Public invited to meet artists at Montalvo's Open Studios

By Shari Kaplan

As part of its ongoing effort to bring art, artists and the community together, Villa Montalvo invites the public to attend its Artist Residency Open Studios on Jan. 23 from noon to 4 p.m.

Visual artists Diana Cherbuliez and Lynn Powers will visit with the public and demonstrate their works in on-site studio cottages between noon and 2 p.m. Poets Katherine Swiggart and Liz Waldner will read from their collections between 2 and 3 p.m. in the Villa.

Cherbuliez, a resident of Vinalhaven, Maine, did her undergraduate work at Simon's Rock of Bard College and San Francisco Art Institute, then earned a master's of fine arts in sculpture from Alfred University in New York. She uses fairy tales and myths as the impetus for her visual themes involving dichotomy, transformation, desire and consequence. At Montalvo, she is studying the transformative and consumable nature of various materials.

San Jose-based Powers received an M.F.A. in pictorial arts from San Jose State University and holds a handful of art awards. She exhibits in the Bay Area, Europe and Japan and has work hanging in many corporate and private collections. During her stay at Montalvo, Powers is completing a series of paintings related to the inner visions she has experienced while meditating.

Swiggart, who lives in Portland, Ore., holds a bachelor's of art degree from Cornell University, earned her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is working on a doctorate in American literature at UCLA. Swiggart is the recipient of several art grants and has had poems printed in several literary publications. She's using her time at Montalvo to work on her first poetry manuscript, Early Reprisals.

The director of creative writing at Cornell College in Iowa, Waldner received the Poetry Society of America Robert M. Winner Award for significant, unrecognized work in 1999. She also received the Iowa Prize for Poetry, which is a publication prize--the book being published by the University of Iowa Press is A Point Is That Which Has No Part, which Waldner worked on while in residence at Montalvo in 1997. She is working on a new poetry collection focusing on memory, time, exile, story, history and the way language and the body connect.

The multi-disciplinary Artist Residency Program brings artists to Montalvo to participate in a working residency for one to three months in a setting that offers privacy, creative reflection and--during open studios--a chance to interact with the public. For more information, call at 408.961.5818.

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