UNM-Taos Klauer Campus now has free bus transportation

After more than five years of hope, talk and negotiation the UNM-Taos Klauer Campus now has bus transportation from the heart of town at the Guadalupe parking lot next to Guadalupe Church. The long awaited public transportation was made possible by an addition to the county-wide gross receipts tax, thanks to support from the County Commission, the Town of Taos and our legislative delegation.

Since its January 19 startup, the Big Blue North Central Regional Transit District bus has been making six round trips per day to match class times at the community college. In addition, it makes 12 stops a day in Ranchos de Taos---six going north and six going south. The twelve passenger coach is fully outfitted with a bike rack and wheelchair access.

In these tough economic times, students facing an hour’s drive round trip have begun getting on board in larger numbers each day. Some go over notes or visit with fellow students. Some snooze. Some just watch the scenery go by. But they all appreciate the free ride. The next time you have an hour to make the full circuit, jump on board!

Click Here to See the Bus Schedule

UNM-Taos Student Art Exhibition and Sale 2010

Four to five hundred people are expected at the University of New Mexico-Taos Annual Art Exhibition at the TCA, Stables Art Gallery. Students, family, friends and the public are invited to this end of the school year celebration. The show runs from May 2 to the 14, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily.

The opening reception with art, music, film and food takes place on Sunday, May 2 from 1 to 4 p.m.. Refreshments will be provided by UNM-Taos students in the Culinary Arts program. The band, Shades of Blue, featuring Sam Lucero and Ed Ramsey, will perform live. Work in the show will be for sale. The exhibit is sponsored by the UNM-Taos Art Club, Student Government and Arts Academy.

When asked what’s new in this yea'rs student show, Arts Academy Head, Gary Cook, answered, “Everything is new: new jewelry, paintings, photographs, ceramics, pueblo pottery, prints, film and chocolate. You haven’t seen this work before. You shouldn’t miss this show.”

The exhibition is an un-juried show open to UNM-Taos students who enrolled in at least one art course during the 2009-2010 school year. It represents production by art majors and general education students working on two year degrees and certificates as well as non-degree seeking professional artists and second career adults. The classes also fulfill many of the first and second year requirements for four year programs offered at UNM-Albuquerque and the UNM Extended University in Taos.

Students learn new technical, material and visual skills as well as how to develop content in their work. UNM-Taos provides well-equipped studio facilities. The school has programs in visual fundamentals, drawing, painting, printmaking, jewelry, digital photography, video and clay. In addition, the Arts Academy offers classes in dance, voice, music, songwriting and acting.

The range and level of work in this exhibition makes the school’s annual show unusual and particularly interesting. New instructor, Jeremy McDonnell, is “consistently surprised by the breadth and quality of the work being made at UNM-Taos”. McDonnell, who teaches students how to photograph their work in his digital portfolio class, sees a healthy cross section of the art produced at the school. According to Cook, “It is rare for a two year program to have such success. While many of Northern New Mexico's best known artists have made art in the UNM-Taos program, the success of the art program is still something of a secret.” Cook also mentioned that this summer twenty printmakers who have studied with him and Amy Rankin will exhibit at the E. L. Blumenschein Home and Museum in Taos in a show Cook is curating with Anita McDaniel, Curator, Taos Historic Museums. Approximately seventy prints will be shown in this year's student show including monotypes, etchings, block prints and collagraphs.
Arts Academy Program Coordinator, Sabra Sowell, reports that, “Classes are fully enrolled. Students in my classes are busy fabricating and casting rings, necklaces and bracelets and making small metal boxes and sculpture from precious and semi precious stones, silver, copper and bronze.” One of Sowell's students, Tracy Olson, after being out of school for eleven years, says that she has found her jewelry class to be challenging and rewarding. As Olson puts it, “Learning from a master teacher, interacting with other students and Taos artists while designing and fabricating jewelry has improved all of my art.”

Although the techniques taught in the Pueblo Pottery class are ancient, the new instructor, Dawning Pollen, has given the class a slightly different emphasis from that of her mother, Bernadette Track, who is taking a break from teaching this year. Dawning Pollen, who studied art at UNM-Albuquerque, has introduced her interest in painted surface design to the spring pottery class.

Matt Adams teaches another ancient pottery technique, Raku, to his students. In this dramatic Japanese firing process, pots are fired in an outdoor gas kiln. Then, tongs are used to remove the red hot pots from the kiln and to immerse them into ash cans containing saw dust, leaves and dirt. After smoldering in the covered ash cans for a short time, the pots are immersed in water. This process imparts a wide range of copper metallic lusters, white crackle and luminescent effects on the pottery.

Gestural drawings, anatomical studies, portraits and nude figures crafted from charcoal, lead and oil paint are the products of the figure classes taught by instructor Conrad Cooper.

The digital media classes have created photographs and moving pictures. Joe Ciaglia’s photography students have addressed Gandhi’s "Seven Deadly Sins of Contemporary Life" and created imaginary family portraits using Adobe Photoshop software. Kelly Clement’s Technical Introduction to Video class will show short films for the duration of the exhibition.

Beginning painting, watercolor, drawing, two dimensional design and still life courses have introduced students to color, the elements and principles of design, composition and new materials. While the physical and observational skills taught in these classes are mostly universal, the subject concerns in these classes are also driven by the interests of the instructors Gary Cook, Amy Rankin, Jeremy McDonnell, Bill Stewart, Giovanna Paponetti and Sabra Sowell. The results are figurative and abstract images that depict both traditional and contemporary art issues and visual language.

Special guests at the opening reception will be the UNM-Taos Culinary Arts students. Last year their food display was reason enough to attend the year-end celebration. Their chocolate cakes and candies were the delicious hit of the show. Special praise should go out to Carol Lee, Culinary Arts Program Coordinator, for the successful program she manages.
UNM Taos Arts Academy Homepage

Photos:

"Viva de Muerte" by Amy Montoya.

Pueblo Potter by Sandra Varos and Ron Moore.

"Delusion" Fatima Rigsby.

Chocolate Cakes by UNM Culinary Arts.

The Taos Times Correction:

Correction:
The current issue of The Taos Times says "90% of UNM-Taos students receive financial aid ..."

According to Anne C. Landgraf, Information Resources Manager at UNM-Taos, "The percentage of UNM-Taos students who receive some form of financial aid (including state and federal grants, scholarships, and students loans) is not ninety percent.

For fall 2009, total census date student headcount was 1523. The number of students who received financial aid was 701, which is 46%. For spring 2010, total census date student headcount was 1500. The number of students who received financial aid was 746, which is 49.73%."

The following is an updated version of a story that ran in the recent edition of The Taos Times:

Heron sets wheels in motion for theater guild
An Interview With Christopher Heron
by Michelle Chandler

Christopher Heron is an actor, world traveler, father and UNM-Taos student. He is an active community member currently drafting a new charter for the UNM-Taos Student Theater Guild.

Taos Times: How did you first get involved in theater?

Christopher Heron: I was dropped from a vintage hot air balloon when I was about two years old and took a role as Tiny Tim as my leg was maimed from the fall. No, actually, I was born into a theater family. My father was a director amd my mother was a set designer. From a very early age I was incorporated into all of the menial tasks of maintaining a theater from set construction to participating in performances.

TT: Where did you graduate from high school?

CH: North MiddleSex Regional High School in Townsend, Massachusetts. In addition to being an avid member of my high school theater productions, I was active in many theaters throughout Central Mass.

TT: College?

CH: UNM-Taos is the first university in which I have been officially enrolled, though I have attended many through the back door and taken up partial residency in many of their libraries.

TT: What are some of the favorite places you’ve traveled to and how do feel that those experiences have enhanced your passion and/or technique as an actor.

CH: No place that I can think of within the five continents I have traveled has not contributed to my passion for theater. From Greece, where theater was once prescribed as a medicine, to Indonesia, where their stories are acted out in the streets and in play houses, to Parisian mime, to Balinese dancers, essential parts of all cultures on earth are the stories they choose to tell and the style they choose to tell them in.

The experience of seeing their performances inspired me to seek the stories of my own culture that I wish to tell and the styles in which I wish to express them. Life is the matter of the medium of theater. In my travels, I found that my foundations in theater were an invaluable boon in the flexibility to be open minded and accept new paradigms, the bravery to participate, and the acuity to manage the unexpected.

TT: What currently gives you inspiration?

CH: You don’t have to travel around the world to find inspiration. Theater is boundless and contains every possibility of experience in life because every moment is just as full, and it is those moments, phenomenal or banal, that are equally priceless on stage.

TT: What else gives you inspiration?

CH: Exhalation, because when you breath out you have to breath in again. Inspiration in the creative sense is the same as inspiration in the physical sense. As I take life in, it fills me and digesting that I have new fruits to offer the world in expression. I believe that the muse of inspiration is perching on our shoulders every day. It is not a lottery ticket, it’s all around us, as ubiquitous as the air, we just have to choose to see it. And it is in choosing to express our art that allows the current of inspiration to pass through us.

TT: Ponder for a moment being a teenager growing up in Taos. How do you think theater could enhance your experience here?

CH: Well I’ll tell you a story. I’ve been working in children’s theatre here in Taos for 15 years. I was walking into Smiths the other day when a bearded man stopped me and asked, “Do you remember me?” I said “I don’t.” He had played Trunculo in “The Tempest.” We were in this play together. He had gone on to finish high school and was studying theater in college and was living and pursuing an acting career in LA.

Another story: There was a young girl whose mother brought her to participate. When she arrived she couldn’t even speak she was so shy. I watched her shyness slowly melt away and she became more and more exhuberent and turned into this completely blossomed flower. Not only was she confident in expressing herself, she was actively and creatively expressing herself through many different forms and mediums.

The term theater has another use. Soldiers use it. It is a term for war. The Iraq theater, the Afghan theater. It is a group outfit. It is not solitary. It is the catharsis that makes soldiers have reunions 30 or 40 years later, the process of theater galvanizes community and brings people together. It can break down barriers between people because it creates a safe environment for every kind of person to come together and be understood. The art of theater is the act of understanding.

TT: What advice would you give someone who maybe interested in checking out theater but who is maybe too shy to feel comfortable putting themselves out there?


CH: I would say that a significant number of most of the actors you could think of are terribly shy. Warren Beatty had a terrible stutter off stage. Theater creates a safe environment to explore self expression, and the structures within theater lend form to that exploration.

TT: How do you feel a student theater guild could enhance the experience of the UNM-Taos student?

CH: (Replying very emphatically) It can allow them to realize all of their dreams, really. We can act them all out on stage. It will be a great opportunity to enhance their lives both socially and introspectively. It will teach them new skills and will allow them forum to hone the ones they have already gathered. And, for those students at large, their experience will be enhanced by going to see great theater produced and performed by their fellow students.

TT: What are your hopes and goals for a theater guild?

CH: I hope to ferret out all of the theatre folk and have them all at my fingertips (laughs). I hope that the guild will bring together an enthusiastic group of students who will come together to manifest theater design and production, that we can provide the greater Taos community with dynamic feats of theatric wonder, that we can create an expansive vision of the potentials of theatre. From summer Shakespeare in the park to cutting edge originals in local studio black boxes to drama therapy, student theater guild could hold a space of creative support, mutual inspiration and dynamic expression.

To get involved contact Christopher Heron at cristobalheron@gmail.com

Green tech is now online

Specializing in Green and Solar coursework within the Construction Technology Department will lead to a certificate recognition in Sustainable Technologies. A solid background in the building trades is emphasized, especially in the Fall semester courses. These courses are highly recommended before taking the more narrowly focused curriculums in Solar Technologies and Green Building.

The Technology Center uses a collaborative approach by the instructors to provide students a background similar to what they will find in the working realm wherein one skill rarely stands alone. Each discipline is integral to the whole system, and the interconnectiveness is especially important in sustainable and green development and construction.

Located on the campus of Taos High School in the Vocational Building. Most classes are held during the weekday to encourage Juniors and Seniors of all regional high schools to join the adults in college level courses.

For more visit: Greentech

Or Email: greentec@unm.edu