Past Exhibitions in Ketchum 2018
We the People: Protest and Patriotism
September 28–December 14, 2018
A BIG IDEA Project of the Sun Valley Center for the Arts
As citizens in a representative democracy, Americans rely on elected officials to make legislation and policy—to act in the United States’ best interests domestically and internationally. But from the time of its founding, the U.S. has also been a nation that embraces the idea of participatory democracy. Our country functions because it allows (and depends upon) the participation of its citizens. Those seeking to participate in the democratic process can take a wide range of actions, from voting in elections to running for office, showing up for city council meetings, or organizing and joining public marches and rallies. In fact, public acts of protest have shaped America’s history since the moment in December 1773 when colonists gathered in Boston Harbor to reject a shipment of tea from the East India Company in protest of their lack of representation in British Parliament. Public protests have punctuated America’s history, bringing people together to speak out against slavery or the Vietnam War, and in favor of voting rights for women, expanded protections for workers, or civil rights for African-Americans, members of the LGBTQ community and many others. Organizing publicly gives citizens with a shared set of beliefs the chance to speak with a unified voice about their vision for the country and the opportunity to effect social and political change. While marches and rallies may be among the most visible ways that Americans participate in their democracy, citizens also take quieter measures—exercising their right to vote, for example. Volunteering on a campaign. or running for office in order to be part of the process of governing, which begins at the grassroots level. American democracy has never been neat and tidy; instead, it is complicated and sometimes messy. However, democracy is enriched and ensured by its citizens’ participation, whatever form that might take. And every act of participation, whether flying a flag or voting in elections, running for office or marching in the streets, is also an act of patriotism that affirms and celebrates our shared belief that as citizens, we have the right and the duty to help shape our nation’s government.
The BIG IDEA project We the People: Protest and Patriotism is generously supported by Jeri L. Wolfson.
Click here to view the Exhibition Brochure
Exhibition Video
Photo Gallery
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
The exhibition features works that illuminate the many ways American citizens participate in our democracy. Historical pamphlets and books from the collection of the Wolfsonian Museum related to demonstrations for workers’ rights and women’s suffrage illustrate the long history of citizens organizing for political change. Materials from the collection of Wendy and Alan Pesky made in connection with marches in New York in support of Soviet Jewry shed light on Americans’ promotion of democratic reforms abroad through public action at home.
Deborah Aschheim has made a series of drawings based on photographs and oral histories of protest marches in Southern California in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as drawings of participants at events throughout 2017.
Kate Haug also revisits the protests of the 1960s in her project, News Today, a consideration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 Poor People’s Campaign. A print and embossed matchboxes that Haug made as part of the project ask viewers to consider the ways they engage in the democratic process today.
The photographs in Paul Shambroom’s project Meetings document democracy at its most local level—city council meetings in small towns around the United States. Shambroom’s photos illustrate the role that everyday citizens play in government.
The exhibition includes a selection of flags from Mel Ziegler’s ongoing project, Flag Ex-change, through which he has exchanged a new flag for an older, tattered flag, with at least one person in each of the 50 states, illuminating the powerful symbolism of the American flag across the political spectrum.
Two bodies of photographs reflect on moments of collective national mourning. Eugene Richards’ project Lincoln Funeral Train traces the path of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train, which traveled more than 1600 miles from Washington, D.C., to Springfield, Illinois. Richards’ photographs ask viewers to think about how Lincoln’s legacy resonates today. Photographs Paul Fusco made while traveling with Robert F. Kennedy’s funeral train from New York City to Washington, D.C. depict the thousands of mourners who came out to pay their respects.
VISUAL ARTS EVENTS
Museum Exhibition
Sep 28–Dec 14, 2018
FREE at The Center, Ketchum
Mon-Fri, 9am-5pm
Evening Exhibition Tour and Discussion with Artists Deborah Aschheim and Paul Shambroom
Thu, Oct 11, 5:30pm
FREE at The Center, Ketchum
Evening Exhibition Tours
Thu, Nov 1 and Thu, Dec 6, 5:30pm
FREE at The Center, Ketchum
Enjoy a glass of wine as you tour the exhibition with The Center’s curators and museum guides.
Gallery Walk
Fri, Nov 23, 4–6pm
FREE at The Center, Ketchum
Start your Gallery Walk at The Center!
ASSOCIATED EVENTS
- COMPANY OF FOOLS THEATRE: Woody Guthrie’s American Song, Songs and Writings by Woody Guthrie, Conceived and Adapted by Peter Glazer, Orchestrations and Vocal Arrangements by Jeff Waxman…..Jun 26–Jul 15, 2018
- ART HISTORY LECTURE: Artists as Agitators and Changemakers with Kristin Poole, Artistic Director…..Thu, Sep 27, 5:30pm
- LECTURE: Jon Meacham “The Soul of America”…..Oct 3, 2018, 6:30pm
- ART HISTORY LECTURE: Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good and Bad Government: 14th Century Ideas with Relevance Today, with Elaine French…..Oct 18, 5:30pm
- COMPANY OF FOOLS PLAY READING: The Agitators, by Mat Smart…..Oct 23, 6:30pm
- PANEL DISCUSSION: Governed by the People—Why Do We Serve?…..Nov 13, 6pm
- CONCERT: The War and Treaty…..Nov 15, 7:30pm
- FILM: The Other Side of Everything…..Nov 1, 4:30 and 7pm
- FILM: Two Trains Runnin’…..Nov 29, 4:30 and 7pm
- FAMILY DAY: It’s as American as Apple Pie!…..Nov 3, 3–5pm
As part of the BIG IDEA project, We the People, the Sun Valley Center for the Arts is a 50 State Initiative partner of For Freedoms. Since 2016, For Freedoms has produced special exhibitions, town hall meetings, billboards, and lawn sign installations to spur greater participation in civic life. This year, For Freedoms launched its 50 State Initiative, a new phase of programming to encourage broad participation and inspire conversation around November’s midterm elections. Building off of the existing artistic infrastructure in the United States, For Freedoms has developed a network of more than 300 artists and 200 institutional partners who will produce nation-wide public art installations, exhibitions and local community dialogues in order to inject nuanced, artistic thinking into public discourse. Centered around the vital work of artists, For Freedoms hopes that these exhibitions and related projects will model how arts institutions can become civic forums for action and discussion of values, place, and patriotism. Learn more at: forfreedoms.org/50-state-initiative
Burchfield’s Influence: Hayley Barker, Anna Fidler, Katy Stone
June 29 – September 21, 2018
A Visual Arts Exhibition of the Sun Valley Center for the Arts
Artist Charles E. Burchfield (1893-1967) devoted much of his career to translating his belief in a spiritualized natural world into radiant landscape paintings that shimmer with energetic line and pattern. This exhibition pairs Burchfield’s watercolor paintings, drawings and wallpaper with work from three contemporary artists who count him as an important influence: Hayley Barker, Anna Fidler and Katy Stone. Hayley Barker shares a selection of her paintings of pilgrimage sites, mystical landscapes and divinities. Following a March 2018 residency at The Center, Hailey, an 1880s house that was the birthplace of the poet Ezra Pound, Anna Fidler has made a body of intensely layered and dynamic works on paper in response to the history of the house, Pound’s poetry, Burchfield’s paintings, and the history and landscapes of the Wood River Valley. Katy Stone has created a site-specific installation that references Burchfield’s botanical imagery as well as his radiant depictions of the sky. Anna Fidler’s residency project generously sponsored by Jennifer Wilson.
Click here to view the exhibition brochure.
Exhibition Video:
Photo Gallery
Associated public events:
Opening Celebration
Fri, Jun 29, 5–7pm
FREE at The Center, Ketchum
Join us as we celebrate the opening of Burchfield’s Influence! Artists Katy Stone and Anna Fidler will be present. Remarks at 6pm.
Gallery Walks
Fri, Jul 6; Fri, Aug 3; and Fri, Aug 31, 5–7pm
FREE at The Center, Ketchum
Start your Gallery Walk at The Center!
Evening Exhibition Tours
Thu, Jul 12; Thu, Aug 30; and Thu, Sep 13, 5:30pm
FREE at The Center, Ketchum
Enjoy a glass of wine as you tour the exhibition with The Center’s curators and gallery guides.
Bees
April 13–June 22, 2018
A BIG IDEA project of the Sun Valley Center for the Arts
This BIG IDEA project explores the central role pollinators play in our food supply and our environment. It offers a community-wide conversation about the challenges bees and pollinators face today, from colony collapse disorder to shrinking habitat. One factor behind The Center’s decision to pursue a project on bees is the appeal the topic holds for contemporary artists working across the disciplines. The project presents work by visual artists, filmmakers and playwrights who have all chosen to illuminate the mysterious world of bees and other pollinators through their artistic practices, celebrating pollinators’ diversity and their contributions to our ecosystems. The Bees BIG IDEA project offers opportunities to learn about steps we can take to help all kinds of pollinator species. It features a wide variety of events, ranging from seed-paper-making workshops to the installation of an outdoor seed-paper quilt and pollinator pasture, from a class on cooking with honey to a backyard beekeeping workshop, and more. We invite you to take part in these events and join in the conversation.
Partnering with Cameron Cartiere and the chART Collective as part of their ongoing proj-ect Border Free Bees, The Center worked with community volunteers to make paper embed-ded with native pollinator plant seeds. 3,333 bees were cut from the paper and installed on The Center’s walls and ceiling alongside 6,667 bees from earlier Border Free Bees projects. In June, The Center’s staff and volunteers will lay the sheets from which the bees were cut on The Center Lot, alongside other plant starts and seeds, to emerge into a pollinator pasture over the summer. The Center commissioned artist Mary Early to create a site-specific installation in its Project Room gallery. Working with beeswax, Early has used simple, repeating forms and shapes to cre-ate a geometric installation that hangs from the ceiling. Visitors are invited to move through the space, taking in the fragrance of beeswax as they experience the installation. Boise-based artist Kirsten Furlong’s Imagined Pollinators is a two-dimensional wall installation of hand-drawn, hand-cut, artist-invented moths and butterflies. The project represents human imagination and empathy as powerful tools in protecting species that are vitally important to us. The exhibition features a selection of renowned photographer Emmet Gowin’s Mariposas nocturnas, grids of photographs of moths Gowin has made during visits to Panama, Ecuador, Venezuela, Guyana and elsewhere. Depicting hundreds, if not thousands, of species, Gowin’s project illuminates the incredible diversity among pollinators and gives viewers the op-portunity to see pollinators who do their work primarily at night, largely hidden from human view. jasna guy has created several bodies of work about bees, including large-scale prints on silk tissue of tens of thousands of bees and honey-comb images. Recently, she’s begun making photographic prints of a wide variety of pollina-tor plants, sampling their pollen as part of her process and presenting the range of hues in swatches of color.
Museum exhibition generously supported by the Dawson Family.
Click here to view the exhibition brochure.
Exhibition Video
Photo Gallery
Visual Arts Events
Museum Exhibition
FREE at The Center, Ketchum
Apr 13–June 22, 2018 Mon-Fri, 9am-5pm
Opening Celebration*
FREE at The Center, Ketchum
Friday, Apr 13, 5–7pm
*Join The Center’s staff and artists Cameron Cartiere, Mary Early, Kirsten Furlong and jasna guy as we celebrate the opening of Bees! Remarks at 6pm.
Evening Exhibition Tour
FREE at The Center, Ketchum
Thursday, Apr 26, 5:30pm, Thursday, May 24, 5:30pm , Thursday, Jun 14, 5:30pm
Enjoy a glass of wine as you tour the exhibition with The Center’s curators and gallery guides.
Favor de llamar al Centro de las Artes para arreglar visitas guiadas en español.
Associated Events: Bees
- Workshops: Seed Paper Making…..Feb 2–3, various times
- Lecture: Ruth Reichl “Protect What We Eat”…..Feb 8, 6:30pm
- Creative Jump-in: Backyard Beekeeping for Beginners with Sawtooth Botanical Garden…..Apr 5, 5:30–7pm
- Lecture: Cameron Cartiere Border Free Bees…..Apr 12, 5:30pm
- Museum Exhibition…..Apr 13–Jun 22
- Exhibition Opening Celebration…..Apr 13, 5–7pm
- Special Event: Pollinator Pop-up (Celebrate Earth Day!)…..Apr 20, 5-7:30pm
- Inside, Outside, Upside Down! A Mini-Musical Commissioned by Company of Fools & Sun Valley Center for the Arts…..Apr 21, 6pm & Apr 22, 2pm
- Panel Discussion: What is the Threat?…..Apr 24, 6:30pm
- Evening Exhibition Tours…..Apr 26, May 24 & Jun 14, 5:30pm
- Teen Workshop: Ceramic Bee Baths with Boulder Mountain Clayworks…..Apr 28, 10am-1pm
- Film: Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us?…..Apr 26, 7pm
- Family Day…..May 12, 12–4pm
- Creative Jump-in: Cooking with Honey with The Haven…..May 17, 6–8pm
- Special Event: Community Planting Party…..Jun 9, 1-5pm
Community partners include:
- Boulder Mountain Clayworks
- City of Ketchum
- Environmental Resource Center (ERC) Ernest Hemingway STEAM School Five Bee Hives—Tom Harned
- The Haven
- Idaho Department of Fish and Game Local Food Alliance
- Magic Valley Beekeepers
- Native Landscapes
- The Sage School
- Sawtooth Botanical Garden
- Squash Blossom Farm—Sara Berman Wood River Community YMCA Wood River Sustainability Center
This Land Is Whose Land?
January 26–March 31, 2018
A BIG IDEA project of the Sun Valley Center for the Arts
Prompted by current global and local conversations about refugees and immigration, This Land Is Whose Land? explores these timely topics in the context of the United States’ history as place of resettlement and contested (and sometimes contentious) claims over land. This BIG IDEA project challenges us with difficult questions: What role should the U.S. play in resettling refugees? What responsibilities do we have as a nation? What are the risks and rewards of welcoming refugees to our communities? The Center’s exhibition for This Land Is Whose Land? features works by artists who consider the history of refugees in the U.S. as well as the broader contemporary refugee crisis.
Participating Artists:
- Tiffany Chung, an artist who works in a wide range of media, from sculpture and embroidery to photography and film, has devoted much of her career to examining migration, displacement and the complex relationships between the political, economic and environmental factors that can trigger refugee crises.
- Angie Smith, a Los Angeles-based artist who has spent the past several years making portraits and recording the stories of refugees who have resettled in Boise after leaving their home countries in Africa and Southeast Asia.
- Fazal Sheikh, an artist who uses photography to document the lives of people living in misplaced or marginalized communities around the world, including refugee camps that have been in place for decades.
- Shiva Ahmadi, an artist born in Tehran (and now based in California) whose hand-drawn works are inspired by Middle Eastern creative traditions and the current Syrian refugee crisis.
Click here to view the exhibition brochure.
Exhibition Video
Photo Gallery
Visual Arts Events
Museum Exhibition
FREE at The Center, Ketchum
Jan. 26–March 31, 2018
Mon-Fri, 9am-5pm, Sats in Feb & Mar, 11am-5pm
Opening Celebration*
FREE at The Center, Ketchum
Friday, Jan 26, 5–7pm
*Participating artist Angie Smith, whose photographs of members of Boise’s refugee community have been featured in The New York Times Magazine, will speak about her project at 6pm.
Evening Exhibition Tour
FREE at The Center, Ketchum
Thursday, Feb 22, 5:30pm
Thursday, Mar 22, 5:30pm
Enjoy a glass of wine as you tour the exhibition with The Center’s curators and gallery guides. Favor de llamar al Centro de las Artes para arreglar visitas guiadas en español.
Gallery Walk
FREE at The Center, Ketchum
Friday, Feb 16, 5–7pm
Friday, Mar 9, 5–7pm
Associated Events: This Land is Whose Land?
- Film: Big Sonia with Leah Warshawski and Todd Soliday Thursday, Jan 25, 7pm
- Exhibition Opening Celebration: Jan 26, 5-7pm
- Company of Fools Theatre: Staged Reading of The Diary of Anne Frank Friday, Jan 27, 7pm & Sunday, Jan 28, 2pm
- Company of Fools Theatre: Clybourne Park with post-show conversation Feb. 21 – March 10, various times and dates
- FREE Creative Jump-in: “Seeing Other People: Photography, Difference, and Ethics at the Limit” with Sarah Sentilles Thursday, Jan 30, 5:30–7pm
- Book Discussion: The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen Thursday, March 1, 5:30–6:30pm
- FREE Family Day: Saturday, March 3, 3–5pm
- FREE Panel Discussion: Whose Land Is it? March 13, 6:30pm
- Lecture: Viet Thanh Nguyen (co-presented with The Community Library) Thursday, March 8, 6:30pm
- Film: Welcome to Refugeestan Thursday, March 22, 7pm
This Land is Whose Land? BIG IDEA project is generously sponsored by Jeanne Meyers and Richard Carr. The Sun Valley Center for the Arts is grateful to the many community collaborators supporting this BIG IDEA project: The Community Library, the Wood River Jewish Community and St. Thomas Episcopal Church. 
