Author Description

Place and passion for place are inseparable from creative expression. The tastes, smells, sights and sounds of our surroundings permeate our waking and dreaming lives. They become the material for both poetic metaphor and scientific inquiry, and can figure in even the smallest gesture or invention. "Lightshow" by Gary Ladd What makes the quality of light on the Colorado Plateau so unique and how do its qualities influence the attempt to capture it on film? A seasoned photographer writes about the lessons light has taught him. "Twentieth-Century Architecture on the Colorado Plateau" by Kathleen Bryant Architecture can be read as an index to available materials in a given place and time, a diagram of spatial priorities, or an aesthetic response to surroundings. Here it holds in its enduring forms a story of the influences - Native American, Hispanic, and frontier - that flavor our experience in the West. "Where the Rainbow Children Sleep" by Michael Engelhard Writer and river guide Michael Engelhard is inspired by Rainbow Bridge, the stone formation that inspired Puebloan, Paiute and Navajo before him. "Mary-Russell Ferrell Colton and Hopi Silver" by Tricia Loscher Hopi silverwork is recognizable for its distinctive look and characteristic overlay technique. These can be traced to a watershed moment in the 1930s when Mary-Russell Ferrell Colton and Virgil Hubert encouraged the rapid evolution of new designs and methods among Hopi silversmiths. "A Grand Thing to Live With" by Fran Elliot Women artists living in Arizona in the early twentieth century recorded their relationship to the land and its people in many media - from commercial design to photography to paintings and writing. Sketches four such Mary Colter, Mary-Russell Ferrell Colton, Jane Cory, and Lillian Wilhelm Smith.