Main and Mezzanine Galleries
Kirsten Furlong – To Talk About Trees

FROM THE ARTIST
Kirsten Furlong’s exhibition, To Talk About Trees, includes installations, detailed works on paper and hand-stitched pieces created from felt and linen. The title for the exhibition was inspired by the poem What Kind of Times Are These by American poet and essayist Adrienne Rich, who was reacting to German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s poem To Those Who Follow in Our Wake. Rich and Brecht, each in their own way, were addressing the dark days of our shared human histories. Rich chose to talk about trees, while Brecht posited that a “conversation about trees is almost a crime… For in doing so we maintain our silence about so much wrongdoing.” Furlong, with the viewpoint of a mixed race woman in the American West, examines social and environmental injustices through her art by employing images of flora and fauna that “serve as both emblems of nature and as metaphors for human desires.”

Creation of the works in the exhibition was supported by Alexa Rose Foundation, the School of the Arts at Boise State University, the Department of Art, Design and Visual Studies at Boise State University, the Barry Lopez Foundation for Art & Environment, Chalk Hill Artist Residency program, The Common Well, Gallery One Visual Arts Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Biography
Kirsten Furlong is a visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice considers the ecological and poetic bonds humans have with animals and plants on lands that we collectively inhabit. Her investigations take the form of drawings and installations created from the viewpoint of a mixed race (Black/white) woman in the American West. Recent projects consider nuclear waste in the high desert of Idaho, declining habitat in the grasslands of the Great Plains, and the effects of climate change on species everywhere. In the work, animals and plants serve as both emblems of nature and as metaphors for human desires. This work has been shown at the Sun Valley Museum of Art, Missoula Art Museum, Boise Art Museum, High Desert Museum, Great Plains Art Museum, Southern Utah Museum of Art, MCLA Gallery 51, Andra Norris Gallery and the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center. Her work is in the collections of the Library of Congress, Portland Art Museum, Corcoran College of Art and Design, Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper at Rutgers University and Denali National Park & Preserve among others. Furlong has earned numerous fellowships and grants including the Alexa Rose Foundation Fellowship, the School of the Arts Grant from Boise State University and Affiliate Fellowship with the Center for Great Plains Study at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She has been awarded residencies at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Jentel Foundation, KHN Center for the Arts, the Montello Foundation, Signal Fire, Chalk Hill Artist Residency, Good Hart Artist Residency, PLAYA and Prairieside Outpost. Kirsten is the director of the Blue Galleries and a lecturer in the Department of Art, Design, and Visual Studies at Boise State University. She lives and works in Boise, ID with her husband painter William D. Lewis. She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree at Boise State University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Eveleth Green Gallery
Judy Kalin – The World of Sumi

Community Gallery
Teddy Weekes Charlton – Land of Plenty

FROM THE ARTIST
An American artist embracing the rural outdoor lifestyle with my family, I capture the spirit of travel, ranching, and farming in every brushstroke. Holding a BFA in Oils from Central Washington University, I create paintings of landscapes, wildlife, flowers, and portraits. My work is inspired by masters such as Fechin, O’Keeffe, Sargent, Richard Schmid, Sorolla, and C.M. Russell, as well as contemporary artists; David Leffel, Richard Alan Nichols, and Howard Terpening.

The seasonal cycles of the land captivate my heart, my sense of self and on this quietude, I embrace my feelings with varying strokes of my brushes. , Seeing a recently sowed field, new leaves clustering on at tree, smelling the sage carried on the wind, cattle moving as they are gently herded to new grasses, lambs jumping in the sunshine, birds calling from somewhere out of sight, harsh winds and snow filled clouds leaving the land softened.  This and so much more is rediscovered with each arriving season. My paintings explore the solitary life often experienced by those who work and live on the land, Life spoken in a language of generational knowledge passed from family to family, friends to friends, strangers to new acquaintances across the United States.

Brushing colors, textures, distance and movement, I celebrate the beauty found in the people and places we call home in these vast rural settings in North America. I focus primely on historical and contemporary rural life, tracing the journey from early America to the present. Spanning tens of thousands of years, from early indigenous peoples to the mixed peoples of today my works embrace the land once known as Pish Wana (Wide River), Kittitas (White Clay), and the Upper Yakima Valley, now called the Kittitas Valley.

May each day greet you with soft light, a horse that knows your voice, and a river that nourishes your soul.

Sincerely,
TMW Charlton,
An American Artist

Hallway Gallery
Melody Reno – Harmony Mandala Art Collection