Segment Coming Up on KUAT Channel 6 ARTe!

Here's the KUAT Channel 6 Press Release ARTe
It will air Sunday March 22, 2009, 6:30 PM


TUCSON, Ariz. (March 6, 2009) – The first installment of the second season for the regional arts journal ARTe from Arizona Public Media features five area artists who use their art to inspire resilience for themselves and for others.

ARTe covers the vital and versatile arts scene in the Tucson area and Southern Arizona and is produced by Emmy award-winning producer Sooyeon Lee, who profiles some of the most talented visual and performing artists in the region for the journal. The five artists profiled in this installment of ARTe, called “Art and Inspirations”.


Date, time and channel
Sunday, March 22 at 6:30 p.m. on KUAT6 and KUAT-HD (analog broadcast channel 6 and digital 6.1)

Where to watch
More information about the ARTe arts journal -- including when and where to watch -- can be found on the Arizona Public Media website at http://tv.azpm.org/originals/arte/

Artists featured
Mark Klett, Photographer
Rick DeMont, Olympian and Painter
Guillermo Gomez Pena, Performance Artist
R. Carlos Nakai, Native American Musician
Carolyn Anderson, Painter

Bios of artists featured on ARTe “Art and Inspirations”
MARK KLETT
Mark Klett photographs the intersection of cultures, landscapes and time. His background includes working as a geologist before turning to photography. Klett established his artistic perspective on the Western American landscape as the chief photographer for the Rephotographic Survey Project (1977-79), which rephotographed scenes visited by the first photographic surveys of the West in the 1860s and 1870s. Klett has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Buhl Foundation, and the Japan/U.S. Friendship Commission. His work has been exhibited, published and collected both nationally and internationally for over 25 years. He is the author of thirteen books including the recently released Saguaros (Radius Press and DAP, 2007), After the Ruins (University of California Press 2006), Yosemite in Time (Trinity University Press, 2005), and Third Views, Second Sights (Museum of New Mexico Press 2004). Mark Klett is Regents’ Professor of Art at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.

RICK DEMONT
Rick DeMont was a swimmer who set a record for the1500m freestyle at the age of fifteen in the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany. But the International Olympic Committee took Rick DeMont's gold medal from the 400-meter freestyle at the 1972 Munich Games after he tested positive for a banned substance contained in his asthma medication. The U.S. Olympic Committee subsequently admitted that it had mishandled DeMont's medical information at the 1972 Olympics, and appealed in 2001 to the IOC to reinstate the medal, but the IOC refused to offer any official acknowledgement of DeMont's innocence. Now an established painter, DeMont talks about how painting helped him deal with distressful events, finally leading him to find serenity in life.

GUILLERMO GOMEZ PENA
Performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña was born and raised in Mexico City in 1955. He came to the United States in 1978 and has been exploring cross-cultural issues and North-South relations ever since. He works in a wide variety of media, including performance art, bilingual poetry, journalism, radio, television and video, and installation art. From 1983 until the mid-1990s, Gómez-Peña lived in San Diego/Tijuana, where he was a catalyst for the reinterpretation of American culture from the point of view of the contested terrain along the border between the United States and Mexico. His art focuses, on the one hand, the exotic and folkloric stereotypes of Mexico still popular in the United States; and on the other, the cultural nationalism often associated with politically charged Chicano art. He currently lives in San Francisco. He was a founding member of the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo and the editor of the experimental arts magazine The Broken Line/la Linea Quebrada. He has been a contributor to the national radio magazine Crossroads and the radio program Latino USA, and a contributing editor to High Performance magazine and The Drama Review, two of the leading magazines dealing with performance art. In 1991 he was the recipient of the prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship.

R. CARLOS NAKAI
Of Navajo-Ute heritage, R. Carlos Nakai is the world's premier performer of the Native American flute. He is responsible for the popularity of Native American music. Originally trained in classical trumpet and music theory, Nakai was given a traditional cedar wood flute as a gift and challenged to see what he could do with it. Since 1983, he has released over 40 albums. In addition to his solo appearances throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan, Nakai has worked with guitarist William Eaton, flutist Paul Horn, composers James DeMars and Phillip Glass, and various symphony orchestras.

Nakai has earned two gold records for Canyon Trilogy and Earth Spirit and has received eight Grammy® nominations. Nakai’s career has been shaped by a desire to communicate a sense of Native American culture and society that transcends the common stereotypes presented in mass media.

CAROLYN ANDERSON
When Carolyn Anderson was 17 years old, she was a passenger in a SUV accident. Surviving this event became a defining point in her life. When the doctors diagnosed Carolyn with permanent paralysis, she began a journey to health and healing. In 1996 a four-legged companion joined her on my path; Tyler J. Worthington, her black Labrador Retriever service dog. They've been together for the last decade and his love has truly transformed her life and who she is. Anderson says dogs have the incredible ability to teach us about love, acceptance, gratitude, and most of all, joy. Now a painter, Anderson tries to capture that amazing love that she received from dogs on her canvas.