Rachel Sauer

For �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder alumni, art is a family matter

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 17:42:30 +0000

For �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder alumni, art is a family matter Rachel Sauer Fri, 09/11/2026 - 11:42

Rachel Sauer

In recent exhibits, renowned Colorado artists Tony Ortega and Daniel Salazar explore themes of Chicano experience, historical erasure, memory, mythology and the bonds of family

Tony Ortega and Daniel Salazar did not know each other growing up in Denver. They did not cross paths at the �鶹��Ѱ��, even though many steps on those paths were similar.

They finally met through Denver’s Chicano Humanities and Arts Council, when the organization invited famed Mexican sculptor Francisco Zúñiga to Denver and Salazar and his wife, Maruca, a �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder MFA alumna, hosted a reception.

Maruca Salazar (left) and Daniel Salazar (right) in a Museo de las Americas gallery with their recently ended exhibit “Accidentally on Purpose – Pasó lo que tenía que pasar” celebrating 50 years of their activism and art. Maruca is a former director of Museo de las Americas. (Photo: Tony Ortega)

“That was really an era that brought artists together,” Salazar says. “And that was really also part of what we were experiencing and practicing at that time, because we were very much directed toward organizing and creating work and creating community, something that continued from our experiences at �鶹��Ѱ��of organizing, working together, creating opportunities to create work and exhibit work and just making that part of our lifestyle.”

So, Ortega and Salazar met, and in that meeting there was recognition—of the inspiration to create, of activism and organizing, of El Movimiento, of art informed and inspired by history and heritage, culture and identity and, perhaps most especially, family.

Always family—in the making of art, in its display, in bonds of both birth and choice that have woven a creative tapestry across decades and been given form in the recently completed exhibit “Accidentally on Purpose – Pasó lo que tenía que pasar” at Museo de las Americas in Denver, celebrating 50 years of Daniel and Maruca Salazar’s activism and art; and in “Tres Voces, Un Corazón,” currently showing at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art.

“Tres Voces, Un Corazón” highlights the work of Ortega, his wife, Sylvia Montero, and their son, Cipriano Ortega. The exhibit, guest curated by Maruca Salazar, in part explores what is passed between generations and how even in families, identity does not have to mean identical.

And in both exhibits, themes of Chicano experience, Indigenous identity, historical erasure, memory, mythology, community and creating home—themes that in many ways began to find form for Salazar and Ortega as young activists and artists at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder.

The path to �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder

Before they began to flourish as artists and activists in the Chicano cultural renaissance that grew in the 1970s, however, Salazar and Ortega were two kids growing up in Denver—six years apart in age but experiencing similar trajectories.

Let the muse move you

Cipriano Ortega and his band Los Lo Los will perform at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art at 6 p.m. Saturday.

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Salazar was born in Denver in 1952 and Ortega moved to the city as a young child from Pecos, New Mexico, and both were bicultural Baby Boomers who navigated their Mexican heritage as American boys who loved to run around and play sports and get up to things in neighborhoods where many of the adults acted as auxiliary parents.

Salazar was in one of the first graduating classes from John F. Kennedy High School and studied at Pamona College in California before losing his financial aid and dropping out to pursue work as a real estate photographer. However, “my brother five years older than I was had attended CU, and I used to go and visit him and marvel at what college life was like there. I was very intrigued by the Boulder scene in those days.”

Ortega, coming up six years later, remembers touring the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder campus as a senior at East High School—inspired, in part, by a fascination with the football team’s lauded running back Bobby Anderson.

Even though Salazar and Ortega studied at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder several years apart, they were there in the heady 1970s, when Chicano activism was gaining momentum and intensity on campuses across the United States. Both were involved with United Mexican American Students (UMAS) and the El Diario de la Gente student newspaper, and Salazar was an undergraduate student during the time of Los Seis de Boulder—when, over the course of 48 hours in May 1974, two car bombs killed six people, five of whom were �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder students or alumni, who were involved in El Movimiento Chicano social justice movement.

Cipriano Ortega (left), Tony Ortega (center) and Sylvia Montero (right) at their “Tres Voces, Un Corazón” exhibit showing through Sunday at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. (Photo: Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art)

Not long after the tragedies of those days, Salazar traveled to Xalapa, the capital of Mexico’s Veracruz state, to study. It was a strange time to be away from Boulder, Salazar recalls.

“The aftermath of Los Seis and other events made things kind of tense, kind of heightened,” he says. “It was a period of a lot of political protest and activity, a lot of activism and organizing, so it was an interesting time to step away from what was happening in Boulder.”

Several years later, Ortega also studied in Xalapa, a natural progression of his Chicano studies and, in a way, to “see how Mexican I was,” Ortega recalls. “I think both Daniel and I ended up finding out how American we were.”

While studying Spanish, anthropology, history and other subjects, both lived with local families and “really integrated into Mexican society,” Ortega says, experiences that have informed his and Salazar’s artwork in various ways—from occasional experiences of feeling very Mexican in the United States to not feeling Mexican enough in Mexico, to navigating and claiming their Mexican heritage while exploring their Chicano identities. And in Salazar’s case, the time in Xalapa included meeting Maruca, the woman who became his wife.

‘Let the muse move you’

After graduating �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder—Salazar in communications and Ortega in business Spanish and Latin American studies—both Salazar and Ortega pursued creative careers. Salazar worked in photography, journalism and filmmaking and Ortega, who earned an associate degree in fine art from the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in 1982 and his MFA from �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder in 1995, became a professor of fine art at Regis University.

And they both married artists and grew their artistic reputations in Denver’s vibrant arts community, so it’s only natural that art has been a language and lineage of family.

As organizers and activists, their art explores themes including immigration, gender roles, historical erasure and identity. And it has never shied away from topics that aren’t easy to face. “Accidentally on Purpose – Pasó lo que tenía que pasar” featured Salazar’s work Grand Poobah and Office Fairy Cut Through Red Tape, a digital photograph mural featuring a 1941 photograph of federal office workers to whom Salazar added a crown and fairy wings.

The piece was controversial enough when it was hung in Denver’s Wellington E. Webb Municipal Office Building that even The Denver Post editorialized against it on behalf of aggrieved government employees.

“Government employees didn’t like it very much,” Salazar recalls, “but I think most people’s experiences are with the red tape and feeling like they can’t do anything about it.”

“It’s meant as satire,” Maruca Salazar says.

And “Tres Voces, Un Corazón” includes Ortega’s work El Grito de Guadalupe, which portrays Our Lady of Guadalupe in a pose reminiscent of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Beneath her on the floor is a sculpture of baby Jesus in a cage.

“To be meaningful, art should represent and reflect the time we’re in,” Ortega explains, adding that art also is a medium for exploring and understanding identity.

“Tres Voces, Un Corazón” also includes Montero’s series “Gaan”—collages showing different aspects of southwest Native dance and reflecting both her Apache heritage and her training with the Martha Graham Dance Company.

Tony Ortega notes that while each of the three artists in the family work on different levels of their Denver home, and while each has a strong individual artistic identity, the threads of family are woven throughout “Tres Voces, Un Corazón.”

In Cipriano Ortega’s installation Lo Lo House, in which he and his band Los Lo Los will perform at 6 p.m. Saturday, one of his poems scrolls down a wall: “To build a house, to build a home. To build a house. To build a home. Let the muse move you.”

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Maruca Salazar and Daniel Salazar, American Me, 2000, mixed-media installation (folkloric dresses and photography)

Tony Ortega, El Vez, 2019, etching and watercolor

Daniel Salazar (left) and Maruca Salazar (center) with Daniel's work Grand Poobah and Office Fairy Cut Through Red Tape.

Sylvia Montero, They Came by Ships, monotype and collage

Daniel Salazar, Westside Dreams (National Chicano Dance Theater), 1979, print on fabric

(Left to right) Tony Ortega, Anton, 2021, digital photo on papel amate; Tony Ortega, Cipriano, 2024, digital photo on papel amate; Tony Ortega, Cheyenne, 2021, digital photo on papel amate

In recent exhibits, renowned Colorado artists Tony Ortega and Daniel Salazar explore themes of Chicano experience, historical erasure, memory, mythology and the bonds of family.

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Top image: The paintings (left to right) Anton, Cipriano and Cheynne by Tony Ortega

Two artists walk into a palazzo…

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 23:07:55 +0000

Two artists walk into a palazzo… Rachel Sauer Mon, 08/31/2026 - 17:07

Rachel Sauer

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder alumna Martha Russo and Professor Emeritus George Rivera currently are displaying art pieces in Venice, Italy, in an exhibit organized by the European Cultural Centre

Let’s wander, as the title of Martha Russo’s work might advise, to a bright, airy space in the Palazzo Mora in Venice, Italy.

There, on a short white platform, is “nomos (cube Venezia),” Russo’s three-dimensional piece sculpted from porcelain, paper clay, wood, metal and paper, among other materials. Its title is derived from the Greek root for “nomad” and can be translated as “to wander” and “to wonder.”

There are a lot of things to feel and question while observing this piece—in person or from every angle in photographs. Is it reaching for the viewer? Sending shoots and tendrils toward them? Does a brief glance from the corner of the eye reveal that it’s actually moving? Are its thousands of pieces a living ecosystem?

George Rivera (left) and Martha Russo (right) outside the Palazzo Mora in Venice, Italy, where their works are featured in the Personal Structures – Confluences exhibit on display through Nov. 22.

In a gallery next door, a different experience: 16 two-dimensional, 11x14 pieces tiled on a wall in an array of earth tones that speak of the Amazonian plants from which the inks were made.

And in the images themselves, a journey through the liminal space between consciousness and unconsciousness, shapes and figures whose meaning may depend on the viewer, giving rise to the title “Mutations: Subconscious Reality Imagery.” Artist George Rivera writes, “These images appear as figurations resembling reality but manifest themselves as completely different in form and color.”

Both pieces are featured in the Personal Structures – Confluences exhibit on display through Nov. 22 in Venice, organized by the European Cultural Centre (ECC) and held concurrently with the famed Venice Biennale international art exhibition. And both pieces have long roots that stretch to the �鶹��Ѱ��.

Russo (MFA’95), whose piece has been shortlisted for the ECC Awards that will be announced in November, is an art and art history alumnus who has shown around the world and who also teaches an interdisciplinary �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder course called Art, Design and Engineering, in which a cohort of upper-level art, environmental design and engineering students learn about sculpture and public installation.

Rivera is a professor emeritus of art and art history—a sociologist by training who pivoted to art and in 1996 became one of the founders, with several �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder colleagues, of the Artnauts collective, whose more than 220 participating artists, including Russo, have worked across art, activism, social practice, peace building and global issues around the world.

As for how their work came to be in a centuries-old palazzo in Venice, well, the art world is small, and it started with an interview.

Enjoying the physical challenges of art

In 2020, writer Ann Landi interviewed Russo for Sculpture magazine. By that point, Russo had grown an international reputation as an artist—showing around the world, known for large-scale pieces that blend media, particularly ceramics, and incorporate abstract shapes that reference the natural world, animal and human forms and fantastical imagery and imaginings.

"I really enjoy the physical challenges of my work,” Russo told Landi. “I also like the science behind it. I was a developmental biology and psychology major, and I had my eye on going to medical school or becoming a psychologist. I was drawn to the materiality and the chemistry of clay.

"nomos (cube Venezia)” by Martha Russo "explores how the abstraction of form, material and gravity couple with a cacophony of color and texture to generate openings for prolonged investigations and enticing a flood of interpretations," Russo explains. (Photo: Matteo Losurdo)

“I loved the idea that you could make clay do different things because of the molecular structure, and that structure made perfect sense to me because I was looking at molecules and thinking about how things generate in the body. The chemistry behind the glazes was also fascinating. To this day, I am drawn to those mysteries and all the infinite possibilities.”

Part of Russo’s interest in the mechanics of the body, she says, arose from a career-ending injury that took her from 1984 U.S. Olympic field hockey hopeful to a Princeton senior recovering from surgery and increasingly drawn to the physical nature of sculpture and ceramics.

In 1991, she and her husband, Joe Ryan, a �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder professor of environmental engineering, moved from New Jersey to Boulder, and several years later Russo began her MFA studies. She taught for 20 years at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, growing her art practice and reputation at the same time and becoming known for her large-scale pieces incorporating hundreds or thousands of pieces that allude to natural forms.

Then came the interview in Sculpture magazine—not her first, but it was the one that caught the eye of ECC curators. They contacted her and asked if she’d be interested in showing in Venice, and they also looked into her colleagues and collaborators, including Rivera.

“Obviously you say yes when you get an invitation like that,” Russo says with a laugh. She immediately began envisioning what she would create for Personal Structures – Confluences.

Celebrate the Artnauts!

The exhibit "Rhizome: Origins" opens with a community celebration Thursday, Sept. 3, and honors 30 years of Artnauts.

Learn more

“I was thinking, ‘I’m going to make a cube, but I want to have four very different experiences on each side,” she explains. “Venice is the most visually stunning place, full of texture, full of color, full of exuberance, so I took all the greatest hits from all past iterations of ‘nomos’ and made a piece that’s very vibrant, colorful, lots of movement with the pieces. I also asked if I could have natural light in the gallery, and they really gave George and me such great spaces.

“They did tell me that outside the (gallery) window I would see a very recently renovated pink and white palazzo and they sent me a picture, so I made a bunch of pink pieces that, when you’re looking at my piece, you see that palazzo. A lot of the time you put up your work and you’re like, ‘I wish I’d done this, I wish I’d done that.’ This is one of the few times I said, ‘I think I just did exactly what I wanted to do,’ and I couldn’t be happier, honestly.”

In “Mutations: Subconscious Reality Imagery” by George Rivera, "images appear as figurations resembling reality but manifest themselves as completely different in form and color," Rivera says.

‘This is reality’

For Rivera, the road to Venice began in Glidden, Texas, where he grew up in poverty with a Mexican mother and a Mexican-American father. He was the first in his family to attend college, where he was able to name and study the disparities and injustices he’d grown up seeing. He pursued sociology, he says, because he wanted to understand racism.

After coming to �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder as a sociology faculty member, Rivera transferred to the Department of Art and Art History after disagreeing with how department decisions were being made, he says. He had studied Chicano art, but says he truly began to understand art as a force for activism, social practice and peace building when he was immersed in it.

In 1996, Rivera and colleagues Garrison Roots, Beth Krensky, Dennis Dalton and Luis Valdovino founded Artnauts, a collective that evolved over time into an artistic force that brings art into places fractured by violence, disaster or upheaval, Rivera explains. Artnauts shows frequently are comprised of two-dimensional prints that can fit into a suitcase on their way to places like Ukraine, Palestine, Colombia or the demilitarized zone at the North Korea-South Korea border.

“It’s the idea that art can be a language all people speak,” Rivera says.

In fact, the idea for “Mutations: Subconscious Reality Imagery” has as one of its roots an experience Rivera had while in Palestine with Artnauts: “We go to places where there’s been social trauma, where things have happened that represent the inhumanity of man against man. So, I was there staying at The Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem that is owned by Bansky, and it’s located right next to the Aida Refugee Camp.

“While I was there, Israeli forces shot gas cannisters into the camp, and I was inside the hotel and hotel personnel told me, ‘Don’t go outside because your lungs are going to burn and eyes are going to burn.' So, I went back to my room, and I had olive oil made by Palestinians and wine made by Palestinians, and I always bring some paper and some brushes with me, so I used the wine and olive oil and started making images. That’s when the idea occurred to me, to use something that’s indigenous to the area to paint with.”

So, when he later was in Colombia at El Centro de Memoria, Paz y Reconciliación in Bogotá and met a shaman of the Huitoto tribe who invited him into the Amazon rainforest, he learned about inks made from plants that grow there and since then has created a significant body of work with them.

Rivera’s work in Venice harkens to the Artnauts format of two-dimensional pieces that can easily be carried in a suitcase and is titled “Mutations” because, he says, he sees the pieces “as derived from the subconscious, and the subconscious to me is something that exists between consciousness and the unconscious. Right before consciousness enters in, the subconscious is trying to make sense of what it sees. It’s coming up with these images before it locks in and says, ‘This is reality.’

“To me, when I was in the rainforest that idea occurred to me, I looked at what was happening to the rainforest, and I was seeing these things that are not representations of what was in front of me; I was looking through a subconscious lens. That is when, to me, you turn to the spirituality of an object, of a people, you see the spiritual representations before we tell ourselves what reality is.”

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�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder alumna Martha Russo and Professor Emeritus George Rivera currently are displaying art pieces in Venice, Italy, in an exhibit organized by the European Cultural Centre.

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Top photo: European Cultural Centre

Exhibit celebrates 30 years of art not as usual

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 22:00:54 +0000

Exhibit celebrates 30 years of art not as usual Rachel Sauer Mon, 08/31/2026 - 16:00

Rachel Sauer

New �鶹��Ѱ��Art Museum exhibit honoring the Artnauts collective opens with a public celebration from 4 to 6 p.m. Thursday

In nature, rhizomes are plant stems that grow just beneath the soil surface, sending out shoots and sprawling root systems that can produce new plants. An expansive purple cluster of bearded iris, an early-spring patch of asparagus, a rustling stand of bamboo—all grow from the branching, interconnected system of a rhizome.

In art, rhizomes are collectives and communities that flourish in connection and collaboration, in exchange, in branching and spreading into new soil.

You're invited

What: Opening celebration for the exhibit “Rhizome: Origins," celebrating 30 years of the Artnauts

Where: �鶹��Ѱ��Art Museum

When: 4-6 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 3

Who: All are invited

Learn more

The Artnauts are a rhizome.

Founded in 1996 at the �鶹��Ѱ��, the Artnauts—a name that can be interpreted as “art not as usual” or as a play on the exploration and globe-circling of “astronaut”—are celebrating their 30th anniversary with the exhibit “Rhizome: Origins” officially opening Friday at the �鶹��Ѱ��Art Museum.

A celebration of the exhibit and the Artnauts will be held from 4 to 6 p.m. Thursday at the museum, initiating a series of events through the fall semester that celebrate 30 years, hundreds of artists and almost as many exhibits in 27 countries that address themes of peace, human rights, climate, migration, cultural memory and other global issues.

The timing of the exhibit is perfect and poignant: George Rivera, professor emeritus of art and art history and a founder and longtime public face of Artnauts, recently announced that he is retiring from the collective for personal reasons and to make way for new leadership.

“(New leadership) already is having a great positive impact, as members are stepping up to acquire new exhibitions in new countries that we have not yet visited,” Rivera explains. “Wait until you see the new venues that they have planned for exhibitions. We need new visions that go beyond what I set up for us throughout the world. The mission will not change. That will stay the same. Just new places of ‘contention’ (as I call them) will be added to where we go with our vision for a better world.”

Rivera and other Artnauts will be featured in a documentary film about the collective, Art, Not As Usual: The Story of the Artnauts, scheduled for release this fall.

Art as connection

In fact, experiencing an Artnauts exhibit in the United States is something of a rarity. When Rivera and colleagues Garrison Roots, Beth Krensky, Dennis Dalton and Luis Valdovino founded Artnauts in 1996, an aim was to balance the aesthetics of art with its power to connect with people experiencing violence, oppression or disaster.

What else are Artnauts Martha Russo and George Rivera up to? Oh, only showing their work in Venice, Italy!

Ciao, amici!

It started simply if not easily, with Rivera cold calling galleries or schools in countries experiencing serious situations. Because of those situations, Artnauts exhibits needed to be two-dimensional and generally not larger than 8x10—a size that allows the work of 40 artists to fit in a carry-on suitcase.

Over three decades, more than 220 artists have contributed their work to exhibits in Bosnia and Rwanda, Colombia, Palestine and the DMZ between North Korea and South Korea—in all, 27 countries on five continents.

Though the points of commonality between the exhibiting country and the United States may not have been identical, Rivera says, Artnauts has always sought common themes, social issues and experiences.

For Martha Russo (MFA’95), who has been with the collective since 1996 and now serves as its board president, the Artnauts’ mission is about staying true to the essence of art. Its mission aligns with her ideas and beliefs about art and its ability to bring “us back to our rudimentary way of collecting information, namely, through the senses and the body,” she describes in her Artnauts artist statement.

Reflecting history and personal growth

In creating “Rhizome: Origins,” both Artnauts and �鶹��Ѱ��Art Museum curators collaborated to envision an exhibit that reflects the history of the organization and reflects artists’ personal growth, says Hope Saska, �鶹��Ѱ��Art Museum director and chief curator. Also uncommon for an Artnauts exhibit, quite a few featured pieces are three-dimensional, deviating from the idea of art that can fit in a carry-on suitcase.

In 30 years, more than 220 artists have participated in Artnauts exhibits, and they were invited to submit ideas for “Rhizome: Origins.” From these ideas, 22 artists’ work was curated for the exhibit, all of whom have �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder affiliation as faculty, staff or alumni.

The opening celebration Thursday will initiate a slate of events throughout the semester, including:

Artnauts at the CU Art Museum from 2-4 p.m. Friday, an event that will include making activity, artist-led gallery talks and an award ceremony for recipients of scholarships honoring past Artnauts.
Collective Visions: An Artnauts Panel Conversation from 1-2 p.m. Sept. 19 in room IB20 of the Visual Arts Complex, which will feature Artnaut founding members George Rivera and Beth Krensky, joined by Martha Russo, Pamela Beverly-Quigley and Eileen Roscina, in a discussion about the history and future of the artist collective.
Social Sculpture: Artnauts + YOU from 1-4 p.m. Nov. 7, an afternoon of hands-on artmaking activities, talks and art demonstrations with faculty and students from �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder’s Unstable Design Lab.
“Rhizome: Origins” closing celebration from 1-3 p.m. Dec. 12.

Thursday’s opening event will also celebrate the �鶹��Ѱ��Art Museum’s sweet 16th birthday and �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder’s 150th anniversary.

Works by Daniel Henry and George Rivera from the Artnauts "Borderlands" exhibit at the Russian Society of Artists Exhibit Hall and Khabarovsk Academy of Art in Khabarovsk, Russia, in 2001.

"Impermanence #2" by Tsehai Johnson

"Lateral Inheritance" by Michael Dixon

"Healing Grounds" by Valerie Albicker, courtesy of the Sunflower Dreams Project and the artists

"Branching as Mapping" by Barbara Colombo

"Objectal Intent" by Heather Hanson

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about the �鶹��Ѱ��Art Museum? Show your support.

New �鶹��Ѱ��Art Museum exhibit honoring the Artnauts collective opens with a public celebration from 4 to 6 p.m. Thursday.

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Top image: "Raw Spots" by Suzanne Faris

It’s more than just feeling good or bad

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 21:23:04 +0000

It’s more than just feeling good or bad Rachel Sauer Mon, 08/31/2026 - 15:23

Rachel Sauer

In her recently published book, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholar Antje Richter explores health and the art of living through illness narratives of early medieval China

In his masterpiece The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, Chinese monk and court librarian Liu Xie observed, “If we melt away our vital energies and cramp the harmonious flow of our vital breath, then holding the writing tablet will hasten our death, and moistening the brush will hack away at our life.”

This might have been a surprising observation from one of the most eminent writers of his time, but nurturing life has long been central to Chinese thought, says Antje Richter, a �鶹��Ѱ�� professor of Chinese in the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations. In fact, ideas about health and illness significantly shaped the literature and culture of the early Chinese medieval era—about 200 CE to 600 CE. And Liu Xie, who was mainly concerned with writers of literature, may have been the first to present advice about writers’ and knowledge workers’ occupational health.

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholar Antje Richter is a professor of Chinese whose research focus includes early medieval Chinese literature.

In her recent book Health and the Art of Living: Illness Narratives in Early Medieval Chinese Literature, Richter explores how themes of health and illness are woven through the literature of the era, from informal letters between friends to sacred texts and the highly regarded genre of sickbed poetry.

“We as humans are not either healthy or unhealthy,” Richter says. “We are constantly adapting to new states of our body. This is interesting to me as a challenge that we are all facing in one way or the other. And it's not a binary; it's a graduated scale that's constantly evolving.

“In one of the chapters, I write about Sima Qian, the father of Chinese historiography, who was famously emasculated as corporal punishment but chose not to end his life, as was expected of him, but continued working on The Records of the Historian. He didn’t die of the punitive mutilation he suffered, but he coped. He finished this groundbreaking historical work, and everybody in China knows him and his story because we also have one of the letters he wrote. So, I use his example to say adaptation to new states of health is possible and that in the literature of this time we have a very nuanced understanding of what it means to be healthy or well.”

Discovering narratives of health and illness

Richter, whose research focus is the early medieval era in China, came upon this significant theme in Chinese literature while writing her previous book, Letters and Epistolary Culture in Medieval China.

“We have thousands of letters transmitted from that period, and among those letters there was a good portion that mentioned illness, and I found it quite interesting,” Richter explains. “There’s one celebrated calligrapher, Wang Xizhi, and much of what he wrote was transmitted and not thrown away. Even if he wrote, ‘I have terrible diarrhea,’ that letter was preserved.”

During her time researching that book, Richter collaborated with a longtime friend in Boulder, Charles “Chip” Chace, who was a Chinese medicine practitioner, to unlock those letters of Wang Xizhi that deal with illness.

Richter’s research of Wang Xizhi’s letters led her, in 2011, to apply for a grant to study for a semester at the Needham Research Institute, which was founded by famed sinologist and historian of Chinese science Joseph Needham.

“This was when I realized, oh, it’s not only letters that have these illness narratives, but also biographies and poetry and religious texts and stories,” Richter says.

“It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the hallowed writers of old clearly understood themselves as living, thriving, aging and, often enough, also suffering bodies,” says Antje Richter.

Richter points to the painting on the cover of her book to describe her main intentions in writing it. The painting, held in the Smithsonian’s collection, shows the beloved early medieval poet Tao Qian—also known as Tao Yuanming—being carried in a basket because he was suffering from a foot illness and could not walk on his own. This detail of Tao Qian’s life is reported in early biographies, and in later centuries became popular in painting as well.

Richter says that to her mind, this episode shows that illness sits right in the middle of life and in the middle of Chinese literature and culture—and that she wanted to emphasize this fact and to help connect medieval Chinese studies to the global medical humanities.

How to live

Surviving texts of the literature of early medieval China, including letters, indicate that openly discussing topics of health or illness carried little or no taboo in certain genres, such as letters, Richter says, while high-register poetry only alluded to mundane or graphic physical aspects of life.

Further, Richter believes that the growing esteem of the literary genre of sickbed poetry in medieval China was inspired by Buddhism, particularly the Vimalakirti Sutra, a Buddhist text expounding on ideas of emptiness and the appearances of the world as mere illusions.

Several chapters of the Vimalakirti Sutra are set at the sickbed of a lay Buddhist, who feigns illness so people will come to his bedside and he can preach.

“Then, he and the visitors that come to his sickbed have conversations about, oh, this body is like a bit of foam that cannot be grasped, this body is like a cloud which changes and disappears in an instant, and Chinese poets were very inspired by that,” Richter says. “So, we have this genre of sickbed poetry that first only reflects on the joys of sick leave and the company of friends during this time, but later also on illnesses that ravaged the body and the illusion of existence, the temporariness of our existence.”

Richter notes that while a significant body of illness narratives from the early medieval era have survived, they generally are the narratives of wealthy and connected men. Despite these limitations, Richter says, illness narratives wove with common threads of human experience.

She says she hopes that readers will come away from the book with a strong sense of the lived reality in the Chinese Middle Ages. “It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the hallowed writers of old clearly understood themselves as living, thriving, aging and, often enough, also suffering bodies,” she says.

“We share many of their concerns: how easy it is to overwork ourselves, how there are points in our lives and biographies where health and illness take center stage, how we are looking for a way to accept illness as part of the human condition. Trying to empathize across centuries and cultures is a good way to practice other types of empathy as well.”

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In her recently published book, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholar Antje Richter explores health and the art of living through illness narratives of early medieval China.

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Top illustration: Scene of poet Tao Qian being carried from scroll "The Lotus Society." (Illustration: Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art)

Remembering Dolly in her coat of many colors

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 15:07:14 +0000

Remembering Dolly in her coat of many colors Rachel Sauer Fri, 08/28/2026 - 09:07

Rachel Sauer

For �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholar Shawn Trenell O’Neal, the outpouring of grief over Dolly Parton’s death in Black communities bespeaks the legend’s humanity and allyship

Shawn Trenell O’Neal was taking an afternoon walk Tuesday when Joanne Corson, program manager for the �鶹��Ѱ�� Center for African and African American Studies (CAAAS) and his dear friend, texted him, asking him to call her right away.

He did, and the first thing she said was, “We just lost Dolly.”

There was no question of which Dolly. Is there any other? “So, we spent the next half an hour talking about Dolly, and right after that I called my mother,” he recalls.

Shawn O'Neal is a �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder assistant teaching professor of ethnic studies and the Center for African and African American Studies associate faculty director.

“My mother and the Black women in my family who raised me were big fans of Dolly Parton, and not necessarily her music, which makes it even more compelling. They were fans of who she was.”

Since she died Tuesday at age 80, people worldwide have united in grief and celebration of a singular songwriter, musician, philanthropist, actress and all-around icon and legend, frequently citing a 2019 New York Times headline: “Is There Anything We Can All Agree On? Yes: Dolly Parton.”

It should be no surprise, says O’Neal, an assistant teaching professor of ethnic studies, musicologist and CAAAS associate faculty director, that Black communities are mourning Parton just as deeply as fan bases, including country music fan bases, that traditionally have veered white.

O’Neal points to a 2020 interview Parton had with Billboard magazine, not long after George Floyd’s death and as the Black Lives Matter movement was gaining momentum. “I understand people having to make themselves known and felt and seen,” Parton told the magazine. “And of course Black lives matter! Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No!”

“At that point we are screaming their names into the air, we don't know what else to do anymore, we are desperate,” O’Neal says. “And to have someone like that step up in that moment, someone who didn’t politicize things, who kept out of politics, but she came out at that moment and said something when we needed it the most?

“She didn't have to do anything and we still would have loved her, but no, she stepped up at that moment and did that, and it just reminded me again, oh, this is why the women in my family made me understand that I have to love this woman.”

Question: Since they weren’t really listening to Dolly’s music, what was it about her that the women in your family loved?

O’Neal: I think it started with her contradictions. She’s got the hair and the nails, the five-inch heels, sequins and rhinestones, you know? But then she comes in with this incredible mind, this talent. And Black people have to live with contradictions all the time, so I think a lot of Black American women were seeing her, like, ‘Oh, you tricky. I see how you playing these dudes, with the heels and the dress and the hair and everything else, and you just playing these dudes like a French horn.’ For the women in my family, Dolly Parton was someone who put a smile on their face.

Question: Do you remember when you first became aware of Dolly?

O’Neal: Around the time 9 to 5 came out, which was in 1980. We didn’t go see it in the theater, but we had cable television and (the women in my family) were so excited to watch this movie. So, I sat there and watched this movie with them, and they just loved it.

I realize now there’s layers to this. The first thing I realize is that we have to put it in a historical context. The movie 9 to 5 is all about women in the workforce and taking a stand to discrimination and taking a stand to misogyny, and all the women in my family worked. My grandmother and my great aunt, they were nurses and nurses’ aides at the VA hospital at Great Lakes Naval Base, my mother was a lab technician and my great-grandmother cleaned houses for rich people in Lake Forest, Illinois, and Highland Park, Illinois.

And this was during the Reagan years, where Ronald Reagan was destroying Black families, just eating us up alive, and at the same time Black women were really trying to insert themselves into the workplace. For the women in my family, at least, I think that movie empowered them, seeing Dolly have to put up with some of the things they were having to put up with. And the song ‘9 to 5’! I mean, that song is submerged in gospel. That line where she’s like, ‘It’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it,’ is that not right out of church?

"This lady actually loves people and she’s actually sticking her neck out for women, for people regardless of their race and ethnicity," says �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholar Shawn Trenell O'Neal.

Question: So, you came to Dolly’s music on your own?

O’Neal: Yes, we watched the movie and I was like, ‘OK, who is this Dolly Parton?’ I gotta now figure out who this Dolly Parton was, so I started listening to some of her music. I remember hearing ‘Jolene’ and, oh, wow. And it was interesting, too, because a lot of Black R&B songs at that time, in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, were about that subject matter—like, ‘I'll be damned if you come in here and mess with my family or my man, you got another think coming.’

Question: Speaking of ‘Jolene,’ you mentioned you played it during your African American History class Wednesday. Why was that?

O’Neal: For starters, because I'm the kind of person that likes to keep (my students) guessing. So, I put it on, I'm blasting it as I'm getting my notes and stuff out and together, and I know they're kind of looking around at each other like, ‘What's going on here?’ What I wanted to do is use it as an icebreaker, because I wanted to talk about the fact that I was raised by these amazing Black women who taught me to honor and love people based on their actions and not the color of their skin or whatever ethnicity that they were a part of.

We were going into a very, very difficult chapter about the triangular trade of the enslavement of African people, so I wanted that icebreaker of what Dolly represented.

Question: You mentioned that your great-grandmother would have called Dolly ‘a good Christian.’ Why is that?

O’Neal: She lived it. My great-grandmother would have said Dolly was a real Christian; like, this lady actually loves people and she’s actually sticking her neck out for women, for people regardless of their race and ethnicity. She was there for people, for humanity, so the women in my family saw her as a true humanitarian.

So, you know, Dolly let Whitney Houston sing (‘I Will Always Love You’) and she made over $10 million in royalties from Whitney’s version, but you know what? She never even collected that money. You know what she did with that money? She put it back into a historically Black neighborhood in Nashville. She was like, ‘This Black woman, Whitney Houston, took my song and sang it into the stratosphere, and that’s who deserves this money, is these communities.’ I mean, who does that? Only Dolly! She built an amusement park so people in the community where she grew up could have jobs. She sent something like 300 million books to kids.

Question: What are you remembering most about Dolly this week?

O’Neal: I think about, you know, I was a young Black man growing up in the Chicago area, and I adored her. I adored her ability to be brash, her ability to be a shrewd businesswoman. Here she was building an empire, but at the same time, going back to that idea of contradictions, being in some ways understated about it.

I think as Black folks we could see ourselves in her. We had to look sharp because we didn't have a lot else to go on. We had to roll in the Cadillac or the Lincoln because we didn't have a lot else to make us feel proud, but that didn’t really get to what was happening beneath the surface. And I know that for Black women, that level of beauty that she exuded, getting the hair done, getting the nails, all of it, they respected that. But they saw she was so much more. There were all these other things going on that were unsaid, but people knew about her, and the women in my family knew. And they were just, like … you weren't about to mush-mouth no Dolly Parton up in my house. You just weren't.

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For �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholar Shawn Trenell O’Neal, the outpouring of grief over Dolly Parton’s death in Black communities bespeaks the legend’s humanity and allyship.

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Top image: Dolly Parton onstage at Wolf Trap in Vienna, Virginia. (Photo: Leeann Cafferata/Wikimedia Commons)

Research shows flowering plants formed rainforests 10 million years earlier than previously thought

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:40:38 +0000

Research shows flowering plants formed rainforests 10 million years earlier than previously thought Rachel Sauer Mon, 08/17/2026 - 09:40

Rachel Sauer

�鶹��Ѱ��Museum curator adjoint Gary Upchurch and colleagues find evidence in ‘botanical Pompeii’ that forests of tropical flowering plants thrived millions of years before dinosaurs’ extinction

In the Jose Creek Formation of south-central New Mexico near the town of Truth or Consequences is what researchers call a “botanical Pompeii.”

There, preserved in volcanic ash, is fossil evidence that flowering plants became dominant in forests a lot earlier than previously thought—almost 10 million years earlier.

“There was a dogma that I helped create back in the ‘80s, which was that tropical-style rainforests, dominated by angiosperms (flowering plants), did not really get established until the Cenozoic (about 66 million years ago),” explains Gary Upchurch, �鶹��Ѱ��Museum curator adjoint and former �鶹��Ѱ�� postdoctoral researcher. “There may have been some farther back in very isolated regions, but there is a big expansion of this type of vegetation in the early Cenozoic.

Gary Upchurch, �鶹��Ѱ��Museum curator adjoint and former �鶹��Ѱ�� postdoctoral researcher, and his research colleagues found evidence that flowering plants formed rainforests 10 million years earlier than previously thought.

“So, I published papers on that back in the ‘80s, with the caveat that there may be some little bits here and there that are older.”

Over many years of research in the Jose Creek Formation, Upchurch and his colleagues discovered some of those “little bits”: diaspores, or the seeds and associated dispersal materials of flowering plants, dating back nearly 76 million years—almost 10 million years before an asteroid strike that led to the mass extinction of dinosaurs. They detail their findings in a paper recently published in the journal Science.

Previously, Upchurch explains, it was thought that flowering plants became dominant on the landscape only after this mass-extinction event, but the diaspores he and his colleagues unearthed in New Mexico say otherwise. They tell a story of angiosperms that developed large, fleshy fruits even before the rise of placental mammals and modern birds—which eat the fruit and help disperse the seeds—encouraged them to do so.

An anomaly in the geologic record

“Flowering plants themselves are an anomaly in the geologic record because all the major phyla of plants occur in a very narrow window of time, basically by the Late Devonian [382 to 359 million years ago] into the Carboniferous [359 to 299 million years ago],” Upchurch says. “The flowering plant lineage must have been around then, but we don't see anything that we would call flowering plants until the Cretaceous [145 to 66 million years ago].

“There are some tantalizing remains that go back further in time, but the oldest that everybody would agree on is about 140 million years old. Now, flowering plants started off as weedy plants, perhaps in forest understories, and their seeds were small and dispersed mostly without help, maybe a little wind. One of the debates has been, when did they become big? When did they become dominant on the landscape?”

As a postdoctoral paleobotany researcher at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder and longtime professor at Texas State University, from which he retired in 2020, Upchurch contributed to longstanding ideas in paleobotany and paleoecology that flowering plants thrived after the dinosaurs.

Throughout his research career, though, he has encountered evidence challenging those ideas. One of his earlier papers detailed an angiosperm leaf assemblage with rainforest structure in the Mid-Cretaceous Dakota Formation of Kansas that’s about 100 million years old. And recent papers by different authors describe Campanian-age tropical rainforests in northern Mexico and North Africa.

He also repeatedly encountered bias in the fossil record having to do with the fact that “so many of our fossil deposits are from coastlines and carbonaceous deposits,” he says. “And when you look today in places like the southeastern U.S., the swamps tend to be dominated by conifers, even though more broadly flowering plants are the dominants.”

Upchurch says he began researching in the Jose Creek Formation almost by accident. During his postdoctoral studies, one of his focuses was end-Cretaceous extinction and coming up with evidence for mass mortality of vegetation in response to the asteroid impact, followed by recovery.

Around that time, noted geologist Greg Mack of New Mexico State University called Upchurch and said he had some fossils that he’d like somebody to look at.

“And whenever Greg Mack says that, you go, ‘Oh, my god, here’s my career,’” Upchurch says.

Seed and fruit fossils found in the Jose Creek Formation of south-central New Mexico. (Image: Cindy Looy and Jaemin Lee/UC Berkeley)

So, beginning in 1991, Upchurch and later members of his lab began studying a series of locations that turned out to be Late Campanian Age, about 76 to 72.1 million years ago, and that were far inland from the epicontinental seaway that traversed North America during the Cretaceous.

What they found was angiosperm dominance in at least some of the assemblages they studied, especially those that were developing not in swamps but in well-drained soils like those in the Jose Creek Formation.

Larger-than-expected fruit

To dig further into this dogma-busting evidence, Upchurch recruited students to join the research, one of whom was Dori Contreras, now director of paleontology and curator of paleobotany at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, Texas.

During her PhD studies at the University of California Berkeley, Contreras continued pursuing this research, working with her advisor, Cindy Looy. Analyzing the reproductive structures of the samples that Upchurch, Contreras and their research colleagues collected over the years, UC Berkeley PhD student Jaemin Lee found in the well-preserved specimens evidence of larger-than-expected fleshy fruit—about the size of a blueberry.

“One possible reason for this had to do with the fact that we were not dealing with fruits and seeds that got washed into the nearest pond,” Upchurch explains. “We were dealing with material that had basically been dropped from the parent plants into a volcanic ash bed that was preserving both the forest leaf litter and the diaspores. It’s a Pompeii type of situation.

“There’s a series of volcanic ash beds where we have radiometric dates as well as different types of fossil plant material—we have leaves, we have diaspores, we have exquisitely preserved petrified woods, both of conifers and angiosperms.”

Further, the diaspores they found suggest an ecological evolution toward humid and shady tropical forests rather than sunny, open environments and dispersal assistance by extinct mammals and birds, Upchurch says.

In ecology, he explains, organisms broadly reproduce via r-selection or K-selection. R-selection is all about numbers: disperse a huge number of small seeds and figure a tiny percentage will germinate and become established. K-selected species, on the other hand, have bigger diaspores and the focus is on survival and establishment because conditions might not be ideal—say, the shade of a tropical forest floor.

Upchurch notes that while previously held ideas about angiosperms weren’t wrong—they did, in fact, abundantly flourish after the asteroid hit Earth—they were incomplete.

“As a scientist and a researcher, sometimes there have been moments I wasn’t expecting, these rare golden finds,” he says. “But the most important thing I’ve done is simply observe.”

Jaemin Lee, Dori L. Contreras, James G. Saulsbury and Cindy V. Looy contributed to this research.

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Top illustration: An artistic rendering of the forest understory in the late Cretaceous based on fossils from the Jose Creek Formation in New Mexico. (Illustration: Brian Engh/LivingRelicProductions.com)

Meredith Betterton awarded Sloan Matter-to-Life grant

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 20:55:21 +0000

Meredith Betterton awarded Sloan Matter-to-Life grant Rachel Sauer Wed, 08/05/2026 - 14:55

Rachel Sauer

Research aligns with foundation goal to sharpen ‘scientific understanding of the physical principles and mechanisms that distinguish living systems from inanimate matter’

Meredith Betterton, a �鶹��Ѱ�� professor of physics and molecular, cellular and developmental biology, has been awarded a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Matter-to-Life program.

The two-year, $594,487 grant will support Betterton’s ongoing research on microtubules, the small, long tubes inside cells that serve several functions and that Betterton’s research suggests may be less fixed and static than previously thought.

The Sloan Matter-to-Life program aims “to sharpen our scientific understanding of the physical principles and mechanisms that distinguish living systems from inanimate matter, and to explore the conditions under which physical principles and mechanisms guide the complexification of matter towards life.”

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scientist Meredith Betterton has been awarded a two-year, $594,487 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Matter-to-Life program.

Betterton and her research colleagues study microtubules in cells, which help maintain cell structure similar to how beams support a building and also act like highways that move traffic along, she explains.

“Because (microtubules) have this important role as highways that things stick to and then move along, people have thought about them as being kind of fixed,” she says. “You build a microtubule, it’s there to be a highway and then it’s pretty static.

“The thought has been that once they’re there (in the cell), they sit there. Our project has to do with the idea that there might be subtle changes within the (microtubule) structure that act as a signal that sends information—so they act in some ways not as a highway, but like a telephone wire that’s sending signals.”

Building with bricks

Microtubules are built of subunits, called tubulin, that can be compared to bricks, Betterton explains. These tubulin “bricks” are known to make small internal changes to their shape and size; what hasn’t been known is what happens to the rest of the tubulin in the microtubule if one changes. “Imagine packing a lot of bricks together in a wall,” she says. “If you change the shape of one, what happens to the others nearby?”

Several years ago, Betterton and her research group, in collaboration with another team of research colleagues including Radhika Subramanian and Sithara S. Wijeratne at Harvard Medical School, were studying “traffic” along microtubules, which is done by motor proteins. These proteins take “steps” along the microtubule. They also can pile up and cause traffic jams, so Betterton and her colleagues were studying those jams to better understand the motors.

The researchers discovered this phenomenon because the math wasn’t working. “In my group we were working on mathematical modeling of this, and we couldn’t get the model to work,” she says. “We put in measurements, and the equations gave us predictions that were really different from what experiments showed. We found the only way we could get the model to make sense was if something was happening where the motors could talk to each other over really long distances.”

While this action happens on a nanometer scale, “if you scaled it up it would be as if, when you’re driving a car, you could know there’s another car two miles away and how fast it’s driving,” she says. “That really was the initial discovery—this weird, long-range effect that we didn’t know where it was coming from.”

Other research had explored the conformational transitions, or structural shifts in tubulin, and how motor proteins can stick to microtubules and change their state if they bind in large numbers. Betterton and her research group are exploring whether a change of state can happen when motor proteins bind in small numbers and send signals over long distances.

How cells process information

A key aspect of this research, Betterton says, is it explores a different paradigm for how to think about these particular molecules in cells and aims for broader understanding of the way cells process information.

For example, she says, much is known about how neurons in the brain send electrical signals—a vital process for information transmission in the brain—but that process “can only happen in that one type of cell, whereas microtubules are in every cell,” Betterton says. “They could be sensing something happening in one part of the cell, so we’re studying this new way that cells could be responding.”

She adds that there are various potential applications for this avenue of research, including developing more targeted chemotherapy drugs: “There’s one (tubulin) that seems to be resistant to this subtle expansion and contraction. Recent work shows that makes them not as responsive to chemotherapy drugs. Because microtubules are involved in cell division, some first-line chemotherapy drugs for cancer act against microtubules.

“What has been discovered is that some cancers can resist these chemotherapy drugs by switching to this other type of tubulin that doesn’t change shape as well,” she says, adding that understanding more about tubulin expansion and contraction could possibly lead to more effective drugs.

There also could be potential applications in the physics of materials and using microtubules and motor proteins to make new types of materials that are more tunable to specific functions.

“The Sloan program is interested in this research because this specific program is called Matter-to-Life,” Betterton says. “What that’s trying to say of matter is that it’s some collections of molecules, but what about it becomes different between something that’s inert versus something that could be more alive? That’s a really exciting question.”

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Research aligns with foundation goal to sharpen ‘scientific understanding of the physical principles and mechanisms that distinguish living systems from inanimate matter.'

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Top image: Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

Tell us, O muse, of that ingenious hero who traveled far and wide

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 22:31:58 +0000

Tell us, O muse, of that ingenious hero who traveled far and wide Rachel Sauer Wed, 07/15/2026 - 16:31

Director Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey opens Friday and stars Matt Damon as the titular Odysseus. (Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures)

Rachel Sauer

With Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey opening in theaters Friday, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder classics scholar John Gibert considers why Homer’s epic is a tale that endures

The city of Troy likely existed. Scholars and historians broadly agree on this, citing its probable location as the mound of Hisarlık near modern Çanakkale in Turkey at the Aegean end of the Dardanelles, the waterway connecting Greeks and inhabitants of the Black Sea region.

Because of this desirable, strategic location, scholars and historians further agree that it’s likely wars were fought there. What’s much less likely is that a warrior king named Odysseus devised a scheme to build an enormous horse and hide Greek soldiers in it so they could sneak into Troy and win a 10-year war that began when the Trojan prince Paris kidnapped the king of Sparta’s wife, Helen.

Also unlikely: that Odysseus and his crew, on their journey home to Ithaca from Troy, were blown off course for 10 more years, encountering all manner of monsters, temptations and obstacles as punishment for eating the sun god’s cattle.

John Gibert, a �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder professor of classics, notes that The Odyssey "is infinitely adaptable."

It’s a thrilling story, though, one that’s been told and retold for almost 3,000 years—since the Greek poet Homer (who may or may not have existed) crafted his enduring epic The Odyssey. Friday, Christopher Nolan’s film version of the story opens in theaters, and in explaining to New York Times reporter Melena Ryzik why he tackled such a monumental tale, Nolan commented that “it is the ur-text. It’s in everything I’ve done before.”

Millennia later, The Odyssey still fascinates, thrills and even outrages—students still are assigned to read it, and artists still plumb its 12,100 lines for insights into myth and loyalty and what it means to be human.

Perhaps that’s why we’re still reading it and, in the spirit of its origins, telling it, says John Gibert, a �鶹��Ѱ�� professor of classics and scholar of Greek poetry. It’s a story about gods and giants, but it’s also a story about a man trying to return safely to his home and (modest) kingdom.

“The Odyssey is infinitely adaptable,” Gibert says. “It gives storytellers who want to retell it so many options, and no two (retellings) are alike because creatives are always finding different things in the stories that they want to run with.”

‘Tell me about a complicated man’

In her acclaimed 2017 translation of The Odyssey, classist Emily Wilson opens with, “Tell me about a complicated man,” which Nolan has cited in interviews as an inspiration for his $250 million epic.

Wilson’s translation continues:

“Tell the old story for our modern times.

Find the beginning.”

And The Odyssey is a very old story, composed approximately 2,800 years ago and a companion to Homer’s The Iliad.

“Each one of them fills a translation 500 or 600 pages long,” Gibert explains. “So, they're really big works, but The Iliad only tells a slice of the 10th year of the Trojan War—slightly over 50 days, but really with a focus on about three or four days. It's very concentrated, and it's set in a wartime society where the values of warriors are uppermost.

“The Iliad is a kind of proto-tragedy in that it focuses on serious characters engaged in serious actions with large ramifications for the nation. But it is, at the end of the day, a fairly narrow slice of life.”

The Odyssey, on the other hand, follows Odysseus and his crew for 10 years, from a Troy in ruins to the land of the Lotus Eaters to the treacherous passage between Scylla and Charybdis and finally home to Ithaca. They encounter—and often anger—gods and monsters and a witch who turns men to swine, and in the end, only Odysseus makes it home.

Movie poster for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey (Courtesy: Universal Pictures)

From a storytelling perspective, The Odyssey is rich with action and memorable characters and can be read on one level as a rip-roaring adventure. This may stem, in part, from its origins in oral tradition, Gibert says, with storytellers performing it live and adapting it as they went.

“If you look for complete consistency in their storytelling, you will not find it because they’re composing live every time,” Gibert says. “They’ve got a vision of the overall story, but in the details it’s going to differ every single time. So, a lot of Homeric scholars are thinking, ‘A-ha, this is why there's some unevenness in The Iliad and The Odyssey.

“This is also why they have those traditional epithets like ‘swift-footed Achilles’ and ‘circumspect Penelope,’ because deploying a phrase like that buys some time for the performer to think about where he's going next.”

This is also why, in both The Iliad and The Odyssey, there’s description of common things like preparing a meal, taking a bath or performing a ritual sacrifice, Gibert says: “(Performers) had a whole stock of motifs, and they could do that stuff almost on autopilot while they're thinking about shaping the larger storytelling purpose for the occasion that they're currently telling in.”

The oral traditions from which The Odyssey grew also belie the image of a genius who sits with a quill choosing one word at a time until the perfect epic poem spans the papers in front of him—“more or less what Virgil did in Rome centuries later,” Gibert says. “Homer is just something completely different.”

A folktale hero

The Odyssey, then, shares DNA with the sort of tall tales that evolve in their telling. It also presents, in Odysseus, a man who is both hero and human, who is complex and fallible and, in some ways, relatable.

“He is a folktale hero of the man against the sea, the man who has adventures against giants and things like that, so he's a traveling hero and this kind of hero naturally is a magnet for more stories of the same kind,” Gibert says. “You can attach any story to Odysseus, really, because it's plausible that he's the sort of guy that would happen to, and so there’s no limit. He’s a husband returning from war to his wife, and he’s also favored by a goddess who’s smoothing the path for him most of the time.”

And while The Odyssey is the story of Odysseus, is also expands the way that other characters’ stories are told, particularly women’s stories. While women only briefly appear in The Iliad and in small, circumscribed roles, Gibert says, in The Odyssey they’re more varied and complex.

“Of course, their roles are circumscribed, too (in The Odyssey), but there’s just more variety,” Gibert says. “Some of them are monsters; some of them are temptresses, goddesses or figures like the Sirens who can lure sailors to their deaths by singing a seductive song. And then some of them are family members and household members, so you’ve got your mothers, your daughters; you’ve got enslaved people”

In fact, Gibert adds, it is the plight of women and enslaved people with which some of his students have found connection and resonance. He recalls a student reading Book 22 of The Odyssey, in which Odysseus and his son, Telemachus, execute 12 enslaved women who had been assaulted or coerced by Penelope’s suitors, “and she just said, ‘You know what, this is where I quit.’ And she got up and left the classroom,” Gibert recalls.

“That was early in my teaching career and, incidentally, years before Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad (2005), which is more or less built on this scene. It was eye opening for me, and my eyes have stayed open. So, I try to work with (those emotional responses) in the classroom and tell students about how many ways we can think about this text.”

During the fourth semester of the Department of Classics’ Greek program, students read Homer in ancient Greek, developing new lenses through which they can approach both The Iliad and The Odyssey, Gibert says.

And while The Iliad is often regarded as the more profound work, The Odyssey “is going to give you just a much broader palette to paint with,” Gibert says, “with adventure, domesticity, warfare—Odysseus is the one who sealed the deal with the Trojan horse—adventures at sea, shipwrecks, giants. It’s great material for special effects if you're thinking in cinematic terms, but also just in storytelling terms it’s a story that’s still exciting to tell.”

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With Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey opening in theaters Friday, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder classics scholar John Gibert considers why Homer’s epic is a tale that endures .

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Top photo: Matt Damon as Odysseus in Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey (Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures)

Are Colorado moose invasive? New research says no

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:32:33 +0000

Are Colorado moose invasive? New research says no Rachel Sauer Thu, 06/18/2026 - 07:32

A moose affectionately dubbed "Frank the Tank" in the Colorado mountains.

Rachel Sauer

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder archaeologist William Taylor and research colleagues find evidence that far from being non-native, moose have been in the southern Rockies for centuries, likely longer

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The modern Colorado moose is often considered just that: modern—brought to the state by wildlife officials in the late 1970s, preceded by very occasional reports of moose sightings in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Since being translocated to Colorado, these charismatic megafauna have been a source of both fascination and concern. In Rocky Mountain National Park, where moose populations have thrived, ecosystems have been changing, and moose-associated impacts have sparked renewed conversations about managing an animal labeled “non-native.”

However, newly published research by an interdisciplinary team of scientists, archivists and Tribal cultural heritage leaders shows that the “non-native” label is inaccurate. They present evidence demonstrating that moose have been in Colorado for at least centuries and likely longer.

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholar William Taylor and his research colleagues found evidence that moose have lived in the southern Rockies for centuries.

The researchers analyzed newspaper archives, archaeological site reports, scientific journals, museum collections and photo archives to understand where and when moose were present in Colorado prior to the mid-1900s. Perhaps most importantly, notes lead author William Taylor, a �鶹��Ѱ�� associate professor of anthropology and �鶹��Ѱ��Museum curator of archaeology, the scholars sought Indigenous histories, and in doing so found evidence of moose being well known and deeply integrated into traditional knowledge of Native people in the southern Rockies.

Crystal C’Bearing, a study co-author and Northern Arapaho Tribal Historic Preservation Officer, notes that among the Northern Arapaho, "the moose is considered a valued commodity among the Tribe.” She adds that societies within the Northern Arapaho "utilize many animals, including moose, in their clothing, society items and regalia. This tradition continues today."

The scholarly approach of joining Indigenous knowledge with historical accounts, archaeology and paleontology, "shows the power of multiple independent lines of evidence converging on the conclusion that moose were part of southern Rocky Mountain ecosystems long before modern reintroductions," says study co-author Jonathan Dombrosky of Crow Canyon Archaeological Center and the University of Alabama. "More broadly, the study demonstrates how historical sciences can help us better understand the origins of modern ecosystems and make more informed decisions about their future."

Delving into the archaeological record

The seeds for this research and the approach to it grew from Taylor’s deep dive into the �鶹��Ѱ��Museum’s collections when he arrived in 2019.

“One of the things I’ve done with my time here is try to familiarize myself with and understand our own collections, which are among the more significant archaeological collections in the whole region,” Taylor says. “In the process of curating our collections, I became more and more familiar with what’s in those and the publications that are out there in the world that pertain to them.

“One of the oldest and most significant is the Jurgens collection, which is from a site in Colorado and related to a really early, deep chapter of Colorado’s pre-history, and that collection was analyzed by (one of) my predecessor(s), Dr. Joe Ben Wheat. He analyzed this collection decades ago and identified several specimens of moose in northwest Colorado dating back thousands of years, to the early Holocene.”

Arapaho objects, symbols and designs linked to moose. 1) Moose hide drum; 2-4) Track designs; 5) Ear design; 6-8) Leg and hoof designs; 9) Animal design (Moose, wolf, or elk). Images modified from Kroeber (1983). (Image courtesy Journey LeBeau)

That fact was on Taylor’s mind a few years ago when Rocky Mountain National Park officials began broadly publicizing moose management issues and the discussions that were happening about them. In many of those discussions, Taylor recalls, the messaging frequently labeled moose as “invasive,” “non-native” or “outsiders,” which doesn’t align with the archaeological record and “some of the basic facts I know from my role here working as curator,” he says.

“I also started to see some media narratives, based on secondhand accounts, suggesting that Native people in the Rockies didn’t know about moose. Things like that just started to rub me the wrong way and raised my spidey senses—I decided that there needs to be serious engagement with the archaeological record. We needed to take a closer look at these things that are trickling into the discourse—particularly characterizations of Indigenous perspectives and the historic record, because that’s going to shape what happens to moose in the future.”

Taylor contacted Tribal partners and colleagues at other universities and institutions and asked, “What’s your sense of the story of moose in the southern Rockies?” From those conversations, he proposed a rigorous analysis of the history of the moose in this area.

The work began in the archives of the �鶹��Ѱ��Museum, and drew on the expertise of other museum staff. They delved into Colorado’s approximately 160 years of digitized newspapers—“an extraordinary resource,” Taylor says—mapping each documented sighting of a moose, every record of an interaction with a moose they encountered for the past 160 years. The story that emerged was a rich record showing that moose have been in this area from its earliest colonial settlement days.

Seeking Indigenous histories

The more challenging task was crawling through Colorado’s sprawling archaeological record. “Like many western states and many parts of the world, the archaeological record isn’t a neatly organized database,” Taylor explains. "It's often a chaotic compilation of dusty old books, partially published white papers, just a lot of resources kind of floating around out there, so you have to turn over a lot of rocks to find what you need.”

This meant sending rafts of emails, requesting interlibrary loans of undigitized manuscripts and working professional and personal networks to better understand the archaeological record. They dug into municipal photo archives along the Front Range and museum databases for vertebrate zoology collections. From this research, they wove a rich tapestry of findings showing that “even though it’s very, very hard to get a comprehensive picture of when an animal was or wasn’t in a given place at a given time in the ancient world, when you take this multi-methodological approach and really get curious rather than starting from assumptions, you uncover a really fascinating picture,” Taylor says.

A moose affectionately dubbed "Frank the Tank" in the Colorado mountains.

One of the most exciting aspects of the research, Taylor adds, was pairing this work with Indigenous histories, including oral traditions about moose from across the region. One of Taylor’s colleagues shared a 19th-century record from the Jicarilla Apache of northern New Mexico discussing the fact that moose were present in—and had recently disappeared from—even the southernmost ranges of the southern Rocky Mountains.

Ultimately, the research coalesced into a reframing of moose in the southern Rockies, supported by evidence: Moose are not, in fact, newcomers, but longtime residents.

Supporting future management

So, what does this mean for human-wildlife co-existence and for populations and ecosystems increasingly stressed by climate change? The findings don’t mean that changes to mountain ecosystems should be ignored, Taylor and his colleagues emphasize. Instead, they argue that moose impacts should be understood through a deeper ecological and historical view, especially in national parks where many processes that once shaped large herbivore populations have been altered.

Moose calves in the Colorado mountains.

“Rocky Mountain National Park is dealing with ecological impacts from moose, but treating moose as a non-native species changes which management responses seem justified," says study co-author John Wendt of New Mexico State University, noting that large mammals and the landscapes they inhabit have never been static, and large herbivores like moose have historically been controlled by things like predators, habitat change and human hunting.

"When modern park systems operate without these regulating processes, high impacts don't necessarily mean that an animal is ecologically out of place,” Wendt adds, Instead, "they may be a sign that our management frameworks themselves should be reconsidered."

The study’s results may change how wildlife managers think about managing modern ecosystems, which have been destabilized by major changes in the last two centuries, including the removal of natural predators, the researchers note. C'Bearing says that Tribes may be willing partners in solving this issue: "Tribal people were part of the natural ecosystem in terms of hunting and wildlife management. It would be beneficial not only to the Tribes to utilize the moose again for cultural practices, but to assist in the co-management of moose in Colorado and the Southern Rockies."

Further, the multidisciplinary approach that the researchers used can be applied to other species, Taylor says. Better understanding where animals lived in the past, and for how long they lived there, can offer important clues to supporting their futures.

"The veil of time is often our biggest obstacle in understanding wildlife," said Joshua Miller, a study co-author from the University of Cincinnati. "Compared to the thousands of years that a species can live in a particular place, data from wildlife surveys might only extend a few decades into the past. We can learn a lot from those data, but some questions require more expansive time horizons. Weaving together different threads of historical evidence can fill important knowledge gaps, and help us develop strategies for managing and conserving plants and animals from around the world."

Study authors are William T. T. Taylor, John A. F. Wendt, Jonathan Dombrosky, Crystal C'Bearing, Mikayla Costales, Isaac A. Hart, Journey LeBeau, Adrian Johnson, Elena Lompe, Russell W. Graham, Chance Ward, Emily Lena Jones and Joshua H. Miller.

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�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder archaeologist William Taylor and research colleagues find evidence that far from being non-native, moose have been in the southern Rockies for centuries, likely longer

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Top photo: A moose pair interacting in Sprague Lake (All moose photos courtesy Deena Sveinsson)

Scholars apply economic analysis to ecological research

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 20 May 2026 21:25:35 +0000

Scholars apply economic analysis to ecological research Rachel Sauer Wed, 05/20/2026 - 15:25

“If you’re studying a natural area, you could get a permit and go sample all over, but you can’t do that in a city. Even if you get a permit, you can’t just go into people’s backyards,” explains �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scientist Asia Kaiser about the challenges of ecological research in urban areas. (Photo: Sandy Millar/Unsplash)

Rachel Sauer

In research published today, recent PhD graduate Asia Kaiser details how synthetic control methods estimated significant declines in bee observations when traditional analyses didn’t

Since it launched in 2008 as a UC Berkeley student’s master's project, the iNaturalist platform has been a source of both fascination and frustration for researchers.

The hundreds of millions of observations about the natural world logged by both professional and citizen scientists around the globe are a treasure trove of information about biodiversity. But is that data usable in research? The prevailing sentiment has veered toward doubt, skepticism or an outright “no.”

“I think the feeling has been, ‘Oh, because this data is just being collected opportunistically by nature enthusiasts and not in a standardized, rigorous way, it can’t be used in scientific research,’” says Asia Kaiser, who earlier this month earned her PhD in the �鶹��Ѱ�� Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. “If you haven’t planned out data collection in advance, a lot of researchers hesitate to use it.”

Recent PhD graduate Asia Kaiser studied how synthetic control methods estimated significant declines in bee observations when traditional analyses didn’t.

There had to be a way, Kaiser thought, to tap into the vast cache of information logged into iNaturalist without sacrificing scientific rigor, especially data collected in urban environments. The answer, it turned out, lay in economics.

In research published today, Kaiser and co-authors Julian Resasco and Laura Dee, both associate professors of ecology and evolutionary biology, detail how combining iNaturalist records with synthetic control methods, originally used in economics, estimated a significant decline in bee observations in Philadelphia during the two years following Hurricane Ida in 2021, while conventional ecological analyses didn’t detect the decline.

“Basically, the inspiration for this project was thinking about causal inference in ecology,” Kaiser explains. “When we have observational data, can we actually use that to ask questions about drivers of biodiversity?”

‘You can’t just go into people’s backyards’

These questions dovetailed neatly with Kaiser’s research focus, which is bees—specifically, how human land use affects different insect groups and, consequently, the ecosystem services they provide in coupled human-natural systems. Among her research aims is understanding biodiversity in urban environments, improving the resilience of urban agroecosystems, increasing equitable access to fresh produce and promoting environmental justice in cities.

However, monitoring biodiversity and evaluating drivers of change in urban environments is confounded by several issues: “Cities are mosaics of land-use types, including parks, private properties, buildings, roads and industrial zones,” Kaiser writes in the paper. “As a result, sampling efforts can be complicated by permission and safety issues, and leaving unattended sampling equipment in the field brings a higher risk of theft, tampering and vandalism in cities.

“Given these challenges, measuring biodiversity in cities requires different tools and data streams than those used in natural ecosystems. Participatory science data is a promising solution for monitoring biodiversity in cities; cities are the land use type with some of the highest upload volumes of data to participatory science platforms, largely because upload frequency is strongly influenced by population density.”

Despite the abundance of participatory science data in platforms like iNaturalist, researchers have hesitated to draw from it, relying instead on randomized, controlled and replicable experiments to identify and estimate causal relationships. That kind of science, Kaiser says, becomes more difficult in urban environments due to sampling challenges and historical legacies that shape different neighborhoods, among other reasons.

“If you’re studying a natural area, you could get a permit and go sample all over, but you can’t do that in a city,” Kaiser says. “Even if you get a permit, you can’t just go into people’s backyards.”

The idea of how to bridge the gap between the abundance of iNaturalist data logged in urban areas and the rigor expected in scientific research came to Kaiser when she was assigned to watch a lecture given by a Nobel laureate in economics. The lecture topic was synthetic control methods, which originated in economics as a way to create a nonexistent control group that allows for comparisons between real-world groups before and after an event or intervention.

One of the most famous uses of synthetic control methods in economics was in estimating the impact of Germany’s reunification after the fall of the Berlin Wall on the gross domestic product (GDP) of western Germany. Economists created a “synthetic” Germany from economic data to study GDP with and without reunification.

Though synthetic control methods hadn’t been widely used in ecology research, “I thought it could be adopted with iNaturalist data,” Kaiser explains. She was further interested in studying the effects of Hurricane Ida on her home city of Philadelphia, which included significant flooding.

“Even though it didn’t have a huge impact on people per se, the effects of the hurricane were really dramatic. Looking at the water levels, the stream gauges had their highest values ever in the 100 years that they’ve been measuring. My feeling was that would have a pretty big impact on bees, because if you look at bee biodiversity, bees are pretty sensitive to precipitation and water. The ones that nest in the ground are really affected by huge flooding events.”

Declines following a hurricane

To apply synthetic control methods to ecological research, Kaiser and her colleagues drew data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, which collects research-grade iNaturalist data—that which includes, among other points, latitude and longitude, collection date and time and correct identification—as a proxy for bee abundance in Philadelphia.

They analyzed for bee population declines and, in addition to synthetic control methods, also performed the more traditional methods of interrupted time series regression, before-after control impact regression and before-after regression.

Kaiser and her colleagues found that synthetic control estimated a 15.5%—20.9% decline in bee observations in the two years following Hurricane Ida. In contrast, the three more common ecological analyses didn’t detect this decline.

“That was an amazing moment, seeing this decline in the data and better understanding how iNaturalist data may be able to help us look at the impact of unusual climate events—things that are happening more and more these days, like huge fires, huge floods, abnormally warm winters,” Kaiser says. “Unless you were already collecting data in a region before, you can’t really see the impact before the event, but synthetic control methods might be able to help us in those situations.”

Kaiser adds that this method also might be useful for looking at the effect of policy interventions. For example, the city of Boulder is establishing pollinator corridors, and Kaiser sees potential in using this method to draw from iNaturalist data in studying the outcomes of these corridors.

Scientists who reviewed the paper expressed excitement and skepticism about using synthetic control methods in ecological research, Kaiser says: “They asked questions about whether or not the decline I’m seeing is a true thing that’s happening or an artifact of the way data has been collected. iNaturalist is very sensitive to observers—wealthy neighborhoods have higher uploads, areas around research universities have higher uploads—but this statistical method can help control for those things.”

Thanks to the professional and citizen scientists gathering data and sharing it on iNaturalist, Kaiser says she sees potential to apply synthetic control methods to a range of ecological research. For example, “using the bee biodiversity that’s collected on iNaturalist, does that correlate with how well flowers are being pollinated? I think that’s something we’ll be able to study.”

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In research published today, recent PhD graduate Asia Kaiser details how synthetic control methods estimated significant declines in bee observations when traditional analyses didn’t.

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Top photo: Aaron Burden/Unsplash

Rachel Sauer

For �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder alumni, art is a family matter

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