Micaela Amateau Amato

Desertification

Edge of the Sea

ibn Sina

Marsh Huts

These gouache illustrations are from Zazu Dreams, Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era, written by Cara Judea Alhadeff. Zazu Dreams is an environmental literacy-adventure story about a bi-racial Sephardi/Mizrahi Arab Jewish boy, Zazu, who traverses the globe along his family’s migration route across the Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Middle East, witnessing ecological crises caused by 21st-century villains, Nestle, Merck, Exxon, Monsanto—Big Pharma, Big Oil, and Agribusiness giants that stalk the planet.
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Micaela Amateau Amato is Professor Emerita, Art and Women’s Studies at Penn State, an artist, curator and writer, who has exhibited her work in NYC, at Kornblee Gallery, Bertha Urdang, Nancy Hoffman Gallery; in Chicago at Marianne Deson Gallery; in Los Angeles at Acme Inc., Angles Gallery, LAX Art; and Navy Pier Armory Art Fairs in NYC, Basel Art Fairs Miami, LA Art Contemporary, Tokyo Art Expos, and Chicago Art Fairs. Her art is held in many public and private collections and been featured in Artforum, Art News, Art in America, New York Times, LA Times, Women’s Art Journal. Amateau Amato has received two NEA Fellowships, a Pollock Krasner Award, and represented the US at the Lulea Biennial in Sweden.

Robert Eric Shoemaker

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Robert Eric Shoemaker is a poet-playwright, educator, and theatre artist. Eric is an MFA Candidate in Naropa University’s Creative Writing & Poetics program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. His poetry and plays have been featured in Columbia Journal, Beats: A Naropan Periodical, Mosaic at University of California Riverside, Tooth N’ Nail, Rollick, Literature Emitting Diodes, Chicago After Dark, Thought Notebook, Baseball Bard, Verde Qué Te Quiero Verde, and his debut collection 30 Days Dry from Thought Collection Publishing, which is available on various platforms including Amazon. Eric’s second book of poetry, We Knew No Mortality, is forthcoming from In Extenso Press, with a third book of hybrid work, Ca’Venezia and other tales, on the way from Partial Press, both in 2017. His journalism has been published in Turnout: A Poetic Journalism Zine, Beats: A Naropan Periodical (where Eric is founding editor), Boulder Weekly, Newcity, Evanston Now, Fra Noi Magazine, Artisan Magazine, Printeresting, VAM, and through the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting Campus Consortium Fellowship, which sent Eric to Venice to cover Artisanship and Climate Change.

Eric is the author of the duet musical PLATH/HUGHES, which was awarded the 2014 Olga and Paul Menn Foundation Prize for Best Play and has been produced throughout Chicago and in New York. His project “Lorca In America” was awarded a 2015 DCASE Individual Artist Program grant from the City of Chicago, and featured the production of his original translation, Bernarda Alba and Her House, at Redtwist Theatre. Other productions of Eric’s plays have been staged by Poetry Is Productions, where Eric is Artistic Director.

Eric is a graduate with honors from the University of Chicago, where he was Artistic Director of the Classical Entertainment Society. Follow his work at reshoemaker.com.

Phoebe Farris

Documentation of various demonstrations in Washington, D.C., to keep our waters safe.

Above: Dakota Access Pipeline protest, March 2016

Above: Indigenous women at Women’s March, January 21, 2017

Above: People’s Climate March, April 29, 2017

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Phoebe Farris has six intertwined careers, stretching the concept of interdisciplinary and transnational research. She is the arts editor of Cultural Survival Quarterly, a licensed CCR/DUNS art curator/dealer, a registered art therapist, documentary photographer, professor and author.

As an award-winning independent curator, photographer, author, professor and art therapist, Farris explores issues involving race, gender, indigenous sovereignty, Native American studies, the environment, peace and social justice from multiple perspectives. Her books, Voices of Color: Art and Society in the Americas, Women Artists of Color: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook to 20th Century Artists in the Americas and Art Therapy and Psychotherapy: Blending Two Therapeutic Approaches, create dialogues about the intersections of social activism and the arts.

A member of the Powhatan-Renape Nation with expertise on contemporary Native American art and culture, Farris has consulted for the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of the American Indian and the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indian Art and taught at the Corcoran School of Arts.

Please see additional photos of polluted waters in an earlier Water, Water blog post ─ https://waterpoetryprose.wordpress.com/2015/02/07/phoebe-farris/ ─ from her Absegami series, photos taken on the Atlantic City shoreline after Hurrican Sandy in 2012.

Jacob Massey

Jacob Massey was born and raised in Los Angeles, California, and is currently serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Cambodia where he teaches English.

Chris Brown

“The North Canyon Pool”

Water is magnetic; we are perpetually drawn to it. Explorers camp and settlers settle where there is water. Nomads and desert travellers map their life by water. The first thing our spaceships look for is water. We are inseparable from water. 60% of our bodies are made of water, the brain and heart, 73%. Every day a gallon or more of water passes through us. That’s 20,000 gallons in 50 years. There is no boundary between water and us. Water goes throughout us. It is no wonder we are fascinated by it, and in love with it.

Deep in the heart of the Grand Canyon, in a section called Marble Canyon there is a break in the walls called North Canyon, wherein lies this pool. To get there requires a short but stout hike up through the layers of the Supai Sandstone. The Grand Canyon was created and carved by water. In North Canyon, water laid down all these layers of sand hundreds of millions of years ago, and then came back a few million years ago to finish making this side canyon. Repeated cataclysmic events flushing this small canyon with water and rock debris, in a thunder of power exciting to contemplate and frightening to behold, slowly carved this place. Millions of gallons of water, coming unexpectedly down out of the sky created huge floods. Silt, sand, pebbles, cobbles and huge boulders as big as refrigerators were the chiseling tools pushed by water that cut this cleft in the canyon.

After each flood the water vanished from the canyon as suddenly as it arrived, leaving small pools like this. When you walk around the final corner into this place a hush settles over you. Even the crunching of your footsteps on the gravel floor of the canyon sounds loud. The quiet transports you into a blissful reverie. The sound of water dripping into the pool becomes a symphony to your ears, and the song of the Canyon Wren like a Bach aria. One would expect to see an ancient bearded mystic meditating by the pool, playing his wooden flute. He is not here, but you are.

Like us, water has multiple personalities. The water that was here and will come again is a raging dragon of fire and fury. Sitting by this quiet pool you can feel the maelstrom of the flood. You understand that like the water you too can be a raging dragon, but now you are a serene pool. You can see through the surface of the water into what is below, in the murky depths. And suddenly you see what the water sees. You see your own power and fury, your mysterious depths, and your own reflection. For a few minutes you are surrounded by the peace and tranquility that envelops those who come here. Oracles come from places like this.

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Chris Brown moved to Boulder, Colorado in 1969 to attend the university, where his photography is now part of Colorado Arts in Public Places. His first exhibit in Boulder was in 1974 and he has had more than a hundred since. He has been a board member of Open Studios, a member of The Dairy Arts Center’s jury committee and participated in various Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks art workshops.

Diane Armitage

Inside the Visible

Video stills from 2014 shot with an underwater camera in the Tesuque River in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains ─ The Tesuque River is part of the Santa Fe Watershed.

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Diane Armitage is an artist in Santa Fe, New Mexico, working in digital video. She has a BFA in Ceramics and an MFA in Sculpture from the University of New Mexico. She studied Digital Media at the Santa Fe Community College, where she established the Art History program in 1999. She has taught Art Studio for the University of New Mexico and the History of Film for Santa Fe University of Art and Design. She is featured in 100 Artists of the Southwest (Schiffer Books, 2006). Her video, The Great River, has been touring the US with Water, Water Everywhere: Paean to a Vanishing Resource.

Bill Berkson — with love (1939-2016)

This week, we hold a moment of silence for our beloved friend, Bill Berkson.
In 2014, he offered us

We send him love and gratitude for the privilege and pleasure of his company.

Here is the Paris Review on the day he died. http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/06/16/bill-berkson-1939-2016/
and an obituary from SFGate
http://www.sfgate.com/art/article/Bill-Berkson-San-Francisco-poet-art-critic-and-8283479.php

Maureen Owen

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Maureen Owen, former editor and chief of Telephone Magazine and Telephone Books, is the author of Erosion’s Pull from Coffee House Press, a finalist for the Colorado Book Award and the Balcones Poetry Prize. Her title American Rush: Selected Poems was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and her work AE (Amelia Earhart) was a recipient of the prestigious Before Columbus American Book Award. She has taught at Naropa University, both on campus and in the low-residency MFA Creative Writing Program, in Naropa’s Summer Writing Program, and edited Naropa’s on-line zine not enough night through 19 issues. Her newest title, Edges of Water is available from Chax Press, chax@the river.com. She has most recently had work in The Denver Quarterly, Vol. 48 #1, Vanitas #7, Bombay Gin’s Anselm Hollo Issue and in New American Writing 2014. Upcoming poems will appear in Hangling Loose #107, Fall 2016. She can be found reading her work on the PennSound website.

Ana María Hernando

Baño de Estrellas y Luna

Nuestra Canción Anaranjada

La Montaña se ha Bañado en Nuestro Lago

“Baño de Estrellas y Luna”
(Bath of Stars and Moon)
30” x 22”
Acrylic inks and acrylics on paper

Nuestra Canción Anaranjada”
(Our Orange Song)
41 1/2” x 30”
Acrylic inks and acrylics on paper
2012

“La montaña se ha bañado en nuestro lago”
(The mountain bathed in our lake)
44″ x 30″
Acrylic inks on paper
2015
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Ana María Hernando, originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, makes paintings, sculptural installations, drawings, and prints with a layering of natural and formal elements. She is moved by the transparent actions she finds in the work of women, in the movement of the flowers, and in a loving hand. She takes the designs from the mantillas and mantones worn for church and the festivities of her Spanish and Latin background, and blends them with floral and organic images.

She is also a poet and translator. Her work has been included in several poetry books, and often she performs in Spanish and English with poet Kenneth Robinson from Nashville, Tennessee. They are working on The Salka Poetry Project, with a book of poems and art scheduled to be published in 2016. As part of the Salka Poetry Project, they published the Salka Archipelago, a limited edition of thirty hand-made bookswith master printmaker Bud Shark in 2013.

She is a single mother of three and lives in Boulder.

Bob Holman

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Bob Holman recently finished teaching “Embodied Poetics” at Naropa University. He lives in NYC, and is the founder of the Bowery Poetry Club. His film on endangered languages, LANGUAGE MATTERS, is streaming on PBS.