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The frequent frequent movie.

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Good morning, Boulder County. It's Wednesday, August 26th. I'm Shay Castle, and this is the Frequency, a weekly local podcast covering the news, events, and voices shaping the Boulder Valley. Today's episode is brought to you by Boulder Bookstore. Visit Boulder's Community Bookstore on the Pearl Street Mall. Besides having an amazing selection of books, Boulder Bookstore hosts author events every week. On Wednesday, September 9th, come see Mary Roach, best-selling author of nonfiction books such as Stiff, The Curious Science of Human Cadavers, and Packing for Mars, The Curious Science of Life in the Void. Mary will be appearing at First Congregational Church at 6.30 p.m. to talk about and sign her new book, Replaceable You, Adventures in Human Anatomy. Visit BoulderBookstore.com to see a full list of upcoming events, purchase tickets to attend, and support the store's Literacy Foundation, which donates books to schools and students in need. That link, once again, is Boulderbookstore.com. Tune in Friday for our interview with Mary Roach. Trust me, we've never had a guest quite like this. Today, we go behind the scenes at B Mocha with three artists, all members of the same family who live and work in the same Denver home. But first, the headlines. An oil and gas company has pulled out of a deal with the town of Erie. SM Energy terminated an agreement with a town over access to Erie's mineral rights. The company hoped to drill under Erie as part of the larger DracoPad project. 26 wells drilled horizontally for more than four miles into parts of Boulder County and underneath about 180 acres of Erie's town land. The town council earlier this summer approved selling the mineral rights on that acreage to SM Energy in exchange for four and a half million dollars, one hundred and sixty acres of land, and a share in production revenue. Residents promptly launched a petition to overturn the decision via a general election. Last week, attorneys for the company notified town officials they were ending the agreement. Erie has petitioned the state to become a party to SM Energy's DracoPad plans, which may have to circumvent town property to drill the remaining acres of mineral rights it has access to. Town officials hope a new state law will protect Erie from the practice of forced pooling, a long-standing practice in which municipalities had to allow drilling in order not to block access to a company's legally obtained mineral rights. An October 21st hearing is planned before the state's oil and gas commission. Read more from the Town of Erie, Yellow Scene, and CBS News at the links in our show notes. Summer homelessness has been cut nearly in half in Boulder over the past four years, according to a new point-in-time count released by the city. Point in time counts are conducted on a single night, an attempt to count every person experiencing homelessness. Winter point in time counts are conducted across the Denver Metro in January and include people living unsheltered as well as in shelters or transitional housing. Because visible homelessness rises during the summer in Boulder, the city has also conducted a summer point in time count of unsheltered homelessness since 2023. That includes people living in cars, tents, or sleeping outside with no cover. This year's count was conducted July 21st. The city counted 88 people experiencing unsheltered homelessness. That's down 48% from July 2023's count. Winter homelessness has also declined 55% since 2023. That mirrors numbers reported to the Metro Denver Homelessness Initiative, which counts unhoused individuals in seven counties. According to MDHI, unsheltered winter homelessness has decreased by about half since 2023 in Boulder County. Because they capture a single night, point-in-time counts are not indicative of the overall state of homelessness. They can be disrupted due to weather, or as during 2020 and 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, comparing numbers over time can give some insights into larger trends. Links to past reports for Boulder County can be found at mdhi.org slash P-I-T. Find City of Boulder specific data at the link in our show notes. Lyons could become the first town in Colorado to require wildfire mitigation on existing homes. In a split vote earlier this summer, town trustees moved forward with drafting an ordinance that would implement a limited set of mitigation efforts on existing housing. Proposed regulations include the installation of mesh screens over vents, the removal of combustible materials under decks or porches, clearing of firewood and debris, trimming trees, and maintaining vertical clearance between the ground and siding. Most wildfire mitigation for existing homes in Boulder County is voluntary, with incentives provided by local governments for things like assessments and removal of highly combustible junipers or fences. New construction, however, is typically subject to more rules, such as building with fire resistant materials, prohibition of fences and flammable landscaping, and requirements for fire suppression systems in multifamily dwellings. Mitigation could be costly for homeowners, but would greatly reduce the risk of flames spreading in town. Lyons is largely built out. Only 10 vacant parcels remain in the town of about 2,000, according to reporting from Nine News. Follow the link in our show notes to read more.

SPEAKER_03 5:56

Without Mark Sandman, without all the people that I've mentioned, I would not be doing this. I would not have the confidence, I would not have the history and the research behind me to know other people have done this. And to be part of that heritage is just great.

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That's Cipriano Ortega, discussing his many influences as an artist. Cipriano is one of three artists who contributed to BMOCA's summer exhibition. Tres Voces Un Corazón. The other artists whose work are featured in Tres Voses are Cipriano's mother and father, Sylvia Montero and Tony Ortega. We'll hear from them in just a minute. Welcome to the Mountaineer Podcast. I'm Shea Castle. Today we're exploring the work behind the work with all three Traces Voses artists. It's the cover story for the August edition of Caribou Current. Out now. You can and should read that to get a sense of what the exhibition is all about. We thought we'd do something a little different with the podcast story. Regular readers of the Current will know about our recurring feature, Under the Influence, where we interview musicians about the songs, albums, and artists they draw inspiration from. We thought we'd do the same with Cipriano, Silvia, and Tony. It's our first time branching out to other artistic disciplines, and we could not have picked better subjects. The trio draw heavily from the past and their peers in their work, particularly Cipriano. His list of influences is long. During the hour I spent interviewing Cipriano, he referenced Leonard Cohen, Maya Angelou, Robert Johnson, Hank Williams, Marlon Brando, William Burrows, Kurt Cobain, Lane Staley, Robbie Krieger from The Doors, and, as you heard earlier, Mark Sandman, frontman of 90s rock band Morphine. Here's Cipriano talking about another musical artist who inspired his work for B.O.

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Jack White has been a huge influence since college. His whole song that he has, very short. It's literally just him acoustically or just singing his voice and Meg's on the drums. There's no guitar, but it's called Little Room.

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While you're in your little room and you're working on something good, Bonifit's really good. You're gonna need a bigger room.

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And while you're in the bigger And it's just about the whole idea of developing ideas in a little room and bringing them out forth into the world. So I wanted to kind of create a similar space in the installation.

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Cipriano is referencing the main set piece he created for the Bimoca exhibition, a one-sided home called Lolo House. Inside is a one-string bass he built. Music from his band, Los Lolos, plays over the speakers. Poetry he wrote is pasted on the walls. Elsewhere in the museum are his paintings. Raised by two artists, Cipriano is a master of multiple disciplines. He first displayed his work in a gallery when he was in third grade, a selection of puppets. He was steeped in the arts in a way few children are.

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We've always encouraged our son to be in theater or be a vocalist. So it's always been a family. It's always been, even though we're visual artists and a musician, we've always been interested in the arts. We made a conscious decision not to have cable. We kind of we more or less restricted his to watching to videos and or PBS. I would always try to get him toys where he could build or be creative, Legos and Tinker toys and for the things he would see. He would make costumes. So I remember taking him to secondhand stores and buying garments or he would borrow some Sylvia's clothes. He was always inventing. So I remember being a kid, and that was just like the most exciting part of being a kid is just being able to create your own inner creative world and expressing that through changing the costume.

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He just has always been a hands-on creator since he's a little tiny thing.

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Still to this day, there's never been a movie accurate Woody doll that Disney has ever produced. They've always been not quite right to the original. And as of recent, obviously Toy Story 5 came out, but I've discovered this subculture on YouTube. These adults make film accurate woodies now. Yeah, the accurate Woody, so I just, yeah.

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That's Tony and Sylvia, Cipriano's parents. All three of them live in the same house in North Denver, where they each have separate studio spaces. Tony and Sylvia are Cipriano's biggest influences. You can see that when you compare Tony and Cipriano's paintings, bright colors, visible brush strokes, and often faceless men and women. Tony says growing up in Colorado and New Mexico impacted the way he views and uses color.

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I think probably my use of color would be different had I grown up in Seattle or the East Coast or the Midwest or something like that. I mean, you know, Colorado's just well known for the number of days that gets sunshine. And, you know, being from New Mexico, just another place of sunshine. And the plains are just Lewis and Clark call it a great American desert. In New Mexico, they call it a high mountain desert. So, you know, it was it's dry and lots of light. So I think that's influenced me.

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Tony's trying to pieces are the exhibitions most vivid, from pinatas to paintings and video installations, all have an undercurrent of humor and a strong narrative thread running through them, with sharp socio-political critique. That's reflective of the show as a whole, which meditates on culture, belonging, and of course, family. Like her son, Sylvia claims many influences. Her first love was black and white television journalism.

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Good evening from our CBS Newsroom in New York on the S.

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She parlayed into black and white photography. She still has her first ever camera, purchased in high school. She used it to take the series of photographs that form the bulk of her Trace Vosse's work depicting daily life in Cuba.

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Cuba was a very big inspiring place for me because of how they make things work even though they don't have anything, and the inhumanity that this country shows to the Cuban people. So those kind of people give me ins inspiration as well and keeps me kind of going, doing our works and things.

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Despite her love for black and white photography and documenting reality, it was actually a fantastical, colorful oil painting that awakened Sylvia as an artist. The Dream by Henry Rousseau.

SPEAKER_01 13:31

What is it? What was the image? It was the one where the woman is uh reclining on the couch with the lion looking at her with the moon. It's in the jungle, and it's one of Russo's. And that kind of really powered me. And I've always been a very visual person, even as a child.

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Sylvia's biggest influence, though, was her dance teacher, Jane Tannenbaum.

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She was in her 70s at the time when I was studying with her. She was like the first dance instructor ever that I had for almost 15 years did not see me as a brown woman. The others were just like, oh, you're not black enough. Oh, you're just just, you know, you're Latina. Latinos don't dance. So it was kind of really complex, but Janie was never like that. And of course, her technique was so superb. It helped me with my back issues that I had as a child. So she's definitely the person, J10 Mom, that inspires me. Very inspirational for me. Changed my life, that little woman. Yeah. She definitely changed my life.

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Tony's biggest influence was a member of his family, his grandmother, a seamstress and storyteller. She raised Tony and was his first introduction to art, much like he would introduce his own son to life as an artist decades later.

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She did everything from alterations to making clothes to quilting to embroidery, crochet. So I always grew up around her making, making objects, making utilitarian objects. I remember literally being underneath a sewing machine cabinet while she was sewing and bothering her for needle and thread and obviously interrupting her work. And she was also quite a storyteller. Or basically, she told me things that happened when she was young, when my mom and my uncles, her brothers were young, growing up in Pecos, New Mexico. So I think that when I would listen to those stories, I would visualize them in my head or visualize what it was like. So I'd experienced Pecos also, so I could see her house or I could see relatives' houses as she would tell the stories. So that was very important to me in that I wanted to be a person making objects or making eventually making art. She would be my biggest influence. Trini Ortega. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:37

Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 15:38

Or Trini da would be, yeah, would be her name. Trini da.

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See more from Tony, Sylvia, and Cipriano at Tres Voces un Corazon, running through September 13th at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Bimoca is also hosting a series of events, like poetry workshops, concerts from Cipriano's band, and other ways to interact with the art and artists. Visit bimocha.org for details, or check out my story in the August issue of Caribou Current out now. Thank you again to Tony, Sylvia, and Cipriano for inviting me into their home. Join us Friday when we hear from the incomparable Mary Roach. I'm going to leave you with a song from Selassie Atiase. He is the frontman for Selassie and the Fafa family, a legendary local reggae band. Selassie performed at Good Grief, Pain, Pleasure, and Possibilities, which I previewed in an August 14th episode. It was a very moving event. Thank you to Selassie, Pedro, and Ramon for hosting and performing, and for everyone in attendance who showed up with open hearts. Before you go, here's one more thing.