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The inaugural exhibition of the University of Colorado’s NEST Studio for the Arts opens on Friday, September 21.
NEST, which stands for Nature, Environment, Science, and Technology, Studio for the Arts is an initiative that came into existence through Grand Challenge funding and an idea between professors, Erin Espelie and Tara Knight.
“One thing that really makes this campus stand out is it has a tie to the earth and space sciences that is really strong,” says Espelie. “Tara and I wanted to find a new way of showcasing that. It’s already in existence and it’s not something we’re designing from scratch. We’re bringing relationships to light that were already in existence and hopefully creating some new ones.”
NEST’s inaugural exhibition is EMBRYONIC which brings together local collaborations between a chemist and a ceramicist, a wood sculptor and an ecologist, and a hydrologist and a filmmaker.
The studio will also be featuring workshops. French artist Blase Kaole will be collecting local willows and bringing them together to create a physical nest while showcasing what it means to be taking local materials and repurposing them, giving some context to this idea of nesting. Mary Edna Fraser, whose work has been shown at the Smithsonian Museum and who has written books with geologist Orrin Pilkey from Duke University, will be doing a workshop at 2 p.m. on October 10.