Crossing Borders – 40 West Arts Show

Autumn T. Thomas (b. 1978) is an interdisciplinary artist currently working in wood sculpture. Her work challenges the boundaries of visual literacy by transforming wood into soft, twisting forms, mimicking the endurance required to thrive amidst the oppression and marginalization of women of color. Minimal in design, Thomas’ work personifies analogous, brown bodies as whispering forms of subversion, affecting prejudice by way of perception and visual literacy. Thomas is sponsored by Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator (DVCAI) and the National Performance Network. She received her MFA in Book Arts and Printmaking from The University of the Arts, Philadelphia in 2017 and her BFA in Visual Communication from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015. She lives and works in Denver, CO.

Becky Wareing Steele is an artist living and working in Denver, Colorado specializing in small scale sculpture and public art. Her work deals with the commonalities that exist in our shared experiences through the examination of scale and environment. Through her sculptural and photographic work with 1:160 scale figures and 1:12 scale objects she explores the impact of scale and how it affects our perception of the world around us. This impact can also be found in the way we perceive ourselves in our environment. In more recent series she has developed narrative components to accompany the works, allowing the viewer to connect with the piece on a deeper level. Using settings familiar and accessible to everyone is a key component of her work. Through this process she is able to alter the way people view everyday situations, seemingly mundane at times, and invite the viewer to think about their place in the environment by altering the scale. Wareing Steele holds a BA in Art History from Colorado State University with a focus on Intuit Art.

While enhancing our imaginations and consciousness, Belgin Yücelen’s art remains true to the desire to create meaning and beauty in subtle simplicity. With her installations, sculptures, films and prints, she asks the questions of Who we are? and Where we are going? So together we can achieve basic human wisdom. Rather than a direct representation, she creates a fictional world beyond the existing to conjure unrealized possibilities to challenge imaginations. Traces of her previous years in Turkey appear in her artwork placing it at the fascinating edge where East and West meet and ancient and modern coincide. She has been recognized by organizations such as the Colorado Creative Industries, Boulder Country Arts Alliance, Moon and Stars Project Grant, Clark Hulings Fund, Hemera Foundation, and National Sculpture Society. She founded in 2019 as a creative space for community use and studios for artists in Boulder, CO. She is currently serving as a board member at the Dairy Arts Center and as a grant panelist at the Boulder Arts Commission.

(b. 1957, Denver, Colorado) Carlos Frésquez is inspired by cartoons, comic books and psychedelic posters. As a painter he loves bold colours. He uses his sense of humour to focus attention to critical issues and to poke fun. He was born in Denver, where he still resides. He received a B.A. from Metropolitan State University of Denver (1980) and an MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder (1995). Frésquez has lectured widely about Chicano art history and his own artwork at many colleges, universities, galleries, and art centers, and is currently a Professor at the Metropolitan State University of Denver. He has exhibited his drawings, sculptures, prints, installations, and paintings in at least 30 U.S. states and ten different countries. Frésquez’s work has been included in many regional and national touring exhibitions, including Arte Caliente (2005-2007), The Colorado Artist Fellowship Awards Exhibition (1997), The Chicano Codices; Encountering Art of the Americas (1992–1994), Chicano Aesthetics: Rasquachismo (1988-1989), and the ground-breaking exhibition featuring the work of 180 artists, Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation (1990–1993).

Cherish Marquez (b.1989 El Paso, TX, USA) is Latina and Queer identifying. She spent her childhood in Sierra Blanca, TX, and adult life in Las Cruces, NM. Currently, she lives and works in Denver, Colorado. She holds a BA in Fine Arts and Creative Writing at the New Mexico State University and an MFA in Emergent Digital Practices from the University of Denver. She is an interdisciplinary artist with a focus on digital media. She has been an advocate for victims of sexual abuse and for people with disabilities. She fights against mental health stigma and is an active member of the Queer community. Her practice includes creating digital landscapes, 3D modeling, Animation, Sound Design, Wearable Technology, Creative Coding, and Photography. She is knowledgeable in programs such as Maya, Blender, Photoshop, InDesign, After Effects, Affinity Photo, Affinity Design, Unity, Unreal, Final Cut Pro, Divinci Resolve, Max MSP, Arduino, Processing, Spark AR, Substance Painter. She is currently an artist in residence at Redline Contemporary Art Center where she mentors students in the (E)ducation (P)artnership (I)nitiative for the (C)reative, aka EPIC Arts Program. She has shown her work in Ars Electronica Galley Spaces (Online), CADAF Contemporary & Digital Art Fair (Online), Social Distance Gallery (Online), RedLine Juried Exhibition at RedLine Contemporary Art Center (Denver, CO), Proud+, The Studio Door (San Fransico, CA), Coalesce && Object at the Vicky Myhren Gallery (Denver. CO), and OUTSIDERS at Leon Gallery (Denver, CO).

Eriko Tsogo (she/her/they) is a Mongolian American multidisciplinary artist merging spectrums of visual art, esotericism, performance, social practice and media based in Brooklyn, New York. She is an alumni of Denver School of the Arts, having attained her B.F.A (2012) from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and Tufts University. Eriko grew up in Budapest, Hungary and immigrated to the United States with her family in 1999. Eriko has had numerous art exhibitions, curatorial and social practice projects, and art residencies throughout the United States. She has been the recipient of ACE Foundation Scholarship, “Juuh” Honorarium by the Mongolian Ministry of Education Culture and Science, Alliance for Artist Communities Fellowship, The Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, and Colorado Creative Industries Artist Grant. From 2012 to 2021, Eriko worked as the Creative Director at the Mongolian Culture and Heritage Center of Colorado where she founded the “International Yurt Art Residency Program” in collaboration with Drala Mountain Center. She is the founder of Hilitehead LLC, a fine art and web based curatorial firm. Eriko has exhibited at the Currier Art Museum (2022), Contemporary Mongolian Art Biennial: Innovating Tradition in Washington DC (2019), Superfine Art Fair (2018), Art Basel Miami Beach (2019), and Saatchi’s The Other Art Fair in Brooklyn (2020, 2023), Los Angeles (2021) and Chicago (2021). Her animated short film “Tears of the Sky” has screened at the Colorado Dragon Film Festival and Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival. Eriko is the creator of “Mongovoo” interactive room at Meow Wolf Denver and “HERO5079” mural at Center for Visual Arts in Denver. She is represented by Tappan Collective out of Los Angeles.

Laleh Mehran was born in Iran and relocated with her family to the United States at the start of the Iranian Islamic Revolution. Mehran creates elaborate environments in digital and physical spaces focused on complex intersections between politics, religion, and science. In a political climate in which certain views are increasingly suspect and can have extreme consequences, Mehran’s artworks are invitations to think again about each of these paradigms and the profound connections that bind them. Her research, often modeled on and about the very ideas of science and technology, takes advantage of their cultural importance in order to articulate a set of ideas which require precisely these kinds of mediations from both political and religious intolerance. Out of necessity, her artwork is as veiled as it is explicit, as personal as it is political and as critical as it is tolerant. Mehran received her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University. Her work has been shown individually and collaboratively in the USA and international venues including the ISEA (United Arab Emirates), National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (Taiwan), FILE (Brazil), ACT Festival (South Korea), Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Massachusetts), Mattress Factory Museum (Pennsylvania), Carnegie Museum of Art (Pennsylvania), Vanderbilt University (Tennessee), The Georgia Museum of Art (Georgia), The Andy Warhol Museum (Pennsylvania), Denver Art Museum (Colorado), Biennial of the Americas at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (Colorado), 404 International Festival of Art & Technology (Argentina), Next 5 Minutes 4 Tactical Media Festival (Netherlands), European Media Arts Festival (Germany), Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (Colorado), Currents: The Santa Fe International New Media Festival (New Mexico), the Pittsburgh Biennial (Pennsylvania), and the Daniels & Fisher Clock Tower (Colorado). Mehran is a Professor in the Emergent Digital Practices program at the University of Denver.

Louis Trujillo is an artist and curator born and working in Colorado. Identity is the recurring theme of inspiration for his artwork with explorations in gender expression, the unconscious, and family history. He received his B.F.A in drawing at Metropolitan State University of Denver where he was awarded the Nagel Art Thesis Grant and the Nagel Directed Studies Scholarship. He is a former member and PR Director of SYNC Gallery located in Denver’s Art District on Santa Fe. His artwork is part of national private collections. He is currently employed by Access Gallery as their Gallery Manager.

Margaret Kasahara is a visual artist who explores themes of personal and social identity. Her drawings, paintings, mixed media work, and installations have been exhibited regionally and nationally, including at the Berkshire Museum of Nature and Science (Pittsfield, MA), the Center for Visual Art (Denver, CO), the Denver Art Museum, the Gallery of Contemporary Art at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, the Harwood Museum (Taos, NM), and the Japanese American National Museum (Los Angeles, CA). Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, the Denver Botanic Gardens, McNichols Civic Center (Denver, CO), and the Sangre de Cristo Arts Center (Pueblo, CO). She has been profiled in DARIA Magazine, The Denver Post, Kiva Magazine, Luxe Magazine, and the online magazine, Discover Nikkei. In 2020, Margaret was honored as a “Colorado Creative” by Denver’s Westword Magazine. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College. Margaret received a BFA degree from the Kansas City Art Institute in Kansas City, Missouri, where she graduated second in her class. She was born in New York City, raised in Boulder, Colorado, and currently lives and works in Colorado Springs. Margaret is represented by Michael Warren Contemporary in Denver, Colorado.

As a printmaker, painter, and sculptor, Melanie Yazzie’s work draws upon her rich Diné (Navajo) cultural heritage. Her work follows the Diné dictum “walk in beauty” literally, creating beauty and harmony. As an artist, she works to serve as an agent of change by encouraging others to learn about social, cultural, and political phenomena shaping the contemporary lives of Native peoples in the United States and beyond. Her work incorporates both personal experiences as well as the events and symbols from Dine culture. Her work is informed and shaped by personal experiences. Ms. Yazzie uses her travels around the world to connect with other indigenous peoples. Her visits to New Zealand, the Arctic, the Pueblos in the Southwest, and to indigenous peoples of Russia, these travels have been the impetus for continued dialogue about Indigenous cultural practices, language, song, story-telling, and survival. Ms. Yazzie has exhibited widely, both in the United States and abroad. Her work is in the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Print Collection, Providence, the Museum of Contemporary Native Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the Kennedy Museum of Art, Art Collection, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, Rhodes University, Print Collection, Grahamstown, South Africa, to name a few. She has been reviewed in Focus Magazine, Santa Fe, the Los Angeles Times, New Zealand Herald, and she is mentioned in Printmaking in the Sun by Dan Welden and Pauline Muir and The Lure of the Local: Sense of Place in a Multi Centered Society by Lucy Lippard. She has had over 500 group and solo exhibitions combined. Yazzie makes prints, sculptures, paintings, and mixed media works. Her work can always be found at the Glenn Green Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Melissa Furness’ work has been most influenced by her experiences of travel, which have included artist’s residencies around the world. Furness has participated in numerous international exhibitions, and was invited to exhibit work at the 2016 Kochi-Muziris Biennial in Kerala, India through A.I.R. Gallery of New York. The artist was awarded a competitive fellowship to participate in the 2015 Biennial of the Americans, through which she resided in Mexico City as an Art Ambassador and exhibited a major project produced based on these experiences. She is an active member of the Artnauts Collective, through which she exhibits small works in places of contention throughout the world, including the DMZ Museum in South Korea and other locations in order to draw attention to significant political, social and historical issues. She has also been a member of A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn as well as Pink Progression through which she has exhibited major works that have addressed feminist and gender issues. Through her various residency experiences, the artist has exhibited major works in Berkeley, California at the Vizivarosi and Keki Galleries and The Drawing Room HU in Budapest, Hungary and developed site specific projects in Mexico, Ireland, Italy and China. Furness’ work has been represented in the past by galleries in New York, Seattle, Palm Springs and Zurich leading up to her current representation with K Contemporary Art and Kiechel Fine Art galleries. Her work has been featured in numerous group and solo exhibitions as well and international art fairs in Seoul , Zurich, Cologne, Los Angeles, and Aspen. She has been featured in New American Paintings, Studio Visit Magazine, SeeAllThis Magazine, Klassik Magazine International, 303 Magazine, 5280 Magazine and others. Furness is currently a Professor of Art Practices at the University of Colorado Denver.

Narkita Wiley is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans photography, textiles, text, and printmaking. Her community engagement projects, site-specific installations, and works on paper draw from the archive, oral traditions, contemporary Black narratives, and Black feminist theory. Her projects explore identity, healing, memory, and loss. She is interested in the nature of the human condition, entangling the political with the spiritual, and bending time in search of catharsis. She also spotlights the capacity of her materials, symbolism, color, and craft to create meaning. Her exhibition record includes Hausen Gallery (2023), Pratt Institute (2022), Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (2021), BMoCA (2021), Colorado Photographic Arts Center (2021), among others. narkita is an NYU HEAR US 2022 fellow. She earned her BS in Public Relations, in 2010, and a MA in Art & Public Policy at New York University Tisch School of the Arts, in 2022. She is based in Brooklyn, NY.

I became interested in Art As a kid Because I loved wandering the streets of Caracas in Venezuela and looking at the street art and the graffitti, art museums and galleries. I felt that the city was very alive with real people and anything was possible, And I could literally see and hear the marks of the cultures in the murals, music , the food and politics.

Sangeeta Reddy (b. 1955, Hyderabad, India) is a multi-disciplinary artist whose body of work is filtered through her first-generation immigrant experience, forever creating between two cultures in which Modernism’s legacies are engaged through abstraction and representation. Reddy studied English literature and philosophy at the University of Mumbai, India, and has completed 7 years of fine arts studies between the United States and India. She migrated to the United States in 1978, and currently lives and works in Denver, Colorado. Reddy has participated in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, including exhibitions in Aspen, Denver, New York, Santa Fe, Sarajevo, New Delhi, Chennai, and Hyderabad.

I was born and raised in Colorado and received a BFA with honors from the University of Denver in 2014. My work revolves around the formation of identity and perception of history, particularly in relation to the immigrant experience. The internment of my Japanese-American family during World War II piqued my interest in the topics of ethnicity, nationality and the identity crises that occur when they conflict. Beginning with the use of personal resources such as photographs, objects and documents, my work has extended to the larger context of Japanese-American history by delving through government photographic archives and investigating the stories of nameless Japanese-American citizens. This has also led to an interest in the dissemination of history, and how it is manipulated and understood throughout time. Much of my work is done on Plexiglas, a material that allows me to layer several aspects of a subject while simultaneously delineating them physically between surfaces. This allows the viewer to focus on the individual facets, as well as step back and view the work as a whole. As my work progresses, I hope to address issues of identity and history that continually reach outward in an attempt to grasp a better understanding of human perception and experience.