Dec 5: Exposed, The Desert as Healer Salon
with Kimi Eisele
5:30-7:30pm $5 donation at the door, no one turned away for lack of funds.
It’s a potluck! Bring food or drink to share.
Those of us who live in the desert know its balms and elixirs. So many find healing in the dry, the heat, the sparseness, learning from plants and animals that teach resilience and resistance. In this salon, artist Kimi Eisele talks about the desert as collaborator and healer, and her practice for moving through the complexities of both our personal lives and political times with more patience, as better listeners, and tending to all parts of our selves.
Kimi Eisele is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. Her writing has appeared in Orion, High Country News, Terrain.org, and Fourth Genre, and has covered art, the environment, health, culture, youth, and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. She holds a master’s degree in geography from the University of Arizona where in 1998 she founded you are here: the journal of creative geography. A dancer/choreographer, Kimi’s performance work explores human-nature relationships and often involves storytelling and public particpation in site-specific venues. Such works have celebrated saguaro cacti, public lands, endangered species, water, urban environments, and local food systems. She practices compositional improvisation, a movement-based form incorporating dance, spoken word, and live music. Also a visual artist, Kimi makes photographs, papercuttings, and shadow puppet theater about wildlife and the human body. She has taught creative writing and dance in schools, communities, and institutions for two decades.
Kimi has received a “Lumie” Award from the Tucson Pima Arts Council and an Artist Project Award from the Arizona Commission on the Arts. Her work has been funded by the Arts Foundation of Southern Arizona, the Kresge Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She been a resident artist at Djerassi, Blue Mountain Center, the Mesa Refuge, the Rasmuson Resident Artist Program with the Island Institute in Sitka, AK, and was the 2016 Centennial Artist-in-Residence in Saguaro National Park. She lives in Tucson and works for the Southwest Folklife Alliance, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving and celebrationg traditional knowledge and cultural expression.
Kore Press Institute / 325 W 2nd St, Room 201, Tucson 85705 in the Dunbar Pavilion
Kore is at the top of the stairs. Enter through the double doors on the east end of the building, under the Dunbar Barber Academy sign. Parking is free on the street.