The Colorado Plateau is home to some of our nation’s most spectacular public and tribal lands, yet these landscapes face tremendous environmental and social challenges. The Grand Canyon Trust addresses conservation threats to this region using science, policy and legal tools. But we need other ways to reach broader audiences and inspire action, so we're using art to connect people to the Colorado Plateau.
In October 2017, we gathered 12 Flagstaff artists together for a weekend at Kane Ranch, in northern Arizona. Tasked with sharing stories and challenges of our treasured lands, the artists created pieces with brush strokes, camera lenses, organic materials, words, and sounds inspired by the land and each other. The resulting artworks explore issues ranging from environmental injustice, to endangered species protection, to the simple beauty of the land.
Special thanks to the Flagstaff Arts Council and David Bower and Sally Glaser for making this project possible.
Photos of artists at bottom of page by Meredith Meeks.
Artist: Diane Hope
Medium: Sound (mp3 files delivered via web streaming)
Artist statement: It's an interesting challenge to make a creative audio piece about landscapes whose most precious quality is deep silence. Here artists' voices are mingled with ambient sounds and music that I composed with found sounds recorded at Kane Ranch and elsewhere on the Colorado Plateau. Those sounds include the wind, piñon jays, coyotes, a ranch gate, a water tank, a canyon wren, and fragments of the poem ‘Wild Love’ by Mary Oliver, read by Darcy Falk, and guitar played by Erica Fareio.
Artist: Erica Fareio
Medium: Watercolor and ink
Artist statement: You are standing on the edge of the Kaibab Monocline, gazing into the Grand Canyon and beyond. The Bears Ears, Hopi Mesas, and San Francisco Peaks are only an infinitesimal of what the Colorado Plateau holds. This is home to a myriad of plants, animals, and people. This diverse and interdependent living organism is now being ravaged by mining and the need for energy. This is fueled by greed and our consumer culture that all of us are a part of. To prevent further destruction, we must make our voices heard, take responsibility, and make choices that reduce our footprints every day.
Artist: Andrew Orr
Medium: Traditional palladium darkroom print
Artist statement: California condors are an endangered raptor found locally in only two places on the Colorado Plateau. Near Kane Ranch, a historical ranch now operated by the Grand Canyon Trust, condors have been reintroduced through a captive breeding program run by the Peregrine Fund.
The condor faced extinction by the 1980s, when the number of wild birds dropped to only 22. Mortality often results from condors ingesting lead bullet fragments left in carcasses and gut piles by hunters. Through successful captive breeding, the condor population has now increased to 276 in the wild and 170 in captivity (2016 data).
Artist: Amy Martin
Media: Composite photographs with ink and colored pencil
Artist statement: Diverging from traditional environmentalist thought, I believe landscape is a synthesis of elements inextricably linked to the physical land, encompassing ecology, history and culture. Through a collection of collaborative portraits, this series celebrates indigenous women on the Colorado Plateau who are advocating for protection of their culture, communities, and endangered lands through their actions, words, and art. These portraits honor kinship with the land, reveal what is at stake if these landscapes and cultures are lost, and celebrate the strength of the women who are on the frontlines of their protection.
Artist: Kate Watters
Medium: Stitched textile collage
Artist statement: Mutualisms are found everywhere in nature. Two species exchange goods or services, and each receives a benefit from the interaction in an evolutionary agreement. That benefit usually comes at a cost, and the partners may not receive equal benefits or incur equal costs. Each species is operating on purely selfish motivations. The benefit is usually an unintended consequence of the interaction. Sacred datura plants and sphinx moths are dance partners throughout their life cycles. They exchange pollination services for protection.
What are the costs and benefits being exchanged between humans and the Earth?
Artist: Ed Dunn
Medium: Fine art digital photographs
Artist statement: Walking the Colorado Plateau, after a rain, I can smell the petrichor allowing plants once dormant to awaken. I am amazed at how they have found a way to adapt to this parched landscape. Water is life. It shapes the land and nourishes what lives on it, but we have damaged cryptobiotic soils and they may not recover for centuries. Climate change has a detrimental effect on the land, creating imbalance and mass die-off of trees, and catastrophic fire and flash floods that are no longer held back by living soil. The land struggles.
Artist: Deb Napple
Medium: Encaustic, oil, and hand pulled prints
Artist statement: A majestic drama. That’s what I found when I moved to Northern Arizona from the East Coast. Light and color bouncing around a wide open horizon, reflecting on rocky walls plunging into the earth. This is the Colorado Plateau and it cannot be described, only experienced. This interpretation is my attempt to share my experience with the beauty of the Colorado Plateau.
Title: The horizon becomes a line, the line, a river that flows through time with intimacy and grace within us, and asks us to see, to love and to ask why.
Artist: Shawn Skabelund
Medium: Site-specific, place-based installation. Materials include: juniper wood, piñon pine pitch, pre-historic marine limestones, and ponderosa pine pollen
Artist statement: The Grand Canyon Trust works to safeguard the Colorado Plateau from destructive uranium mining. Originally, this installation was going to be a symbolic history of House Rock Valley and of Kane Ranch. Setting up the installation, it became a symbol of the geological history of the valley, the Grand Canyon, and human’s attempt to alter it in a destructive manner. The greater ecosystem of the Grand Canyon has much to offer us. As humans, we have a choice to either leave or take its gifts. By leaving, no harm can be done. By taking, we and all that the canyon offers will pay a price.
Artist: Darcy Falk
Medium: Stitched textile collage
Artist statement: During a weekend artist’s retreat at the Grand Canyon Trust’s Kane Ranch (on the north side of Grand Canyon on the Arizona Strip), the four of us sat on the east-facing front porch and watched the clouds at sunset. Spectacularly, the moon appeared from behind a cloud and took our breath away.
Artist: Rebekah Nordstrom
Medium: Oil on Panel, Plein air paintings of House Rock Valley, Arizona
Artist statement: Between December 2017 and March 2018, I visited the Grand Canyon Trust’s Kane Ranch headquarters situated in House Rock Valley on the Arizona Strip to make this work consisting of 28 plein air paintings. During one day each month, I painted a plein air painting every two hours, beginning at 6:00 a.m. and continuing until 6:00 p.m. Over the course of the day, I completed seven paintings. As the paintings progressed through the year, I increased their size, beginning with 4”x4” panels in December and finishing with 4”x12” panels in March.
I made these progressing paintings as a means to understand the coherent whole that lies between time and place. By positioning time and place at opposite ends of a continuum, we are free to observe the progression of elements as they change through time. These sequential observations form an intimate relationship between ourselves and the places we occupy.
Artist: Elizabeth Bonzani
Medium: Stoneware, Juniper Branch
Artist statement: This piece is an attempt to mirror a small portion of the artistic masterpiece that is the Colorado Plateau. When I'm walking in the shadow of the Vermillion Cliffs, I am immersed in a sea of tiny miracles...a beautifully curved branch, an antler shed, the rough texture of bark, the sparkling inclusions in a quartz crystal...and it is this sense of wonder that my piece seeks to convey. We need to slow our pace down so that these moments of beauty can enter into us and transform us. That is when the light comes in.
Artist: Barbara Ryan Gartin
Medium: Color reduction woodcut, book form
Artist statement: What we consume, consumes us. What we save, saves us. What we let vanish, vanishes within us.
“The Story of Our Disappearing” depicts the overlapping landforms of the Vermilion Cliffs, Echo Cliffs, and the distant Aquarius Plateau. This is the first of 10 forthcoming volumes that will include other public lands on the Colorado Plateau currently under review, including Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
