✺ welcome to the newsletter: an occasional bushel of works, news, + more ✺

Letter #1 | 4.18.25

Hello

I am glad you are here! Welcome to the very first newsletter. I am writing from Denver, CO. From where are you reading?

Here are some various updates from this brightly busy Spring:

✺ For those of you in my neck of the woods, I’d love to invite you to Near and Far, a solo exhibition of works at the Volunteers for Outdoor Colorado headquarters in the Dos Chappell Bathhouse in Washington Park. VOC is the state’s oldest outdoor stewardship nonprofit, and it is a great honor to be hosted by them. Further, it is a personal delight to be showing in Wash Park: both my parents grew up on S Gaylord St.; the Bonnie Brae Tavern (lovingly RIP) and Wash Park are places of home. This show features a portrait and interview of my mom, as well as a portrait of my dad at 17 created when I too was 17.

Reception: Friday 4/18 5:30 - 9pm. 600 S Marion St Pkwy, Denver, CO. The show is up until 6/23.

✺ I will be slinging prints and such at South Pearl Street’s Final Friday Art Walk on 4/25, and most Final Fridays this summer.

✺ Nature Notes: Ralston Creek was recently completed, a ~1,800 square foot mural in Arvada, CO. The City of Arvada created a wonderful video featuring the project and how it came to be through a great community effort.

✺ The drawing above: Cactus wren, and the drawing below: Arctic tern, are currently up at the Roger Tory Peterson Institute in Jamestown, NY for the Art That Matters to the Planet: Wild America show, juried by Kenn Kaufman(!!). This show is celebrating the renowned RTP and his friend James Fisher’s journey across the U.S. to document birds, places, and changes. Wild America was published in 1955, so it obviously offers a much different perspective on public lands and our relationship to them, and is therefore an important read. This art exhibit features work related to/inspired by their experiences and the places they visited.

✺ Above, Night Flight, is currently on view at Valkarie Gallery in Lakewood, CO until May 4, 2025. Blackpoll warblers, among many other species, migrate primarily at night. Check out Birdcast: depending on where you are, they might even fly over you tonight!! Happy Spring Migration!!

✺ Below, Good Warm Light, was recently shown as part of the Babe Walls Women’s History Month Show. Good Warm Light is named after Frida Kahlo’s description of the color green in her writings from 1957: ‘el verde - luz tibia y buena’. Various green organisms tend to their ecological niches. The serpentine rocks were especially inspired by Dr. Susan Harrison of UC Davis who specializes in botanical research and plants that grow in serpentine soils. She and her colleagues published this excellent book.

Looking ahead

✺ I am headed to Oregon this month for the first in-person gathering of Oregon State University’s Fireline Fellowship. A cohort of eight (meet them here) was selected early last year to create work over the next two years inspired by OSU’s long-term ecological monitoring of the H.J. Andrews Forest in light of the 2023 Lookout Fire, which burned ~2/3 of the forest. I’ve since been studying and preparing (some materials linked below). I am so so excited to work with the Andrews’ researchers on subjects like songbird vocalization studies, macro-invertebrate surveys, stream flow changes, and amphibian population dynamics, oh my!!

✺ Afterwards, I will be spending the rest of Spring in Steamboat, CO, painting a mural on the sides of the Old Town Hot Springs pump house with fellow artist Melanie Damore. Melanie is a painter who specializes in landscapes; she will create our mural’s expansive background showcasing Howelsen Hill and the Yampa River, and I will focus on flora and fauna. I am particularly excited to be painting a large-and-in-charge bugling elk. Stay tuned for the public announcement of the project sometime soon. If you’re nearby in May, come say hi!

✺ I recently illustrated an essay for Mad! Agriculture’s Journal Issue 12: For the Love of Plants, written by Emily Haga. On May 8, I will be joining them at the Patagonia Store in Boulder, CO as a speaker for Tools of the Trade: a free event centered around using art and photography as tools for regenerative agriculture.

✺ In June, I am very excited to teach a two-part mural class at the Denver Botanic Gardens! Registration is open. Really looking forward to sharing some mural-making skills and helping folks create their own small scale mural panel inspired by explorations in the Gardens.

✺ opportunities ✺

Pine Meadow Ranch Center for Agriculture 2026 Artist in Residency: Applications open 5/1 - 6/20

Creature Conserve: $500- $1,500 Art-Sci Scholarships: Applications open now until 4/30

Bell Projects: The Bread Show Open Call: Submissions open now until 5/11

Southwest Contemporary OBSESSION Call for Art: Submissions open until 5/15

Creative Capital - Artist Opportunities May/June Newsletter

ADSF Broadway Market Call for Vendors: Submissions open throughout the summer

✺ reading, listening, looking ✺

OSU’s Forest Understory: Creative Inquiry in an Old-Growth Forest

Creature Needs: Writers Respond to the Science of Animal Conservation

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag of Fiction and The Dispossessed

Manjula Martin (fellow Fireline Fellow)’s The Last Fire Season

Daniel Mason’s North Woods

Yukimi (of Little Dragon)’s solo debut album: For You, Break Me Down

AURORA’s KCXP show and interview

NoSo Tiny Desk

Lido Pimiento’s Resisto Y Ya

Turnstile’s Never Enough

Nabihah Iqbal’s This World Couldn’t See Us

Platinum Palladium Printing with Leica M Monochrom

Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of B̶l̶a̶c̶k̶ Genius)

Ephemeral - Life in Appalachian Vernal Pools

the earth sings

When a living being speaks, it is best practice to speak back. In whistle, in melody, in moan, bark, growl. Something in the key of C. A wide-hipped moan and long breath out, from the hidden places in the spine and down through each leg. Of course, from the hips, loud and wet-noted, sliding through the scales. Cottonwood leaves shushing against each other in the wind, river rushing over rock, thunderous and urgent after a long winter, or a lullaby whispering in the fall. The whistled good morning of a robin. A chittering squirrel. The rattle of magpies. Trumpet of a goose. The language of sky, its inhalations. I sing with my whole chest up. Or sometimes silently, my forehead, touching the earth. Ripe fruit falling from a tree.

• suzi q. smith

The fact is: the Light will increase

It always does. Whether we think it should

or not. No matter how determined

we are to be gloomy.

We may be sure that things

are worse than ever.

We may even be right.

But

HERE COMES THE SUN

Try & stop it.

• Diane di Prima

thanks for reading ✺ until next time ✺ reach out anytime

CATIE MICHEL @catiecreating

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cathrynbmichel@gmail.com