The UCCS Galleries of Contemporary Art will open a new exhibit “M12: The Black Hornet” Aug. 29 at GOCA 1420.
The exhibit will run through Oct. 12.
The opening event will take place from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Aug. 29. A lecture about “M12 and the Black Hornet” will take place at 5:30 p.m. featuring M12’s founder, Richard Saxton, Program Director Kirsten Stoltz and the race car drivers. The reception and lecture are free and open to the public.
The M12 Collective is known for groundbreaking and award-winning creative projects uniting rural culture and identity with documentary installation and performance. Their projects have garnered recognition nationally and internationally, including invitation to the 13th International Venice Architecture Biennale in Italy in 2012 and a prestigious Our Town grant from the National Endowment on the Arts in 2013.
The exhibit will also feature a traditional chili cook-off competition from 4 p.m.to 7 p.m. on Sept. 19. An organized field trip to M12’s day-long Big Feed event in Byers, Colo. will take place on Oct. 12.
About the Exhibit
Since 2009, the M12 Collective has partnered with the Hall family racing team in Fort Morgan, Colo.. Together, they have created “The Black Hornet,” an artwork that simultaneously operates as a performance event, a community and culture building strategy, and a participatory art action. The work functions as a race car at its most basic level, and awakens discussions of how viewers might encounter cultural exchange outside the city.
This project mobilizes collective knowledge in the broader urban/rural sphere, and highlights M12’s connective aesthetic attitude and methodology, taking the art object past its basic level and insisting on its role to be one of a catalyst for cultural discourse-a discourse generated through participation and collective movement. Humble, and yet slightly subversive, the M12 dirt-track race car has literally set the pace for new forms of cultural expression in rural space. The M12/Hall family collaboration reveals the importance of intergenerational knowledge, gives value to notions of rural family and community, and sustains cultural livelihood beyond the metropolis. The exhibition features the M12 Black Hornet race cars as well as documents and artifacts from the four-year project.
About the M12 Collective
In 2002, M12 founder and Creative Director Richard Saxton began working under the moniker municipalWORKSHOP (mW), which was an itinerant creative laboratory dedicated to the creation of contemporary public art projects in small communities around the US. Saxton developed M12 from its outrider mW. Saxton is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado-Boulder and has developed the M12 partnership with CU in recent years, starting the Art and Rural Environments Field School, which aids M12’s programmatic mission in rural eastern Colorado.
Over the last fifteen years Kirsten Stoltz, M12’s programming director, has focused primarily on interdisciplinary arts programming. Previously, Stoltz worked as curator for the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, and director and curator of the Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Fe, N.M.. Saxton’s family homesteaded in western Nebraska and Stoltz’ in eastern Colorado. (Saxton and Stoltz both hold a deep appreciation for the Plains region in the U.S., and both draw inspiration from the landscape and communities of this part of the world. Working through M12, they understand that the preservation of rural communities and reconstitution of urban/rural realities is crucial to life in the 21st century.
The M12 Collective has been featured widely nationally and internationally including the 13th International Venice Architecture Biennale in Italy, IASKA International Art Biennial in Australia, Yuma Museum and Historical society, The Ornitarium in Denmark, Biennial of the Americas in Colorado, and SILO Art Space in Wisconsin. M12was just awarded a significant National Endowment for the Arts Our Town grant to support the design and implementation of a collaborative project with Swedish art collective Kultivator titled “Gran’s University: Ornaments of Knowledge” in Last Chance, Colo.. Visit http://m12studio.org/ for more information.
GOCA is a regional hub of contemporary art, culture, and conversation. By featuring world-class artists, hosting artist and expert talks, and offering meaningful events , the galleries engage UCCS students, faculty, staff and Pikes Peak Region community members in contemporary culture and life. GOCA features two galleries – one founded on the UCCS campus in 1982 and a satellite opened in 2010 in the Plaza of the Rockies building.
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