Join us for new works of art by Cindy Burkhart, accompanied by live music, snacks, and as always, fresh herbal tea.

Cindy Burkhart is an artist and educator living in Fort Collins, CO. After more than 30 years of making art with students – in schools, community centers, libraries, parks and her own kitchen – she is finally giving herself the freedom to play on her own. Creating community through art is one of her primary reasons for being. Dogs and mountains are two others.

“How Does Your Garden?” is a series of drawings inspired by my reading of Camille Dungy’s book Soil. Dungy inspired me to think about gardens – about our relationship to place when we plant and nurture, about what it means to be rooted, and about ways that we can collaborate with nature and with each other. I was sitting in my garden in the spring of 2024 feeling despair about the future – ecological, political, and personal – when I noticed a breeze catching up petals of the columbine, making the blooms dance on their delicate stems. Struck by the beauty and lightness of the moment I promised myself to focus more on moments like these, to make drawings that will be reminders of blooming even when the sky is gray and the plants seem dead. I began to sketch in my garden and to include little pieces of the sketches, the artistic “seeds”, in my larger drawings. As companion pieces to the drawings of blooming I include drawings of leavings. These ink and charcoal drawings take my attempts to collaborate with nature a step further, from my subject matter to my art-making process. In the fall of 2023 I began playing with making my own inks using everything from invasive tamarisk to gleanings from my compost bin. I am still experimenting, hoping to expand my homemade color palate, but I am appreciating that my shift towards foraged paints and inks leads me to literally connect with the land around me before beginning each new project. I can only begin where I am, and only begin because I have hope. I don’t think it was coincidence that I ran across a poem by Kyle Tran Myhre in which he writes, “Survival is not a fortress. It is a garden.”

Cindy Burkhart
www.cindyburkh.art