April 19: Unbound Book Festival Preview

Join us at 7 p.m. April 19 for a special sneak preview of the Unbound Book Festival.

An insiders' guide to a new literary extravaganza! We'll talk to organizers about what goes into planning a huge, super-awesome literary event in wee Columbia, Missouri. We'll hear wonderful excerpts of fine literature by festival-featured local authors such as Eric Praschan and Laura McHugh. We'll view beautiful artwork by festival-featured author/illustrator Deborah Zemke. As always, we'll ask lots of questions, eat snacks, drink wine, make friends and chill out amid colorful Orr Street Studios artwork.

What's not to love?

See you at Orr Street April 19.
See you at the festival April 22-23.

http://www.unboundbookfestival.com/ 



Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Missouri. Join us the third Tuesday evening of each month during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.

March 15: Elise Rugolo

Join us at 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 15, for an art talk and a viewing of paintings by Elise Rugolo.

Elise Rugolo's work currently is on display at Orr Street Studios in an exhibit title "Tension + Repose."

 ELISE RUGOLO

Elise Rugolo is an abstract painter who celebrates the physicality of her artwork through an exploration of various media and layering of imagery. Her rhythmic and sometimes calligraphic style is suggestive of dance or motion borne out of a sense of urgency. She favors vivid color, energetic mark making, and intricate compositions that incorporate both geometric and organic elements. Her paintings often combine acrylic, gouache, or encaustic paint with other materials, such as drawing media, collage, fiber, and photo transfers. Her observations of nature and human behavior serve as the conceptual and/or emotional springboard for her intuitive working process, which is directed and shaped by her quest for visual balance.

Rugolo was born and raised in Columbia. She was fortunate to have an art professor father (Lawrence Rugolo), who encouraged and nurtured her creative spirit in her formative years. She left town to go to college and went on to live in a variety of places, most recently Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She moved back to Columbia in September 2015.

Rugolo earned a BFA from the University of Iowa and an MFA from Arizona State University. She has exhibited extensively in galleries and juried shows throughout the country. Her artwork is held in numerous private and public collections. She taught as an adjunct instructor at the University of Wisconsin, and currently teaches workshops and private instruction. She is represented by Concept Art Gallery in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

www.eliserugolo.com

Feb. 16: David Spear | Charlotte Pence

Join us at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb 16, for poetry by Charlotte Pence and an art talk and a viewing of paintings by David Spear.

CHARLOTTE PENCE

Charlotte Pence’s poetry merges the personal with the scientific. Her first book, Many Small Fires (Black Lawrence Press, 2015) explores her father’s chronic homelessness while simultaneously detailing the physiological changes that enabled humans to form cities, communities and households. A professor of English and creative writing at Eastern Illinois University, she is also the author of two award-winning poetry chapbooks and the editor of The Poetics of American Song Lyrics (University Press of Mississippi, 2012). Pence is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Tennessee Arts Commission, the Redden Fund, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Alvin H. Nielson Memorial Fund, the Discovered Voices Award, New Millennium Writing Award, and many others. New poems have recently been published in Epoch, Harvard Review and The Southern Review.

DAVID SPEAR

David Spear earned a BFA from the University of Missouri-St.Louis in 1999 and an MFA in painting from University of Missouri in 2012.

His work can be seen throughout Columbia at venues such as Addison's Restaurant, the Wabash Bus Station, Memorial Union, Boone Hospital, Jefferson Middle School, the traffic box on the corner of Ninth Street and Broadway and the ROTC Cannon fired on Faurot Field after a Tigers score.

Spear currently works on private and public commissions for a variety of patrons and teaches drawing and painting at the University of Missouri.

Temporal Auxiliaries

 

Dec. 28, 2015 - March 6, 2016

Orr Street Studios

This collection of works by David Spear considers and weighs the transient nature of time in terms of antecedent appropriations, historical recollections and artist as individual.

Dec. 15: Lise Saffran | Dareth Goettemoeller

Join us at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 15, for essays by Lise Saffran and art therapy with Dareth Goettemoeller.

LISE SAFFRAN 

Lise Saffran’s novel Juno's Daughters was published by Penguin/Plume in 2011, and her fiction and nonfiction works have appeared in a variety of literary and academic journals, including Poets and Writers, Orion, Academic Medicine and Medical Humanities. Saffran is a graduate of both the School of Public Health at UNC (now the Gillings School of Global Public Health) and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her creative work explores the essential question at the heart of public health: How do we balance our need for autonomy with the responsibilities of community life?

She will read an excerpt from a collection of essays-in-progress titled Safe in These Bodies.


DARETH GOETTEMOELLER

Dareth Ann Goettemoeller is a resident artist at Orr Street Studios and an art therapist with a master's degree in art therapy from Emporia State University in Kansas. 

 

Goettemoeller has been running art therapy groups in Columbia for the 10 years. She specializes in working with adults and loves watching childlike joy bubble up from a room of stressed adults as she guides them in healing art activities. 

All art activities are healing, but there is a special magic that happens when working with a trained art therapist. As we enter the winter holiday season, she will guide us in developing skills for coping and healing through art.

Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Missouri. Join us the third Tuesday evening of each month during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.

NO NOVEMBER EVENT

Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions will not convene in November. Join us at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 15, for our next event.

Svetlana Grobman

Join us at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 20, for memoir by Svetlana Grobman + local art.

SVETLANA GROBMAN

Svetlana Grobman is a Jewish immigrant from Russia who was born in Moscow in 1951. She moved to the United States in 1990. While living in Russia, Grobman was an engineer and an editor for the Soviet Encyclopedia. Now, she is a librarian and freelance writer living in Columbia, Missouri.

Grobman has published articles and personal stories in a variety of places, including the Christian Science Monitor, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, Rural Missouri, and Chicken Soup for the Soul. The Education of a Traitor: A Memoir of Growing Up in Cold War Russia is Grobman’s first book, and she is currently working on her second. To learn more about Svetlana’s experiences in Russia and the U.S., subscribe to her blog at http://svetlanagrobman.com.

Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Missouri. Join us the third Tuesday evening of each month during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.

Chris Teeter | Jennifer Wiggs | Brett Cottrell

Join us at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 22, for fiction by Brett Cotrell and paintings by Chris Teeter and Jennifer Wiggs.


About Abstraction, featuring work by Chris Teeter and Jennifer Wiggs, is showing in the Mildred M. Cox Gallery at William Woods University, through Sept. 27.


CHRIS TEETER

Chris Teeter began his career as a visual artist with representational drawing and plein air painting. Afterward, for 10 years, he was involved almost completely with creating sculpture in steel or various media, including the doors at Orr Street Studios and many other sculptures. During the past three years he has returned to painting. This change in media is a change in form only, since the content of his artistic  pursuits has always revolved around his interest in abstraction.

“I love how abstraction is, in varying degrees, without reference to representation and the external world and therefore presents itself somewhat enigmatically. The viewer is asked to think and perceive non-verbally, in effect, to jump from the familiar to the unfamiliar and participate in the final act of perception and understanding internally.”

JENNIFER WIGGS

Jennifer Ann Wiggs has a BFA from Indiana University and an MFA from Washington University, and she has taught art at the Art Department of the University of Missouri.

She is a member of the Watercolor USA Honor Society, and her award-winning work has been shown in Watercolor USA, the Living Artist’s Magazine, the Missouri Watercolor National, the National Exhibition of American Watercolor at the Taos New Mexico Museum, and the River Market Regional Exhibition in Kansas City.

Artist statement: The channel between realism and abstraction is rich territory for invention. These latest gouache paintings explore abstraction using sophisticated color relationships and simple shapes.


BRETT COTTRELL

Brett Cottrell was born and bred in Las Vegas. His writings blend religious and political satire with whimsical, action-packed absurdity. He’s been a bartender, a drummer in a rock-and-roll band, a legislative intern and an attorney. He studied political theory at Boise State University and graduated from the George Washington University Law School. Cottrell lives in Columbia, Missouri, with his wife and their opinionated dog, Tico.

The End of the World Is Rye

What would you do for the perfect sandwich? Kill? Die? Well, if you were a rogue angel, you might just cause the Apocalypse. And it looks like that's just what he's about to do when he lands in a polygamist cult in Utah. So, now it's up to the rest of God's divine posse, including Jesus and Lucifer, to save all of existence from certain destruction. In his debut novel, Brett Cottrell takes you on a provocative, celestial roller coaster ride that will have you laughing on the edge of your seat all the way to the gates of Hell.


Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Missouri. Join us the third Tuesday evening of each month during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.