The Narrow Gauge Book Cooperative is excited to welcome Richard Saxton and Trent Segura from M12 Studio for an event featuring Landlines: San Luis Valley, Journey into the American West. The team will join us on July 26th at 6pm for a reading, Q&A, and book signing.
About M12: The mission of M12 is to support, encourage, plan and execute new projects in the realm of contemporary public art; to facilitate creative research regarding public art making, including forms of experimentation, exploration, and inquiry with respect to the creation, development, and facilitation of public art; to promote and facilitate public art as a vehicle for exploring community identity, contemporary issues, and the creative process; and to engage communities and individuals in explorations of art, including through exhibitions, residency programs, educational programming, or collaborative performing or visual arts programming.
About Landlines: LANDLINES is the culmination of a multi-year engagement with Colorado’s rural San Luis Valley between 2018–2022. The largest alpine valley in the world, the San Luis Valley is characterized by an unparalleled range of physical geography and extraordinary environmental phenomena; social, cultural, and economic diversity. It is a land of sand dunes, wetlands, and farmland, all above 10,000 feet in elevation. The Valley has been home to mixed Hispanic ancestral villages, Spanish and Anglo settlements, Indigenous territories, and Catholic, Mormon, Amish, Hindu, and Buddhist communities. Nestled between the Sangre de Cristo and San Juan Mountain ranges, it is home to rivers and acequias; historic adobe architecture; barley, cannabis, and potato farms; deserts and dead volcanoes; UFO activity and cryptids; folk music; and medicinal ecology. Dominated by the presence of the Rio Grande River, the San Luis Valley is the headwaters of lifeways that follow it and branch out. The San Luis Valley is truly “America’s Attic,” and an entryway into a deeper understanding of the American Southwest.
About the Team:
Richard Saxton is the Founder and Creative Director of M12 Studio. He is an artist, designer, and educator whose work focuses primarily on rural knowledge and landscape. Saxton’s work is conceived through an interdisciplinary cultural framework and can be contextualized through social and site-based art practice. Saxton’s work has been described as contemporary vernacular, non-heroic, and art infused with rural experience without subscribing to any one genre or culture. Saxton is an Associate Professor of Sculpture & Post-studio Practice at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the Director of its Art + Rural Environments Field School.
Trent Segura is a researcher, writer, and artist based out of Denver and Saguache, Colorado. He works as an independent graphic designer and is a member of artist collective M12 Studio. He is the Programs Manager for NOON Organization and co-coordinates the San Luis Valley Colcha Embroidery Project, an effort to reinvigorate Hispanic craft traditions in Southern Colorado through workshops, exhibitions, and scholarship. He learned colcha embroidery from artist Delores Worley who was a member of the sewing circle La Costura de Saguache. He has also received instruction from NEA Heritage Fellow Josephine Lobato of San Luis.
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