The Black Friday 2023 Special!
The Raven Express - 11/24/23
In this issue, I got to have an expansive chat about Knob Hill and its new community arts program Shutter and Strum with co-founder Brian Tryon; I talked with artist Kevin Persaud about the new multi-artist exhibition there, What Kinda Brown Are You? and I experienced Theatreworks’ new whimsical production at the Ent Center, The Little Prince.
Shuttering and strumming
It’s hard to believe, but December 1 will only be Shutter and Strum’s third First Friday. The new Knob Hill community arts entity, a mash-up of Brian Tryon’s photography program (complete with dark room!), Chris Bacavis’ musical instruction and recording (complete with audio studio!) and visual arts gallery (the Disruptor Gallery!), Shutter and Strum has been busy since opening in October alongside the new What’s Left Records location on Platte Avenue.
Tryon had previously operated the Garfield Gallery at the Community Prep School in Downtown Colorado Springs where he still teaches, but left over a censorship dispute regarding Jesse Allan Rozell’s Playtime, a show he’d planned to put on there. The exhibit — an exploration of the human figure using old, manipulated Playboy magazines — wound up finding a home at the Disruptor Gallery.
I’d first visited Shutter and Strum when it was still under construction for my story on Knob Hill’s growing art scene at the Colorado Springs Indy. After a brief visit on First Friday, it was great to slip back into the wood-paneled space to catch up with Tryon (Bacavis was out of town, unfortunately) to see how things were going.
First off, how did this whole thing come about? Obviously, there was the dispute over Playtime.
I don’t have a teaching license, but I was afforded teaching opportunities being highly qualified in dark room photography. It’s been tough: most places you need a teaching license. I'm just really not interested in teaching school districts anymore. I still want to teach, I love teaching, I love working with the youth but with the past elections and what I've experienced… it's not where I want to be.
That's why I started Shutter and Strum: I can see this crumbling of the school systems, the banning of the books, the taking art and music out of schools and all these different things. I also wanted to provide what I do at the Community Prep School on a city-wide level as well. We'll be working with underprivileged youth because I've had a lot of great experience with my program at the school.
And then I'm going to make this a community art center as well. We'll be working with adults and we also do the First Friday shows, not just student shows. There'll be artists in the community curated and ran by students and interns and things like that. That's kind of what I was doing over at the other spot.
The doors are open, the workshops are on our website and we're ready. It’s a “If you build it, they will come” kind of deal.
And you have full autonomy here that you didn’t have previously.
There's no censorship, there's no… [political] right agenda kind of stuff. I get to do what I get to do for me and the youth we represent in the community.
We want a safe space where you don't have all those people putting thumbs on you with rules and censorship. I think it's just so ridiculous how politics have been sliding into our music and books and school and libraries. We want a place that’s separate from that and gives opportunity for people that don't normally have opportunity, especially now that the school systems are being designed the way they're being designed.
We teach music pathways, art pathways, visual art pathways, how to run businesses and how to communicate with people and artists in the community and do it in a positive manner that’s going to help the students, the community and us grow and flourish.
Has the growing art scene in Knob Hill considered moving away from competing with Downtown Colorado Springs, Old Colorado City and Manitou Springs by shifting your gallery openings and celebrations away from First Friday?
Yeah, we’ve definitely thought about that. I think we’ll be doing First Friday stuff continually for a while, but then I want to offer — because we have the space here, too — doing Second Fridays, Third Saturdays, whatever it is.
I go into galleries after First Fridays — because most of time, I've worked First Fridays at our place — and they're mostly empty. Nobody wants to go out after First Fridays.
It would be nice if people would come in more after First Fridays or if you did offer Second Saturdays. It's always a gamble. You do artist talks and different things and people either go or they don't go, you never know…
Depends on the artist.
Yeah. Sometimes they're full, sometimes they’re not. People have obligations. It's always like… I can catch people on First Friday, but after that, where do you catch them? It's kind of tough. It’s something I've noticed in my years of doing this and being an artist myself.
It seems like there’s an opportunity to build a coalition to coordinate something like that where a breakout group says “we’re doing Second Saturday” instead of individual galleries figuring things on their own and leaning on First Friday as a tradition.
Yeah, that’s what it seems like. We need more of community base, we need more collaborations with each other. It's not a competition. We all — and what we're doing here as a community art center and a center for youth — have something different to offer as galleries. We have different artists, we have different styles of art. Most of the prominent galleries in town are willing to work together, but then there's a lot of people that make it seem like it's a competition or whatever when we're all hustling, we're all struggling, we’re all fighting for the same money and grants.
Maybe we meet as a once every couple months, all the curators, gallery owners and the people that are interested, and talk about what we should do to work together. We could offer Third Saturdays and still make it an art walk. The Manitou Art Center tries different things, I think all galleries have tried it, it just seems like everybody is locked into First Friday.
I've been to other towns like San Francisco, Portland and New York where almost every night there’s some art thing going on and the places are full, they're thriving. What I've noticed being here now in Knob Hill is we've been opening when What's Left Records has shows next door and it's really cool to see [music venues like] Vultures, The Black Sheep, What's Left and us open where we have this cool art and music [scene] going on and people can just roam around. It’s not like going Downtown and having dinner, we're offering this culture in this community.
You were just recently elected to the Knob Hill Neighborhood Association Board of Directors. First, congrats. Second, what do you think?
It's cool, I think we got a good group of people. I think the big thing is… I’ve lived here my whole life. This Platte strip and the Knob Hill area has always been this sketch area, or this eclectic area, and gentrification is coming, I know that.
And Shutter and Strum and the growing arts community is part of it, really.
Yeah and we want to be the positive part of moving in here and being established first. Us setting up here is not going to make [property] taxes rise and push the homeless and marginalized more into the neighborhoods. We want to take care of the neighborhoods and create a creative arts community while also keeping it to so the neighbors and the community has a voice too. It's not just about the Platte strip, right? It’s about this whole area.
I've heard they're opening up a big Broadmoor-type destination hotel where the Union Printers Home is. How's that gonna affect everything? It's gonna raise [property] taxes, it's gonna raise this, it’s gonna do this. It's gonna happen regardless — there's probably some powerful people that have money behind all that stuff — but we want to make sure we have a voice and Knob Hill has a voice. (TRE note: UPH Partners, the people behind the redevelopment of the Union Printers Home, is seeking feedback for a master plan to be unveiled by the end of 2023 (checks watch). The vision includes a mixed-use set of developments including apartments, offices and recreational “third places”, but there are no details yet.)
I purposely wanted to be in this area because I think this is going to be a really cool, growing, golden area that hopefully doesn't get too gentrified.
Then even you’re priced out.
Yeah and then I know [local] friends that are buying businesses so they can keep the four or five Starbucks from coming in on every corner or these Denver restaurants moving in to gentrify the area [in a way] that doesn't do anything for our community.
Like Whataburger and other out-of-state chains. Keeping the neighborhood locally owned.
Yeah.
How is Shutter and Strum doing?
I think… it's new. People are kind of we're waiting to see what's going to happen. We're open, we're here. It's like, “How do you get it out there?” It's marketing. Word of mouth is good and you know: location, location, location. We're a destination with the record store, the tattoo shop and Vultures. I want that destination to keep growing like, “Oh, man, let's go to Knob Hill and see what's going on.”
I hope we can ride it out but I think the guy next door, there might be a… for lack of a better title, a Shuga’s type of coffee shop where you could have a coffee and maybe some food, come to the art center, go to the record store, go see shows, you know. I know Eli[as King, gallery coordinator at Platte Collections] and them at Platte Furniture have been really big about trying to get more things and getting things going.
We're here, but we need to be here as a group.
What Kinda Brown Are You?
One of Shutter and Strum’s first bookings for their Disruptor Gallery is What Kinda Brown Are You?, the multi-artist show that will also close out the space for the year. Artist Kevin Persaud says the show channels existentialist thinkers Jean-Paul Sartre and W.E.B. du Bois as a study of “how people of the global majority see themselves as an idea based on the perspective of society.”
Featuring mixed media works from a variety of local artists of color — including Persaud, Jasmine Dillavou, and Mateo Ramírez Rose as well as portraits by Shasta Laue — the show presents works that break its individuals out of the “Brown” diaspora that society places them in.
“The show itself is people of color being able to open up about who they are, how they live their life, how they can get by, who they are, what kind of hats they wear every day, whether you're someone's son, father, mother, sister, but also, you’re a teacher, you're a mechanic,” Persaud says. “We have different identities that we go through every single day. It’s about the artists expressing a version of themselves that's trapped within that cocoon of outside perspective.”
For Persaud, the show evolved out of a desire to connect with his students as he filled in to teach welding at the Manufacturing Industry Learning Lab in Widefield District 3.
“It's a way for me to relate to them and stay vulnerable, saying, ‘Hey, I’m from your neighborhood. I grew up here, but I'm not Hispanic. I'm not Mexican. I'm not Puerto Rican, but I do look like it. I'm ethnically ambiguous,’” Persaud says. “So the joke is ‘What kind of brown are you?’ It's a simple thing that happens in every conversation when you're getting to know somebody. It either becomes ominous or a moment of, ‘Oh, cool! You grew up with Spam, I grew up with Spam,’ depending on who you’re talking to.”
What Kinda Brown Are You? kicks off on Dec. 1 at 5:00 p.m. at Disruptor Gallery (2217 E. Platte Ave.) with presentations by some of the exhibit’s artists as well as Pikes Peak region poet laureate Ashley Cornelius. They’re also enlisting Ricky’s Island Cafe for food truck support.
Ready or not, The Little Prince has places to go.
Deterred from becoming an artist as a child, the unnamed protagonist of The Little Prince becomes a pilot and subsequently crashes into the Saharan desert between the Great Wars. It’s there they encounter a youthful prince who regales the protagonist (and the audience) with his interplanetary journey.
But somewhere in this play’s planet hopping, charming performances, drawings cast on moons and incredible puppetry… I got lost.
Theatreworks’ new production adapts the iconic 1943 French novella of the same name by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry with direction by the company’s artistic director Caitlin Lowans and a huge lift by puppet maker Katy Williams who helps bring the book’s more fantastical characters to life. Following their gender-swapped adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, this production also sought to gender-swap several of the characters from the original book to charming effect.
Without the experience of having read or grown up with the book, I can say that it is very French: playful and different. Written in a time before science-fiction became formalized into something more familiar to modern audiences (or before Luc Besson brought us the very French Fifth Element), The Little Prince’s interplanetary hops are presented as a weave of miniature fables that chastise the calcification of adulthood, the abandonment of childhood joy and the value of meaningful things. The “planets” the Little Prince (Sean Ahmed Sharif) visits and the protagonist (Prentiss Benjamin) draws from his descriptions are less planets and more characters. And then, they’re less characters and more Aesopian foils with specific flaws that our heroes must learn from. A fox wants to be tamed. A rose wants to know why they’re beautiful. A businessman cannot stop calculating their wealth long enough to possibly enjoy it. It is a story that bounces between such disparate concepts and absurd non-sequiturs — such as the prince’s need to clean volcanoes, prune baobab bushes or tolerate the persistent demands of a talking rose — that it was hard to keep track of.
Theatreworks’ incredible production design works hard to bring the novel — as well as de Saint-Exupéry’s classic, whimsical drawings — to life through abstraction. There is no crash-landed plane on-stage, merely a series of wheeled crates, some of which are designed for puppet characters to operate out of.
The trio of worker-actor-puppeteers serve as persistent stage hands, the regularly-churning gears that keep this imagination parade going. Wearing gray worker uniforms and caps from a bygone era, Colton Pratt and Kaley Corinaldi turn in incredible performances as they portray multiple planetary figures while Ellie Myers supports their puppeteering.
The Little Prince is colorful in tone and in practice (the lighting… french kiss) as well as incredibly funny and well-produced, but an appreciation of the original book — an internationally and critically hailed masterpiece that somehow didn’t wind up on any of my grade school reading lists — seems like a strong prerequisite before stepping into the Dusty Loo Bon Vivant Theater.
The Little Prince can be seen at The Ent Center for the Arts (5225 N. Nevada Ave.) until Dec. 17. Info and tickets can be found at entcenterforthearts.org.
The Raven’s Recommendation
The Raven’s Recommendation is something I’ve munched on in the past week that I want to share with you.
This week is a self-serving piece of work because it’s Black Friday and I’m tired. Giant Bomb don’t care. is a deep dive review/editorial/documentary on Giant Bomb, a web site about video games that once revolutionized how gamers ingested videogames online through their quasi-journalism. In the past few years, it’s seen some drastic switches in personality and scope as it’s been traded between corporate owners.
It’s roughly three hours long — yes — but it’s roughly a year of investigation and production. I hope you’ll give it a watch (and a subscribe!)
I love the idea of spreading out the art walks. Then, people could spend more time exploring the area, and discover new shops!