Use This Poster

All you people who want to get the word out for next weekend's show, here's a poster for you.

DCR Advertisement and Workshop Announcement

Hey all!  We sent an advertisement to be published in the Denver Catholic Register, but it didn't make it in this week.  They had a full page of advertisements, so I'm sure our's was just bumped in place of more important things- like masses and such.  Anyway, here's what it would have said.  If you can steal this little advert and publish it where ever you can, that'd be great!

Call for Entries for Catholic Writers:  Aggiornamento Art and Cultural Event is a collective of Catholic Artists and other creative people reviving our authentic Catholic Culture in the Denver Metropolitan Area.  Shows take place each First Friday and Saturday at the Knights of Columbus #539 Hall at 1555 Grant St in Denver.  This month's show will showcase local Catholic writers and authors, as well as local Catholic Artists, Artisans and Musicians.  We are looking for local authors, poets and other writers to submit their works for display and sale. A portion of proceeds from sold works goes to the KofC hall and to perpetuate the event.  Please contact Joey or Brittany Kerlin at SaintRochStudios@gmail.com or visit our blog at www.CatholicArtandCulture.blogspot.com to apply by February 29th.  Show runs Friday, March 2nd, 6-10pm and Saturday, March 3rd, 1-5pm.  Local artists also welcome to apply.

and: 

Free Art Show and Cultural Event:  Aggiornamento Art and Cultural Event takes place each First Friday and Saturday at the Knights of Columbus #539 Hall at 1555 Grant St in Denver.  This month's show will spotlight local Catholic Writer's.  Visual art produced by local Catholic artists and artisans will also be on display, as well as live music by Catholic musicians Friday evening.  Works will be for sale, and a portion of all sales are donated to the Knights of Columbus and to support the collective.  A FREE Cultural lesson/demonstration for families will be held Saturday from 1:30-3:30pm.  Admission to all events is free, free will donations accepted.  For more information contact Joey or Brittany Kerlin at SaintRochStudios@gmail.com or visit our blog at www.CatholicArtandCulture.blogspot.com.

Also- In case you weren't aware, Joey and Britt Kerlin will be in charge of the March show as Nicole and Mark Thomason will be out of town visiting family.  For all you artists, this means contact us if you need help with anything.  If you need, you can drop off any work with us by Thursday, March 1st at our home.

And for everyone else, Joey Kerlin, our resident ceramicist and experienced instructor, will be leading our workshop on Saturday from 1:30-3:30.  Since our theme this month is Words, you'll be excited to learn that he has blended the 2 medium, visual and verbal art, together to bring this project to you.  If you want a sneak peek and what you'll be working on, come to the show on Friday to see Joey's newest creations- that are NOT made of clay!

Joey with a student working on a clay birdhouse

Finally!  Don't forget that the potluck will be Friday night, March 2nd!  Since it's lent, don't forget to bring a MEATLESS meal to share.  We will provide forks, spoons, plates and bowls, napkins and cups.  Bring your own serving utensils and anything else you may need.  Beer and wine sales will benefit the hall, and water will also be provided.  You don't have to be an artist to join us in our potluck!  Pre-show dinner begins at 5:30 and we will open the doors to the public at 6:00pm.

See you next week at the show!

New for this month's show!

I am excited to announce that we will have the privilege to have copies of the wonderful journal, Dappled Things, for sale at our March Show!  What a wonderful opportunity to support the greater Catholic Art and Culture movement through our local venue!  And what a perfect addition to our current Writer's show!  The journal is published quarterly and includes both visual art from Catholic artists as well as poetry, prose, and essays by Catholic writers.

Here's a sample of a piece written by Julie McGurn for the current issue of Dappled Things.  It's titled Old Grace and New Beauty and quite appropriate for this week, I think.  You can find the rest of her short story here.

Old Grace and New Beauty

Julie McGurn

At the end of the block on Main Street sits a small dry cleaners owned by the Choi family. It is a model of tidiness and precision. Every day the hum and whoosh of electric dryers and steam cleaners sound forth like the beating heart of a great giant. Mrs. Choi runs the register with an efficiency bordering on the brusque, but mitigated by her ability to greet each customer by name. The pronunciation may sometimes be wanting, but she’s got the raw data down cold.

No one could doubt her willingness to extend herself for her customers either. Like one February morning when a regular, Mr. Sam Gilette, came in with a black smudge on his forehead. After her usual boisterous hello, Mrs. Choi leaned over the counter, pointed to her own forehead, and whispered, “Your head,” in a discreet gesture meant to spare the man a day of embarrassment.

“What?”

“Your forehead. It all dirty.”

“Oh, that,” he said. “Church. I’ve  just come from church. Ash Wednesday.”

“Oh. Church.” A flash of recognition crossed Mrs. Choi’s face as she remembered seeing such a smudge before. She was satisfied by his explanation and her own solicitude, and business could proceed. It’s an admirable service they provide to the public. People bring in their soiled, stained, wrinkled and ripped clothing and receive them back a few days later fresh, pressed,mended and clean.

Serena, Mrs. Choi’s niece, works as a seamstress. She sits just near the front counter, facing the wall under a pegboard of dozens of large, brightly colored spools of thread ready for any contingency. She had left Korea as a teenager to join her aunt and uncle who had emigrated to America several years before, and everything she knows of her new home she learned from them. But she possesses all the softness her aunt lacks. Her face is smaller and finely shaped, not the broad block of Mrs. Choi. She speaks infrequently to the customers, but when she does, a shy sweetness emanates from behind her unfashionable glasses. When things get busy, Serena gets up from her sewing machine and helps at the counter, but this is always a last resort. Everyone knows Mrs.Choi is in charge.

All that changed the day Mrs. Choi suffered a stroke. She had been sorting the day’s receipts when Serena noticed a trickle of drool fall from Mrs. Choi’s mouth onto the counter. The right side of her face had gone completely slack and looked as if it were melting. Now Mrs. Choi is in a rehab center and Serena is running the shop. At first, Serena was terrified. Though her aunt’s imperious manner could sometimes be irritating, it had been so much easier when Mrs. Choi was there. Serena had never needed to think for herself or make any decisions. Submitting to the commands of her superiors was second nature to her. When her aunt told her to step lively and help at the register, barking orders at her one at a time, she would do what she was told. Serena could even anticipate what her aunt would say next, but she always hung back and never let Mrs. Choi know. Out of politeness, perhaps. Her aunt liked it that way and Serena liked to please. But from such submission she had learned to do things on her own. Serena soon found herself doing what she would have imagined unthinkable a mere six months before. “The buck stop here,” she had taken to saying. Sometimes her new motto confused patrons. Some thought she was talking about the bus. Others had visions of marauding bands of male deer.

From her days of hemming and mending, she had gotten good at concocting lives for the garments customers brought in. Bits of the world came to her one hanger at a time, like bodies without spirits. Each suit, each dress, each cardigan, was an occasion for her to wonder about lives being lived on a big stage somewhere.

Say a 38 Long Brooks Brothers suit came into the store. Serena would see a man strutting through the morning rush at Penn Station as if wading in the shallow end of the shore, the other people like so much water in a wave, their presence a slight dragon his progress. In the evening he would reverse course, but slowly, buffeted by more waves than before. Serena would smell the stale odor of cigar clinging to the jacket and conjure a scene of male bonhomie, muttered complaints and bursts of laughter, the slow release of strife amid the billows of acrid smoke.

Serena liked cocktail dresses and ball gowns best. Her eyes would widen at the first glimpse of sequin or bead. One dress in particular caught her fancy. Long to the floor and short off the shoulder, its golden silk ruched on the side to conform to the wearer’s shape. She could almost feel the soft skin of the slightly rounded shoulders, cold like a marble statue. This one, this one, would be worn to a party, a grand party with string quartets and canapés. She could see the lady in the gold dress walking into a parquet ballroom, a row of enormous floor to ceiling windows with layer upon layer of trim framing a Manhattan street scene a few stories below. The darkness outside would be punctuated by a haphazard array of lights—some red from the backs of cars,others white from lampposts or blue from shop signs.

Serena wondered what the size 6 gold dress lady would be thinking as she stood looking down to the street in between sips of her vodka tonic. Maybe she was steeling herself for the appearance of the woman her husband was carrying on with, andthe fake cordiality that she would endure. Maybe she would be cursing the ultra-support hose this clingy number necessitated, counting the minutes until she could free herself from the flesh-suffocating torturer. Or maybe she was thinking how pretty the street looked below with all the lights twinkling and the noise muted, and how golden the ballroom looked, and how she felt part of it all.

Serena never considered her own life a stage. She was always backstage. She was wardrobe. The real action of life was always elsewhere. She wasn’t depressed by this, and she suffered no envy. She was content with her place backstage. Almost.

Serena’s fear of Mrs. Choi had kept any thoughts other than pleasing her aunt in check. Her job was to do what Mrs. Choi told her, and she did that well. But with Mrs. Choi no longer there and her eventual success in running the shop assured, Serena began to think the stage not so scary either. She could run things. Mrs.Choi had become training wheels she no longer needed.

One day Mr. Gilette came in shortly before close. He placed a slender department store shopping bag on the counter.

“Serena, I have something I need cleaned. I need it tomorrow. Can you help me?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Gilette. It almost five o’clock. I don’t know. But I can try for you. The buck stop here.”

Mr. Gilette reached into the bag and pulled out a dress of lilac silk. He held it for a moment and then smoothed it out on the counter.

“Oh, very pretty.” She liked the smell of tea rose that accompanied it. “For Mrs. Gilette?”

“Yes, it’s my wife’s. Her favorite. I need it for her funeral the day after tomorrow. Is it possible?”

Serena, who had picked up and was admiring the dress, shuddered a little as if death had somehow touched her, too. “Oh, Mr. Gilette. I very sorry. Very sorry about Mrs. Gilette. I make sure it be ready.”

“She always looked so pretty in this dress. So soft,” his voice trailed off.

“You must loved her very much.”

“Yes, yes. Thank you, Serena. See you tomorrow.”

Mr. Gilette walked out the door and Serena took the dead woman’s dress to the machines in the back of the shop....

Read the rest of the story here, and be sure to buy a copy of the journal at our March 2nd and 3rd show to support the authors and artists both here and all over the country that share our beliefs and love of our faith and culture.

2 weeks away

The opening of our long awaited Writer's show, postponed because of the February Blizzard, is only 2 weeks away!  If you, or someone you know, is a Catholic writer who would like to submit work for this show, you have until Wednesday, February 29th to email saintrochstudios@gmail.com or leave a comment here to get more information.  We can't wait to read what you've been writing!

Don't forget, just because it's a Writer's show doesn't mean we won't have some of your favorite, local Catholic visual artists and musicians as well.  Oh, and for all of you who made it to the January show, yes, the heat has been fixed!  Come and see all the hard work we've been doing on the hall, and enjoy some local Catholic culture of all kinds.

Finally, we take free will donations at the show to help off set the costs associated with running it and keep it going.  Our donations, so far, have helped to paint the hall and get some important equipment for the shows themselves, but there's so much more we can do.  If you are feeling called to help the Catholic Art and Culture Community in Denver, we'd be so happy!  Because so many people rely on debit cards and electronic funds, we will be adding a paypal donation button to this site as soon as we work the kinks out.  No pressure, but all funds donated both through the shows and through the paypal button will go to keep up this good and holy work.

Saturday Work Day

Calling all people in the Greater Denver area – we are having a Work day at Knights of Columbus council #539. They have been helping us by hosting our art exhibition and now is our a chance to help them improve the hall that we use for the shows. Many hands will really make the work go fast. I know this is last minute BUT PLEASE get the word out. KofC#539 is a great gift to the Denver Catholic community.

See those 1980's yellow walls behind the beautiful icons?  They're GONE!  

It all starts 9:30am, Saturday the 11th at 1555 Grant St. Denver Co 80203

We started painting last month, and now it's time to finish!

For those of you who can't make it, be sure to stop by March 2nd and 3rd for our rescheduled Writer's show to see all the hard work we've done, as well as all the hard work the writer's have done!  You won't believe the difference a few coats of paint and some old fashioned elbow grease can make!

BLIZZARD CANCELATION

There's about 2 feet of snow coming down, and I'm almost not exagerating.  Anyway, the show's canceled.  Our writer's show will be on March 2nd and 3rd, so you've got a whole month more to prepare!  Hope to see you all then!

Stay safe and warm1