COVID Community Collection

When it becomes evident that the present moment will go down in history, our everyday experiences become extraordinary. During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, we recognized an urgent need to document these experiences. As an interdisciplinary team of historians, archivists, and cultural workers, it is our job not only to support our cultural community, but to work to preserve its history. In addition to keeping our own records and collecting stories from our community, we wanted to provide artists with an opportunity to do what they do best: translate lived experience into something legible and felt, something that might help us better understand the significance of what we are living through, that might help to provide emotional context around a time that will someday be looked back upon as historic.

In the summer of 2020, we put out a call to the creative and cultural community for works documenting the time surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, and the result can now be experienced here. The City of Boise’s COVID Community Collection is an assembly of 27 works from 25 Boise artists. Spanning a wide range of mediums—from poems and plays to paintings and prints to digital art and textiles—these works come together with breadth and depth to tell an unfinished story.

The collection begins with the anxiety and discomfort of the early moments of the pandemic. Works such as Ellen Wilson’s Perspective in Shopping and Katie Fuller’s “How to Mourn a Holiday in New Pandemia” evoke the ways in which something as simple and everyday as going to the grocery store quickly became loaded with worries of contagion and shortage, and how old grief was compounded with new grief. Brooke Rowen’s Teenage Apocalypse explores isolation, while Emily Pittinos’ A Careful Distance considers the complication quarantine brought to relationships. And through Gracieux Baraka’s Carravagio (2) and Veiko Valencia Pacheco’s See what this is ... we begin to imagine the relief, possibility, and hope that the act of creation might bring to this crisis.

In the very center of 2020, the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery turned national attention to the racial injustice that pervades the foundation and systems of our country. This shift in consciousness can be witnessed through works like Bruce Maury’s Oxygen and Hallie Maxwell’s 46 Cranes for Justice and Health, and Katarzyna Cepek’s photographs, Change Starts with Us and Apathy/Empathy. As protests mounted, the pandemic further exposed economic and healthcare inequities, and collective resilience continued to be tested. Poems by Margaret Koger and Catherine Kyle, as well as Laura Mei Roghaar’s artbook HAP serve to plumb the depths of this moment.

Though we remain in the throes and the tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic, the collection ends with a cautious sense of hope. Bob Bushnell’s “Pandemic” invites the possibility that this moment might someday pass and become history, while Rachel Emenaker’s After the Storm and Rebuild invite healing, repair, and reflection. Finally, in a gesture of safety and comfort, Amy Granger and Helene Peterson’s collaborative quilts bookend the entire collection—asking that we might come together in spite of this to make something beautiful and whole.

All these and so many other works join here to create a still place within this continuing moment. We hope that this collection provides a space for reflection and healing, and that the creative testimonies within it serve as a resource for future generations to gain an understanding of this crisis and its impact on our community. 

Statement: Historically, quilting was often a community effort, but modernity has brought more isolation to the art form. COVID-19 brought even more isolation to the creative process. Our goal with collaborative quilting has been to find ways to connect, support, and push each other creatively. Because of social distancing and other considerations, each quilt we have worked on has been through a slightly different process, however, it mostly involves us passing quilt blocks and tops back and forth in various stages. We have each started quilt tops, passed them to each other, which then get cut and reworked, and passed back. There is a lot of photo sharing and phone conversations to make sure we’re respecting the spirit of collaborating. We have each finalized, quilted, and bound two quilts. Three others are in various stages of completion. One of those involved collaborating with a third, unknown artist. We found a discarded quilt top at an antique store and decided to rework it and finish it. We kept one-third intact and then each of us reworked a third. This quilt will be quilted by hand in honor of the original quilter who pieced it by hand. The limitations, stress, and complexity of working together during a pandemic have produced quilts that are unique to this place and time and couldn’t have been made under any other circumstances. This has been an inspiring and surprising experiment and has been a real lifeline during this time.

Amy Granger Bio: I spent most of my adult creative career avoiding quilting. I come from many generations of quilters and I wanted to forge my own path that didn’t follow theirs. Naively, I felt that my BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art surely meant that I was destined for pursuits with more rigor and status than quilting. I spent the next 20 years as a professional graphic designer and always in pursuit of that “perfect” art medium that seemed to allude me. One day, I was given a crazy quilt made by my great-great-grandmother and I couldn’t stop fixating on it. It sparked an intense interest in quilting that I’m happy to say is just as full of rigor, technique, ideas, and experimentation as any fine art medium. My quilts have been featured in Uppercase magazine, “Quilted, an Encyclopedia of Inspiration” as well as at Treefort in 2018.

Helene Peterson Bio: As the daughter of immigrants, I grew up creating traditional Scandinavian art and macramé, stained glass, cross-stitch, knitting, and Hardanger embroidery. In my early 20’s I had a summer-long quilting mentorship. Seven quilts quickly followed over the course of a year, but this medium was abandoned as I became focused on other artistic pursuits, namely dance. I danced with Idaho Dance Theater and then earned an MFA in Dance at NYU, Tisch School of the Arts. I came back to Idaho and created Drop Dance Collective and choreographed with Balance Dance Company as the Artistic Associate. 25 years later the desire to create a quilt for my daughter’s graduation was inspired by my friend Amy Granger’s work in the quilting/textile world. Now… I can’t stop. In this work of improv quilting, I get to work in color and chaos, and it is a relief to my heart and soul.

Statement: I write poetry and creative non-fiction. My writing is lyric, ekphrastic, ecopoetic, and multidisciplinary, and it often explores the intersection between art and science. I’m drawn to nature and conservation as sources of inspiration. I’m interested in the role of history in interpreting science, and in how art can humanize science into becoming emotionally inhabitable. This manifests in writing that looks at the history of ecological disasters (our role in shaping our ecological present), or in looking at the emotional impacts of historical epidemics. Recent projects include a collection of ekphrastic elegies on animal extinctions (often written about archival photographs that document the last of a species), and a forthcoming collection of poetry on Pacific Northwest ecosystems completed at residencies for the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service.

My current project is poetry about pandemics that is informed by the second plague pandemic and my experience with COVID-19. Manuscript themes include pandemics’ cultural impacts on people and communities, their breakdown of social systems, their role in misinformation and distrust, and their impact on historically-marginalized groups. The project also includes poems about distrusted women figures, like the plague virgin, a blue flame that supposedly formed on the lips of the dying (when people saw it, they cried, “Run, the owlet is coming!”). Project poems were commissioned by The Cabin and the COVID Cultural Commissioning Fund and will also be completed at a residency at Surel’s Place in August.

Bio: Hannah Rodabaugh has an MFA from Naropa University and an MA from Miami University. She is the author of With Words: Verse in Concordance (Dancing Girl Press), We Don't Bury Our Dead When Our Dead Are Animals (Another New Calligraphy), and We Traced The Shape Of Our Loss To See Your Face (Angel House Press). Her work has been published in Anti-Narrative Journal, Berkeley Poetry Review, ROAR Magazine, Horse Less Review, K’in Literary Journal, Linden Avenue Literary Journal, The Wire’s Dream Magazine, and Written River, among others. She's received grants from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, the Alexa Rose Foundation, and the COVID Cultural Commissioning Fund. She’s been an Artist-in-Residence for the Bureau of Land Management, and has twice been an Artist-in-Residence for the National Park Service. She is a teaching writer for The Cabin and a co-organizer for Ghosts & Projectors: A Poetry Reading Series.

Statement: 2020: The Year of the Mood Swing and COVID-19. The strangeness of the 2020 pandemic has offered an artist, like myself, a banquet of muse, turmoil and emotion in which to feed my creativity. I think one way that artists are unique is our ability to find a silver lining in any tragic, anxiety provoking life occurrence- mainly because they help us work.

This is a small portion of paintings I have created during COVID-19’s 2020 debut. Humor paired with razor-sharp seriousness.... a mundane grocery store item which gets a new level of attention, perspective and risk. I’ve found beauty in wearing masks and expressing one’s self through fabric, texture and (of course) eyes. Nobody’s lives have escaped change, but we share affection in some of the ways in which we’ve been inconvenienced this year and perhaps grown a little closer in the process. 

Bio: My name is Ellen Wilson. I am a 40-year resident of this valley and I have been painting and making art since I could hold a brush. I have a strong interest in the challenge that watercolors provide me but can easily explore and appreciate a multitude of mediums. I’ve taught classes in oil painting through community education, painted large scale murals and rally race-cars. I have torn apart my studio with fabric projects, welding, paper mache, beads, wire armature, tattoo design, face painting and I happen to have built the world’s most famous chicken coop.

Statement: I am a poet and educator. The questions that drive my writing: what is care? What is survival? Is survival enough? I grew up in the intricate Maine forest. My father was a woodcutter. The themes that haunt my work include gender, hunting culture, the environment, and the rural vs. urban divide. My longest-term project is a book of stories and poems devoted to reckoning with pollution in the paper mill valley of my hometown, and what it means to have moved away. As a teaching-writer I believe writing forges positive community change, reflection, and helps others feel less alone. I'm currently working on a series of epistolary and documentary poems to describe life during COVID in Boise. I am also working on a letter-writing project.

Bio: Katie Fuller is a writer, poet, and the author of two chapbooks, valve (DoubleCross Press 2016) and The Greenwood Cemetery (dancing girl press 2017). Other writing has appeared in WSQ: The Feminist Press, Stolen Island, Paideuma and forthcoming in Bone Bouquet. She is an instructor of creative writing at Boise State University. She has been a grant recipient at the Idaho Commission for the Arts, the COVID Cultural Commission through the Boise City of Arts and History, and the Vermont Studio Center. Originally from Maine, she lives in Boise, Idaho. More work can be found at katieelaynefullerwordpress.com.

Statement: All we can do is sit and watch, as the world burns outside. Teenage Apocalypse symbolizes the feeling of helplessness that teenagers have been experiencing during the COVID-19 Pandemic, and how many have chosen to cope with it.

Bio: My name is Brooke Rowen. I'm a fourteen-year-old entrepreneurial freelance artist living and studying here in the Treasure Valley. I have studied art all my life, and have taken my creative journey very seriously. I've been taking college-level classes and watching lectures online since I was in the sixth grade, as well as taking a variety of courses that my schools provide. I have gone as far as to create my own business, Cartoon You, where I create artwork for passersby at conventions and fairs. I hope to one day be able to work and sustain myself by doing what I love, which is expressing myself, and inspiring others to do the same.

Statement: It would be an understatement to say that this pandemic has changed the way we interact with those around us. Many of us go for days, or even weeks, without leaving our homes. When we pass someone on the way to the grocery store, even looking them in the eye may feel like an unbearably intimate gesture after months of careful distancing. The strangest part of these strange times may be the way that distance, or perhaps an utter lack of distance, has changed the dynamics with those beside us daily, with people we do not know, and with ourselves. When this is all over, many things may return to normal. There may be concerts again, the bars will reopen, and social anxieties will likely recede. However, the relationships we develop, or don’t, during this time are statistically more intense. Romances that began just before lockdown have been pushed into cohabitation. Friends will either fall out of touch or grow closer due to unrest. There will be a spike in pandemic divorces, engagements, and babies. I have explored the effects of distance, or its lack, on human intimacy in my writing as this time of isolation continues to develop. While I typically write poetry, this unprecedented time has given me a chance to progress my playwriting, which is a form that lends itself to documenting social dynamics in a kind of real time. The attached work is a short play that attempts to do just that.

Bio: Emily Pittinos is a poet and essayist teaching in Boise, ID. An Associate Editor for Poetry Northwest, Pittinos received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where she also served as the Senior Fellow in Poetry. Pittinos is a recipient of grants from the YoungArts Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and the Alexa Rose Foundation. A dedicated teacher to writing students of all ages, Pittinos works as a Writers in the Schools Instructor with The Cabin, a Professor at Boise State University, and a High School Poetry Instructor at Interlochen Arts Camp. Her recent work appears in The Adroit Journal, Denver Quarterly, The Iowa Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, The Last Unkillable Thing (University of Iowa Press, 2021), is a winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and will be released this coming Spring. 

Statement: Being a refugee, I’ve had to move from place to place, varying in culture, color and inspiration. As I’ve moved from place to place, I’ve had the opportunity to experience life in a more unique and transient way. Though chapters of my story may be heartbreaking— my first home was taken from me and my family, for example— I have adopted essential impressions of each new place, making them a lasting part of my accumulated identity. These impressions have amounted to a distinct kaleidoscope of vision which is not only integral to my sense of self, but also to my creation of art.  

Art has been in my life for a long time, acting as catharsis, entertainment and mental exercise. For as long as I can remember I've always wanted to recreate the art I admired. I started with drawing a child and gradually picked up photography in my mid-teens. I gradually discovered that though there are many talented black people, and people of color, they are not at the front lines of the art community which isn't fair to them or the people that love art. Because of this scarcity of black creators having a space to be seen, there's also scarcity in black stories and black experiences being told. My goal became, as sincerely as I could to elevate and give black stories a platform, through my photography and films.

Bio: Gracieux Baraka (he/him) is a visual artist based in Boise, Idaho. With the medium of photography and video, he uses color as a main ingredient for story and theme. He has been featured in multiple exhibits including the #Vote Together Art Exhibition by Our Gender Revolution in partnership with the Idaho Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence on November 3rd 2018, the First Thursday event by LED Boise on September 5th 2019, the CWI Art Capstone exhibit on April 17th, 2020 as well as the international exhibit “No Shoes In My Carpet”, hosted by Kanaiza, and supported by the Mayor of London (July 30th, 2020). Baraka recently received a grant (June 2020) by the Alexa Rose Foundation honoring his previous works to help him buy new equipment for his visual arts career. Find his latest works here:  https://www.instagram.com/cognitivadissonantia/?hl=en .

Statement: I write daily, either prose or poetry. I read as much and as often as possible.

Bio: I was raised in Wilder, Idaho, and graduated in 1972 from Caldwell High School. I attended the University of Idaho where I was “Outstanding Freshman” and “Outstanding Sophomore.” I graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in Political Science in 1969, and from the University of Law School in 1972, having been an editor of the University of Washington Law Review. I served as General Counsel for the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare from 1972 to 1976 after which I was in private law practice for two years. I was President of Western World, Inc., from 1979 – 2008. I am a member of the Boise Great Books Club and this is our 43rd year of reading Classics together. I have been writing short stories and poems since 2009, with stories published by The Cabin, The Idaho Magazine and by Limberlost Review.

Statement: Hannah Riley is a creative writer who draws inspiration from life's varying emotions. Her approach highlights the duality of human struggle, often showing compassion for less admirable characters. Diving deep into not only the actions one takes, but the circumstances which led to those decisions. Her poetry outlines the wavering line between morality and human nature. Revealing an honest and abstract portrayal of those emotions we often hide from ourselves. The reader is asked to find connections within themselves, evoking them to draw their own conclusions and uncover new paths of thought.

Lorelle Rau is a collage artist, who uses cut paper and appropriated imagery to investigate concepts ranging from nature and place to personal experiences. Lorelle Rau’s harmonious compositions piece together snippets of found paper and captured imagery to create graceful linear vistas and abstract scenes that coordinate color, texture, and shape with balanced intention. Her process is guided by an intuitive context, where the elements come together by adding and extracting forms and expertly bringing line and detail into play within the landscape.

Lorelle and Hannah created a collaborative, mixed media work of art that responds to their experience during the Covid-19 Pandemic of 2020. This work uses collage and poetry to create a narrative surrounding the feelings of isolation and resilience. The artwork uses flora silhouettes and a limited, antiqued color palette to signify the passage of seasons and time. It uses snippets of unedited and raw poetry as an insight into the artists’ mind. The viewer is asked to insert his or her own thoughts and experiences surrounding Covid-19 into the artwork.

Bios: Lorelle Rau earned an MA in Arts Administration from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2015 and received a BS in Art Management and BA in Studio Art from Appalachian State University. Lorelle has been pursuing a fine art career and has been exhibiting her artwork nationally since 2011. She also currently works as an art consultant, where she manages corporate, residential, and healthcare art projects. She is affiliated with Capitol Contemporary Gallery, Swell Artists Collective, and Boise Open Studios Collective (BOSCO) in the Treasure Valley.

Hannah Riley earned her BA in English, Creative Writing from Mills College. She began writing at the age of eight, when she wrote and directed her first films. As an avid journalist, her writing practice continued into her adulthood. From there she has explored various mediums from novella to poetry. She lives in Boise, ID where she works as a freelance writer.

Statement: The way we live our lives reveals the concepts that exist within us. This phrase means that our practices and behaviors are a manifestation of our understanding of the world. But how do we know if someone is living under the right concepts? Do we always have to go back and look at a manual to verify is someone is choosing the right idea? How do we know if we are observing the world from the right angle?

Today, the pandemic put in evidence that we do not mean the same when we talk about the Concept of Belonging, Democracy, Priority, Compassion, and Freedom. There is a massive conflict in how we interpret and represent these concepts. This body of work arises out of this dilemma. I have created a series of drawings where I open the discussion of natural rights vs. institutional rights. How can one distinguish between them? I am raising the question that one person would need more than common sense and available evidence to differentiate them. If one wishes to make a decision, personal awareness of how you arrive at a particular conclusion is necessary. But being aware of your own choice will only reveal that we make subjective decisions in the end. Or how many cameras do you need on a subject posing so the students can see what you see?2

Bio: Veiko Vladimir Valencia Pacheco is from Arequipa, Peru. There, he studied at the traditional art school “Carlos Baca Flor,” before moving to the United States at the age of twenty-three in 2006. He earned both a B.F.A and an M.F.A. in Visual Arts from Boise State University. Valencia has exhibited at numerous venues throughout the Western United States, and in Lima, Peru. He has worked on public art projects for the City of Boise and has been published twice on the New American Paintings magazine. Valencia is an adjunct instructor in the Department of Art, Design, and Visual Studies at Boise State University.

Statement: I am a printmaker currently carving into linoleum blocks and using an 800lb floor etching press to print onto fabric and paper. After acquiring a BFA in printmaking from BSU, I have spent the past year changing my studio over from painting to printmaking. My current work is figurative. Through my imagery, I am exploring humans’ emotions, our physical conditions, psychological inspirations, and stressors. The work is geared towards aiding in psychotherapy and counseling. My work focuses on our shared humanness. The figure is ambiguous, I only give enough information to communicate the subject matter. Sometime the subject matter does call for gender, racial, or body differences and at those times the information is strategically added to the images. The pandemic has encouraged me to start a guerrilla art practice in addition to my normal studio work on paper. In my case, this guerrilla art practice has included printing with weather resistant ink onto recycled fabric and posting artwork in unconventional public spaces. I am interested in exploring this type of art expression further, along with portable/wearable art and printing on recycled substrate.

Bio: Wendy Blickenstaff was born in upstate New York and grew up in Twin Falls, Idaho. She holds a bachelor’s degree in studio art from California State University Fullerton and a Bachelor of Fine Art degree in printmaking from Boise State University. Wendy lived in California for twenty years as a student, practicing artist, visual merchandiser, instructor, and designer. In 2005, she moved to Boise Idaho with her husband and two daughters. Wendy has continued her work in Idaho. In fall of 2019 Wendy set up a print making studio with an 800 lb Takach floor press. Through her work she has acquired a Grant from the CCCFund and has purchased a small portable press. Her COVID-19 prints have been reported about in the Press Tribune, Boise Weekly, future Statesmen article, North End News and other online media. NPR’s Idaho Matters, conducted an interview about the spring COVID-19 guerrilla art.

Statement: I write poetry in hopes that my words will capture a bit of the beauty of human life in its relationship to the natural world. Poems are windows into our hearts and lasers reading our minds. Life would mean less without them. As a poet, I am a member of three Boise-based writing groups currently meeting online: Living Poets, associated with The Cabin, Poetry in the City of Trees from Meetup, and my mainstay since 1984, a group of fellow educators who have been active since a 1984 conference funded by the Whittenberger Foundation. I have also participated in The Cabin sponsored Writers in the Attic project for several years and have been published in the volumes Rooms, Detour, Animal, Game, Song, and the upcoming Apple. I have attended a number of writing workshops at The Cabin and through the Idaho Writer’s Guild. In addition, I have taken poetry writing classes at Boise State University, I subscribe to Poetry, and read a wide range of poetry publications. All of this adds up to many hours in my office at home, writing and rewriting. I am fascinated with the process and the outcomes of these efforts by myself and other poets. Finally, I am indebted to my editor, Grove Koger, who reviews my drafts and makes vital suggestions.

Bio: Over the years, poetry has offered me opportunities for growth as well as safe harbor during stormy weather. Writing has kept my soul open to the natural beauty of humanity and the supporting world we live in. Throughout my career as a Boise Schools English teacher and since my retirement, I have devoted untold hours to improving my poetry. As a result I have published nearly one hundred poems since 2001. I am most grateful for repeat appearances of my poetry in Tiny Seed Literary Journal. “The Bears of Redfish” placed 1st in the Forbidden Peak Press 2019 Summer Poetry Competition. “Little Sturgeon” placed 2nd in the 2012 Friends of Acadia Journal Poetry Competition. “Washing Red Leaf Lettuce” was a finalist in the 2019 Lascaux Prize Poetry Competition. You can also take a quick look at several poems published recently by Ponder Savant at  https://pondersavant.com/2020/05/18/the-morning-news-and-other-poems-by-margaret-koger/ 

Statement: COVID-19 has deeply impacted my career and worklife, as all of my art shows have been canceled until further notice, ad my design clients have mostly put the brakes on any sort of marketing. I have spent the last 30+ years creating, designing, making; the last few years I have been able to get to a place that I have worked so hard to get to with art shows lining up and a vast assortment of design clients. This has all but vanished. Frustration, fear, and not knowing what will come next is where I am today. This has carried through within my recent works.

Bio: Bruce Maurey was born and raised in New Jersey until the age of fourteen, when is family moved to Southern California. His career in art and design began at the Art Institute, Laguna Beach, where he graduated with a Bachelor’s in Graphic Arts. In the early 90s, Bruce entered the action sports industry and worked with a number of snowboard companies designing logos, board graphics, and marketing materials. In 1999, Bruce moved to Idaho with his touring band and began his freelance business, Maurey Design. Now living and working in Boise, Bruce continues to design and create art for hobby and for hire. He maintains a steady stream of design work while continuing to explore and hone his unique painting style. The mixed media paintings of “Re:Incarnate” represent a creative pivot in Maurey’s career. After half a decade of fine detailed acrylic portrait work, Maurey sought a new method of expression. He began experimenting with bold strokes of color, mediums, application techniques, and symbolism. Each piece evolves in layers, applied, scrubbed back, and reapplied. The final images are rich with texture and touches of personal narrative.

Statement: During the stay at home order Kelly Cox and I began working of a series of tools: shovels, fire-extinguishers, scuba tanks, face shields etc... Everyday items that provide a degree of control and safety. By remaking them as surreal and no-functional sculptures, these tools become a metaphor for the desire for and illusion of safety and control in our daily lives.

Bio: Kelly Cox and Eric Mullis are an artist team living in Boise, ID where they recently completed their MFAs. Before moving to Boise, they made art in Madison, WI, Missoula, MT and Minneapolis, MN. They are currently art instructors for the City of Boise Parks and Recreation Art program and adjunct faculty at Boise State University and CWI. They make artwork together in their home studio while raising a small boy named Edwin.

Statement: A child in Poland. A refugee in Italy. A woman in America. I am all of these things, but looking at my life feels like looking at a collage of someone else’s memories. I have experienced my life in discrete stages. I am attempting to connect my dots, make them into a whole, and explore them as a visual artist. I am inspired by the “other,” by those who exist outside of the mainstream. My primary recent artistic expression has been photographing concerts, mainly the heavy metal music scene. With the pandemic halting live music performances, I am in search of new paths. As a refugee-immigrant-citizen, I possess unique experiences that have the potential to create powerful commentary on the present world crises, including the pandemic and the protests. I am documenting the struggles of my community. I am questioning, trying to understand and to connect. My current approach is more photojournalistic in nature rather than an editorial analysis with a specific thesis.

Bio: Katarzyna Cepek is a mixed media artist, printmaker, and photographer. She was born in Poland and immigrated with her family to the United States as a child. Cepek received her MFA in Printmaking from the University of Arizona and her BFA in Drawing and Printmaking from Boise State University. Her work has been exhibited across the United States and abroad, including the 2007 Idaho Triennial at the Boise Art Museum. Her installation at BAM explored the frail and elusive nature of memory through repetition and use of everyday objects. Cepek is also the recipient of a 2019 Alexa Rose Foundation Grant for travel to Poland to document places and people that mark her evolution from schoolgirl, to refugee, to naturalized American. Her trip and resulting art work are currently on an indefinite hold due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, she was a freelance concert photographer.

Statement: I wrote this poem during a residency at Surel's Place that was generously provided as part of the grant I received through the COVID Cultural Commissioning Fund in 2020. I encourage readers to look up the painting it was inspired by for added context. Thank you for reading!

Bio: Catherine Kyle is the author of Shelter in Place (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), Coronations (Ghost City Press, 2019), and other collections. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Midwestern Gothic, Mid-American Review, Bellingham Review, and other journals, and has been honored by the Idaho Commission on the Arts, the Alexa Rose Foundation, and other organizations. She is the winner of the 2019-2020 COG Poetry Award. She works as an assistant professor at the College of Western Idaho, where she teaches creative writing and literature. Her website is catherinebaileykyle.com. 

Statement: The pandemic has changed the way I create. Before COVID-19, I worked primarily in ceramics, but difficult times have led me to explore other mediums such as paper and wire. I have taken inspiration from artists that created art with inexpensive materials in times of struggle, such as Ruth Asawa and James Castle. My largest project that I am working on at the moment is a suspended sculpture made of 1,000 cranes that resembles the human lungs. As a half Japanese American, the legend of folding 1,000 paper cranes for making a wish come true is a way I can use my culture in allyship with the community. The cranes symbolize a hope for healing for people affected by COVID-19, as well as, hope for justice for victims of racial inequality and violence. I currently make my art at home and because space is at a premium, I have begun to create more 2D art. In an attempt to save our US Postal Service and connect with others in isolation, I have started to mail my 2D art, similar to the ones I am submitting, to friends and family. My research on art made by Japanese Americans during the Internment Camps has taught me that art has the power to heal. It’s my hope that by sharing my art I can help contribute to healing the wounds caused by the pandemic.

Bio: Hallie Maxwell is a sculptor and mixed media artist that was born and raised in Boise, Idaho. She graduated with a BA in Art from California Lutheran University in 2019. Maxwell is currently a partnering artist with the Idaho Museum of International Diaspora. In 2020, an article on her sculptures was published in Antioch University’s literary and art journal Lunch Ticket. She has exhibited her work in Southern California and the Treasure Valley. Maxwell is passionate about Japanese American art history and gives guest lectures at California Lutheran University on the subject. Maxwell’s grandparents and great grandmother are survivors of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima. This tragic event and the legacy of Japanese American art deeply influences Maxwell’s art. 

Statement: To begin, I should say that this submission is going to stretch the rules of this opportunity. What I have to submit is 2-D work on paper, but it’s also a book of poems that I surfaced by painting them out of the words of another book. My work is called HAP. The included images show just part of what the book contains. I have worked with this type of poem-book-making by erasure before, and never for no reason, for example, while avoiding writing my thesis. I love the strictness of constraint entailed in finding poems inside books; a boundary that makes it possible to play.

The poems of HAP are built on BE HAPPY! a little thrifted book of assorted instructions on happiness with a 1977 publication date. I have been variously charmed and repulsed by its earnestness and naïveté, its monotone pictures of white people in nature next to quotes from Katherine Hepburn and Jesus and Thoreau. On this book or inside it, I salvaged an experience of still-writing within the conditions of the COVID-19 stay-at-home order and its long, separate-keeping tail of social distancing, which for me includes the all-the-time care of my two toddlers, and gratitude for that gift and burden. Erasure is a way for me to write and still remain available to the sweet children in my care; a way to make work alongside them with their crayons and scissors and noises. Here’s what else I hear in the poems of this book: a massive crack in the vessel that holds both work and caregiving, the splintering of our thought-common bough, a weird joy of surrender to no longer being (or never having been) in charge, an invitation to inspect the house of whiteness which I have been sheltering smally inside, all this time.

Bio: Laura Roghaar is a poet, educator, and arts organizer in Boise. She serves as the Idaho state coordinator of Poetry Out Loud, a national poem recitation contest funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Idaho Commission on the Arts; and she teaches writing for The Cabin, A Center for Readers and Writers. She has taught creative writing in a range of settings including public schools, community childcare centers, and juvenile detention. Her teaching and writing work both rely on play, chance, and feeling to be any good for other folks. She holds an MFA in poetry from Boise State and her chapbook of poems, SISTERHOUSE, is available from dancing girl press.

Statement: My new exploration is in shadow cutouts. Inspired by plague art, Soviet-era agitprop, tarot, and American traditional tattoo, my cutouts are angry and radical pleas to fight the pandemic and for social distancing, and to celebrate our healthcare professionals on the front line fighting the virus. The cutouts are handcut with x-acto knives on black cardstock, and can be displayed in a frame, hung in a window, or with a light shone through it, just to name a few options.

Bio: Chad Ethan Shohet is an explorer of poking the theatrical bear. Primarily a director, writer, actor, and puppeteer, but never in that order, he creates theatrical fantasias that explore the chasm of the unknown, unexplainable cosmic anxieties that creep around in your subconscious. He chases the impossible, the stupid, and the impossibly stupid with hopes of reaching greater understanding, and to bring audiences together through catharsis and community. Mostly, he is a dreamer who chases wonderful nightmares. Chad has been a professional theatre artist based in Boise for the past 15 years, where he’s been seen onstage as an ensemble regular in Boise Contemporary Theater’s Children’s Reading Series and Idaho Shakespeare Festival’s education tours. He has produced 17 productions as the Artistic Director of HomeGrown Theatre and is the creator and Creative Director of the wildly popular Horrific Puppet Affair for the last 8 years.

Statement: I write daily, either prose or poetry. I read as much and as often as possible.

Bio: I was raised in Wilder, Idaho, and graduated in 1972 from Caldwell High School. I attended the University of Idaho where I was “Outstanding Freshman” and “Outstanding Sophomore.” I graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in Political Science in 1969, and from the University of Law School in 1972, having been an editor of the University of Washington Law Review. I served as General Counsel for the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare from 1972 to 1976 after which I was in private law practice for two years. I was President of Western World, Inc., from 1979 – 2008. I am a member of the Boise Great Books Club and this is our 43rd year of reading Classics together. I have been writing short stories and poems since 2009, with stories published by The Cabin, The Idaho Magazine and by Limberlost Review.

Statement: Thanks to the CCC Fund and Surel’s Place I have had a studio place the past 11 days where I have been making a textile piece for the CCC Fund. I have been reveling in the space and time to create. I do not currently have a studio and due to space limitations I have been making smaller works on paper/fabric. As my, and so many others, worlds and plans have been turned upside down due to Covid-19 I have been finding peace in Idaho’s nature and the strong supportive community I have. My work has been primarily mixed media these last several months. I am focusing on the beauty and calm moments inside of the chaos as well as the hope for rebirth and rebuilding that will come after. The pieces “After the Storm”, “Rebuild”, and “Dreams of Tomorrow” are all about the structure, beauty, and rebirth that will come from the chaos of Covid-19 (and so so many other world and personal events happening right now). The piece “Together” is how I see community, family, and friends holding one another up and the bond that unites us is what will carry us through this time of uncertainty.

Bio: My work and who I am is shaped by my multi-cultural background and commitment to social justice. I joke that I am comfortable anywhere and foreign everywhere due to my multi-cultural heritage and upbringing in Suriname and Russia. My artistic practice is rooted in having to navigate the tension, beauty, and violence that can come when conflicting cultures and traditions are asked to live together. I explore combining traditional Eastern and Western art, craft and art making techniques. My art examines globalization through the use of textiles, painting, stories, mythology, patterns, and symbolism combined with religious iconography and history. I received my BFA from Biola University.

Statement: As a playwright and theater maker, I love the space between words. I bridge gaps dividing genres, humans and my own disjointed fragments. Studying the distance between us, I seek true connection. I write to root into earth and find present weight in each moment. Aiming to the global impossible through the immediate, tangible here/now, my plays examine how we meet our nature in time and space. Using diverse media to develop dramatic blueprints, I play with text, image, video, music, movement and puppets. As several aesthetic languages inform my work, so do the brain, the body, relationships, landscapes and intricate complexities of human behavior.

I physicalize my hardest moments and pour in stories collected through devised collaborations, interviews and observations, submerging our rawest parts together. Cathartic release brings breath. My art looks at the worst of us to locate the best in us. I rip into past with controlled passion, for future’s sake, so I can hold out a hand and sit with you through your own struggle. It’s hard being human. My plays are quests for empathy. On each page, I long for so much muchness swimming beneath every word like an ocean. I want to feel the volcano underneath while standing grounded on land. Orchestral dynamism and rhythm builds to choreographed enormity that accelerates to a stop. Through theater, I want to connect with strangers, loved ones, people I don’t like and people who turn away from me, leaning in and asking how we can live better.

Unwind: Hindsight is 2020 is a play based on survey responses from 90+ individuals uncovering how stress affects the human body in this moment and women’s bodies in particular as we careen into a time where overpopulation, autocracy, climate crisis and recurring pandemic overpowers us. In this play, five womxn identifying performers use text, music and physicality to dissect how stress links humanity and the earth. Unwind asks how we can stay strong, calm and heal in the face of disaster. Within the play, COVID-19 serves as both a metaphor for the sense of stress, isolation and despair that has been mounting globally for decades and as a major factor in story that impacts all the characters irrevocably.

Bio: Heidi Kraay examines the link between brain and body, seeking empathy with fractured characters. Her work pulls myth, metaphor and monsters together to attempt connections across difference. Plays include see in the dark, How To Hide Your Monster, New Eden, Me and My Shadow and Kilgore, as well as co-devised plays, one-acts, plays for young audiences and short plays. Her work has been presented in Boise, regionally, in NYC and internationally, recently through Playwrights’ Round Table, Trinity Street Players, Georgia’s One Minute Play Festival, HomeGrown Theatre, Tomo Suru Players and Thingamajig Theatre Company. She has been awarded grants from The COVID Cultural Commissioning Fund, The Cabin, Idaho Commission on the Arts, Alexa Rose Foundation, Boise City Department of Arts & History and Boise Weekly. Heidi holds an MFA in Creative Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Arts from California Institute of Integral Studies. She is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America.

Statement: Thanks to the CCC Fund and Surel’s Place I have had a studio place the past 11 days where I have been making a textile piece for the CCC Fund. I have been reveling in the space and time to create. I do not currently have a studio and due to space limitations I have been making smaller works on paper/fabric. As my, and so many others, worlds and plans have been turned upside down due to Covid-19 I have been finding peace in Idaho’s nature and the strong supportive community I have. My work has been primarily mixed media these last several months. I am focusing on the beauty and calm moments inside of the chaos as well as the hope for rebirth and rebuilding that will come after. The pieces “After the Storm”, “Rebuild”, and “Dreams of Tomorrow” are all about the structure, beauty, and rebirth that will come from the chaos of Covid-19 (and so so many other world and personal events happening right now). The piece “Together” is how I see community, family, and friends holding one another up and the bond that unites us is what will carry us through this time of uncertainty.

Bio: My work and who I am is shaped by my multi-cultural background and commitment to social justice. I joke that I am comfortable anywhere and foreign everywhere due to my multi-cultural heritage and upbringing in Suriname and Russia. My artistic practice is rooted in having to navigate the tension, beauty, and violence that can come when conflicting cultures and traditions are asked to live together. I explore combining traditional Eastern and Western art, craft and art making techniques. My art examines globalization through the use of textiles, painting, stories, mythology, patterns, and symbolism combined with religious iconography and history. I received my BFA from Biola University.

Statement: I am a poet, fiction writer, and biographer whose writing plays at the intersection between fairy tales and personal narrative. The things that happen to everybody (the subject of myth) also happen to each one of us differently (the subject of personal narrative), and I draw from the democratic pool of mythic motifs to speak to this juncture. I am inspired by ordinary cycles— birth, love, and death; by forces of nature (human and environmental); and by individual resilience and resourcefulness shown by people stuck in tight spots. Most of my stories and books begin with a myth or a fairy tale that offers a small “seed” story to center the bigger story. My story about COVID begins with the “seed” of the story of Noah’s Ark.     

My novel-in-verse, Ark, explores the ways that a pandemic impacts children, specifically children living in small houses or apartments. It is about a 9-year-old girl (and animal-lover) who lives with her family in a tiny backyard house, built like a wooden boat. When a pandemic threatens their city, my protagonist Arden and her family must stay quarantined in this small space, finding ways to get along and be resourceful. As their neighbors leave town, shut down, and die, leaving their pets to care for, Arden becomes the safe-keeper of all the abandoned animals. Ark will be a modern retelling of the ancient story about a family and its animals striving to keep themselves and their world safe.

Bio: Elisabeth McKetta teaches writing online for Harvard Extension School and is the author of eight books including a biography, a writing guide, several books of poetry, and a children’s book. Her poetry and prose have won awards and been published in over fifty journals, and for seven years she has maintained the blog Poetry for Strangers (poetryforstrangers.com). Her PhD (Univ. Texas 2009) focused on the uses of myth and fairy tales to structure life writing, an idea that still informs her work. She lives in Boise in a tiny house with her young family, an adventure she discusses in her 2019 TEDx talk, “Edit your life like a poem.”

Statement: Historically, quilting was often a community effort, but modernity has brought more isolation to the art form. COVID-19 brought even more isolation to the creative process. Our goal with collaborative quilting has been to find ways to connect, support, and push each other creatively. Because of social distancing and other considerations, each quilt we have worked on has been through a slightly different process, however, it mostly involves us passing quilt blocks and tops back and forth in various stages. We have each started quilt tops, passed them to each other, which then get cut and reworked, and passed back. There is a lot of photo sharing and phone conversations to make sure we’re respecting the spirit of collaborating. We have each finalized, quilted, and bound two quilts. Three others are in various stages of completion. One of those involved collaborating with a third, unknown artist. We found a discarded quilt top at an antique store and decided to rework it and finish it. We kept one-third intact and then each of us reworked a third. This quilt will be quilted by hand in honor of the original quilter who pieced it by hand. The limitations, stress, and complexity of working together during a pandemic have produced quilts that are unique to this place and time and couldn’t have been made under any other circumstances. This has been an inspiring and surprising experiment and has been a real lifeline during this time.

Amy Granger Bio: I spent most of my adult creative career avoiding quilting. I come from many generations of quilters and I wanted to forge my own path that didn’t follow theirs. Naively, I felt that my BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art surely meant that I was destined for pursuits with more rigor and status than quilting. I spent the next 20 years as a professional graphic designer and always in pursuit of that “perfect” art medium that seemed to allude me. One day, I was given a crazy quilt made by my great-great-grandmother and I couldn’t stop fixating on it. It sparked an intense interest in quilting that I’m happy to say is just as full of rigor, technique, ideas, and experimentation as any fine art medium. My quilts have been featured in Uppercase magazine, “Quilted, an Encyclopedia of Inspiration” as well as at Treefort in 2018.

Helene Peterson Bio: As the daughter of immigrants, I grew up creating traditional Scandinavian art and macramé, stained glass, cross-stitch, knitting, and Hardanger embroidery. In my early 20’s I had a summer-long quilting mentorship. Seven quilts quickly followed over the course of a year, but this medium was abandoned as I became focused on other artistic pursuits, namely dance. I danced with Idaho Dance Theater and then earned an MFA in Dance at NYU, Tisch School of the Arts. I came back to Idaho and created Drop Dance Collective and choreographed with Balance Dance Company as the Artistic Associate. 25 years later the desire to create a quilt for my daughter’s graduation was inspired by my friend Amy Granger’s work in the quilting/textile world. Now… I can’t stop. In this work of improv quilting, I get to work in color and chaos and it is a relief to my heart and soul.