FREE | Every Friday: June 19 - August 28 | 5 PM - 6 PM
Join us throughout the residency season for our free public series of short and informal artist talks, readings, and presentations. We’ll learn about works-in-progress from our artists and scholars-in-residence with informative and inspiring presentations in all disciplines. This is a wonderful way to kick off your weekend! Bring a friend, all are welcome.
Location: Main Campus. Look for Craigardan Event sign at the end of Main Campus driveway (two “doors” west of the farm store, towards Keene). Google Maps Link
Grace Fossett
Grace Fossett. Through clay and illustration, Grace seeks to actively blur the historical boundaries between fine art and craft. By using traditional handbuilding and surface design techniques, they give their pots and sculptures depth and breadth by world-building narratives through a trans non-binary lens. Dealing in dreams and histories, real and imagined, Grace’s visual lexicon acts as a narrator, spiraling storyteller, and subject. Arch, hand, castle, spaceship, strong man, truck, sword, dragon, dog, gun, motorcycle– as monikers for narrative, these forms suggest movement and the passage of time. They become the driving force of stories, multi-functional narratives to hold secrets that shelter and shuttle you from place to place. With this lexicon, they record their history onto the surface of pots or pages of a comic, a history that tells lies and undisputed facts, one that accounts for the utterly mundane and fantastically extraordinary— of interactions seen on the street to altercations witnessed in a dream. Shards and slices of daily life altered by an overactive imagination. This library of personal iconography is carved/scratched/printed onto ceramic objects, allowing you to hold story and history in your hands. The forms lovingly interacts with the user, creating an experience that is both tactile and cerebral. Grace’s work is a playful yet emotionally charged exploration of gender, fantasy, and relationship with self— familial, platonic, and romantic. It conjures up a dream-like sense in my audience, blending fantasy and humor with poignant resonance.
Ari Cordovero
Ari Cordovero is a writer whose work traces intimate thresholds of transformation: girlhood and motherhood, inheritance and rupture, devotion and leaving. Across lyric essays and narrative nonfiction, she explores lineage, memory, and the body as both archive and instrument of survival. She grew up in the Rocky Mountain Southwest, in a landscape shaped by sagebrush, long silences, and a sense of distance that sharpened attention inward. Though geographically suburban, the terrain carried something older and elemental — a place where imagination thrived in the absence of noise. As a child, she was an obsessive reader and improvisational storyteller, narrating elaborate worlds to friends long before she understood that writing could be a vocation. One friend recently reminded her that, at thirteen, she would lie with her head in Ari’s lap while Ari spun continuous, unwritten stories aloud, as if language were a current moving through her.
A teacher once predicted — publicly and mortifyingly — that she would “be on a bookshelf someday.” Ari remembers this less as prophecy than as proof that her voice was visible before she learned to question it. Like many writers, she stepped away from the page for a time. Adulthood intervened; practicality replaced imagination. It was not until a period of personal upheaval — heartbreak, loss, and an unexpected pregnancy — that writing returned, not as ambition, but as necessity. She began journaling compulsively, filling more than 1,500 pages in a single year. What began as private reckoning gradually revealed a larger architecture. Patterns surfaced. A manuscript took shape.
She is currently at work on a memoir-in-essays that examines pregnancy, romantic disillusionment, and childhood through the lens of lineage: how patterns repeat, how cycles fracture, and how tenderness can be learned where it was once absent. The project resists spectacle and simple redemption arcs, instead holding moral ambiguity, intimacy, and the quiet mechanics of survival. Motherhood has clarified rather than softened her artistic commitment. Much of her work is written with her daughter in mind — not as audience, but as future witness. She writes toward a different inheritance:
emotional fluency, honesty without performance, and a refusal to shrink complexity into something more comfortable. Her work appears in Pictura Journal, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. She lives in the Colorado mountains with her daughter, Goose.