 1970s (and beyond), which makes explicit the relationship between private life and larger structures of power. [2]

Brenda Jones, *Morning Breakfast*, ceramic. Image courtesy of the artist.

Jones’s Morning Breakfast is a ceramic skillet bedecked with a pink and red plaid and glazed daisies dotting each intersection of the gridded lines. A naturalistic fried egg slides down the pan, as if it is about to fall and plop on the desk below, its yolk breaking and flinging thick, yellow goo. It foretells a kitchen mess all over the halls of governance, a visualization of the domestic realities—even if disavowed—already baked into politics.

Chelsea Gilmore, *The Veils are Thinning*, acrylic and mirror on repurposed window. Image courtesy of the artist.

Lauri Lynnxe Murphy, *Large Double Snail Drawing* I, snail slime on hand-cut paper. Image courtesy of the artist.

From the Governor’s office lobby, I went down the stairs to the basement rotunda. There, framed by the engaged columns of the round room’s architecture and the benches below, hang artworks by Lisa Cameron Russell, Cindy Cervantez Perrin, Eric Robert Dallimore, Helen Eberhardie Dunn, Jennifer Ghormley, Chelsea Gilmore, Lauri Lynnxe Murphy, Tony Ortega, Kia Neill, Eileen Roscina, and Elizabeth Stanbro.

Tony Ortega, *Dando Luz,* acrylic paint. Image courtesy of Think 360 Arts.

Tony Ortega’s Dando Luz depicts a pregnant woman interacting with two children, who stand in front of an accordion player. The title of the painting is an idiom in Spanish which refers to giving birth and translates to “giving light.” The bellows of the instrument create a dynamic pattern of radiating lines that could likewise be rays of light emanating from the girl’s head and that invite aural imagining. Perhaps a Norteño or Tejano melody floats around the woman and children, sonically affirming the exuberant rhythms of life itself.

Washes of luminescent acrylic paint veil collaged images of an elephant herd and handwriting that runs across the curled fingers of the boy. The images of the pachyderms layered with humans and signs of (pro)creativity suggest a vast, ecological interconnectivity between the local and the global.

Jennifer Ghormley, *Water Series: Overflow*, mixed media printmaking. Image courtesy of the artist.

This mixed media method of artmaking finds harmony in the three prints from Jennifer Ghormley’s Water Series, hung in a vertical line on one wall to the left of Ortega’s painting. In the lower print titled Water Series: Overflow, hands cover the head of a blue figure. Visible wood grain suggests that woodcut is one of the printing techniques the artist employs here. Ghormley uses pencil to delineate details in the anatomy of the hands and stitches an outline that traces the bottom of the palms and wrists. A cascade of blue embroidery threads gush from the center of the figure’s face where the tips of the pinkie fingers meet.

An installation view of *Creative Capitol: The Art of Teaching Artistry*, basement level of the rotunda, Colorado State Capitol building. Image by Nina Peterson.

Ghormley’s mixed media approach to creating art—combining varied materials and deploying multiple processes—aligns with the artist’s pedagogy. According to Ghormley’s page on the Think 360 Arts for Learning website, “her workshops emphasize a D-I-Y approach and creative problem solving.” [3]

Helen Eberhardie Dunn, *FlowRate Ritual Performance – Flow Painting*, Pueblo clay, porcelain, red and black iron oxides, acacia gum, and copal resin on muslin, mounted on canvas. Image courtesy of the artist.

This methodology resonates with philosopher Michel de Certeau’s notion of making a life with the materials at hand. For de Certeau, this bricolage (a French word that means “do-it-yourself”) is an “artisan-like inventiveness” that makes do with what is available. [4] Cooking, walking, shopping, and dwelling are all activities during which one might deploy this inventiveness against the determinations of life imposed by power. Learning to make art and teaching artistic techniques also belong on this list.

Eric Robert Dallimore, *Burnt Negative Series #1*, silver gelatin photographic print. Image courtesy of the artist.

I see a kind of bricolage at work in Eric Robert Dallimore’s Burnt Negative Series. Dallimore made the images by burning the photographic negatives, originally produced in 2001, and printing the gelatin silver photographs years later. [5] Dallimore’s fiery process of manipulation caused the sprocket holes on the film strips to warp, and the resulting prints turn the normally regular march of squares in the upper and lower registers of the image into distorted swooshes.

Eric Robert Dallimore, *Burnt Negative Series #2*, silver gelatin photographic print. Image courtesy of the artist.

In one image, two silhouetted figures stand parallel to each other as if performing on a stage: the frame of the film strip looks like curtains drawn back. The figure on the right raises a hand, which grasps onto something indistinct and linear. It looks like a magic wand. Star-like dots swirl in celestial clouds between the figures, as if this performance is no mere magic show but an actual fulfillment of cosmic transformation. Dallimore’s work reminds me of the magic in the ordinary as well as the potential for change through performative action.

Historian and activist Paul Ginsborg summarizes de Certeau’s notion of everyday politics as follows: “Politics was to be a form of daily bricolage, the assembling of minute acts of autonomy which would distance the individual from the controls of a ‘disciplinary’ society.” [6] For Ginsborg, following de Certeau, the individual’s exercise of agency—making choices at the level of local politics, or, I would add, during the process of artistic creation—is a method of exercising control and escaping oversight in the context of surveillance and exclusionary, damaging, or punitive policies.

The artworks in Creative Capitol: The Art of Teaching Artistry show how art—making it, learning how to make it, and sharing knowledge about its processes—can be and already is integrated into everyday life as a form of political agency. The teaching artists featured in the exhibition do this important work.

Nina Peterson (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in art history at the University of Minnesota. Currently based in Denver, she researches histories of photography, film, and performance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

[1] Artist page for Elizabeth Stanbro, Think 360 Arts, accessed May 15, 2025. think360arts.org/artist/elizabeth-stanbro/. For a list of the programs the Lt. Governor’s office leads, see “Lt. Governor Dianne Primavera,” Colorado State Government, accessed May 15, 2025, ltgovernor.colorado.gov/#:~:text=In%20her%20role%2C%20she%20leads,Colorado%2C%20and%20Aerospace%20and%20Defense.

[2] The phrase came from a 1968 text by feminist activist Carol Hanisch. For a discussion of its continued relevance, see Theresa Man Ling Lee, “Rethinking the Personal and the Political: Feminist Activism and Civic Engagement,” Hypatia 22, no. 4 (2007): 163–79, www.jstor.org/stable/4640110.

[3] Artist page for Jennifer Ghormley, Think 360 Arts, accessed May 15, 2025, think360arts.org/artist/jennifer-ghormley/.

[4] Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (University of California Press, 1984), xviii, available at monoskop.org/images/2/2a/De_Certeau_Michel_The_Practice_of_Everyday_Life.pdf.

[5] Eugene Reznik, “Burned to Nothing: When Photographers Destroy Their Own Negatives,” Time Magazine, August 13, 2013, https://time.com/3801493/burned-to-nothing-when-photographers-destroy-their-own-negatives/.

[6] Paul Ginsborg, The Politics of Everyday Life: Making Choices, Changing Lives (Yale University Press, 2005), 77.