The Steamboat Pilot & Today

Sculptors Bland Hoke, right, Carol Hummel, middle, and Colorado Art Ranch Executive Director Grant Pound work on Hoke’s piece in front of BAP. Photo by Matt Stensland

Steamboat Springs — When large-scale visual artist Carol Hummel looked into the backyard of her temporary home off Tree Haus Drive, she saw contamination.

Or, she saw a statement that could be made about the encroachment of development on the natural landscape. So Hummel used multi-colored crocheted circles to form lumpy viral masses of yarn and rainbow hues on the ground outside the house she’s staying in this month as a resident of Colorado Art Ranch. She did the same thing at the Milner Landfill.

The results of that work will be on display in a reception from 7 to 10 p.m. today at the Steamboat Art Museum. The event kicks off the Art Ranch Artposium, a weekend of presentations and workshops on the intersection of art and land-use issues. The series marks the end of Art Ranch, which has put eight artists and writers to work in Routt County since the end of April.

“For artists, it’s such a great thing to have an entire month where all you have to do is be creative,” Hummel said about her time living and working in Steamboat Springs.

Michael Bauer has spent his residency creating large, text-based drawings with passages from Walt Whitman and a book of Buddhist mantras he found at Bud Werner Memorial Library. Bauer has spent the past few weeks working in the back room of the Artists’ Gallery of Steamboat. He likes to have a number of projects going at one time, and he might put his largest Steamboat work away for a while before completing it back home.

“I’ll be curious how it affects the work, or how it has affected the work,” Bauer said of his time with the Art Ranch.

To get an outside-the-gallery view of what Art Ranch residents have been working on, stop by BAP on Oak Street to see sculptor Bland Hoke’s large-scale work around a tree in the store’s front lawn.