The following is an original production of AZPM News.

(Tom) This week on Arizona Illustrated, wonder of curiosity and radical openness with artist Galen Dara.

(Galen) A lot of my work is my exploration of my identity.

(Tom) See how Tucsonans are creating a community around giving things away for free.

(Kevin) That's the one question I tend to ask people.

Have you found any treasures at the table?

Almost everybody says yes.

(Tom) Can these supernatural looking sculptures be used to rehabilitate polluted areas along the Santa Cruz River?

(Claire) What does it mean to be a collaborator with living organism that's not a human?

(Tom) And a student group is giving a little Arizona magic for local families.

(Jordan) But something that really spoke to me about Glam, it's less about me and more about what we can give back.

Hello and welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

And today we're joining you from the newly renovated Gateway to the Arts.

It's a beautiful little pocket on the U of A campus.

We'll be telling you a lot more about it in a few minutes.

But first we have the story of a recent Masters of Fine Arts graduate here at the U of A, Galen Dara.

[ MACHINERY WHIRRING ] ♪ UPLIFTING PIANO (Galen) There's all of these different like mediums and methods and tools that you use as an artist, but the most important tool is your soul.

If that—however you choose to conceive of that and, like your mind.

So it's one of the reasons why I call myself a multimedia artist because for me, it's the art is the thing.

And like being able to use a variety of different mediums and techniques and methods is all just part of it.

♪ PIANO CONTINUES From a very young age, mark-making and image-making was a very big part of my identity.

I'm very compelled by transformative gender, oriented imagery, and ideas.

Being a new mother really opened up and tapped into a lot of that kind of imagery for me.

But at that point, it's all still very much like in my sketchbook.

I had my hands full of a baby, but I taught myself how to paint with pixels of light.

And I really developed that as an art making tool.

It led to my working as an illustrator in the science fiction and fantasy industry.

(Yana) When Galen first started working on this thesis project, she had to kind of like physically turn away from any sort of illustration or image making and she had to figure out her entire technical process.

(Gary) She was using digital animation and video projection and video mapping and installation elements like all these things kind of synthesized together to say what she had been trying to say all along.

(Galen) Utopias and dystopias, I'm also looking at origin story, myths, how we construct our meaning in life.

This is what makes us human.

I love the fantastic.

I love the world building in a distant planet far away.

But these stories are still things that can actually reveal such pivotal things about us as humans.

I had been working with fragmentation and reclamation of imagery, birthing symbols and rebirthing symbols across a variety of different belief structures.

A lot of fluid is usually involved in all of the rebirth narratives like the baptism, the born of blood, just the actual visceral reality of being born.

♪ PIANO CONTINUES ♪ I actually had to transform my studio space to create this environment where I could control the light.

Basically, I created a womb where I could gestate these new ways of working.

Unfortunately, building a false ceiling in my studio didn't go over well with the fire marshal.

I was able to come out of the womb.

(Gary) With fluid, you've got these shapes that could represent fluid, kind of dripping down like water, could also be kind of an eyeball shape.

The magic of video mapping kind of makes these floating shapes feel like they have depth and that they're windows into another world.

(Yana) This is the feeling that Galen was going for, is to have this sort of magic.

Like, how is this happening?

How are these images changing?

How are they floating in space?

People are very much engaged with the projections.

And then I like seeing how the projections sometimes cast a glow on people, on the visitors of the gallery.

(Galen) That was kind of what I wanted it to be, was that.

A lot of my work is my exploration of my identity.

Throughout all of human history, identity has been constructed.

(Gary) The work is dealing with this rebuilding or re-finding identity.

It's fun for me to sort of think about this moment kind of frozen in time, where these droplets are coming down from above.

These will then, gravity, right, will kind of carry them down through, and they'll puddle up.

We see that moment of fragmentation right before it self-congeals.

I wanted this to be more about joy, to be something compelling and magical, and for there to be an element of wonder and discovery.

To be able to see how things just beautifully shift your perspective in this fluid way, and each new view reveals new things and changes how you experience everything that you're looking at.

It's an open invitation to see a more expansive way of being.

Let's be together, let's exist together, let's be changed together.

And joining us now is the Interim Director of the School of Art here at the U of A, Karen Zimmerman.

Thank you for having us by today.

Thank you, Tom.

We are impressed by what we see.

Now you're tucked away in a quiet little pocket of campus, but you've had a lot of things going on, a lot of projects and improvements.

Tell us about that.

Yeah, this is a really wonderful improvement in the Arts Oasis, as we call it here.

So we bring together all of the units of the College of Fine Arts, except for dance, which is still on the mall.

But we bring together in this north quarter of campus, the Arts Engagement Units.

We have the CCP, Center for Creative Photography.

We have the School of Music.

We have the School of Film and Television and Theater.

And then the School of Art, as a place where students can come and relax in our beautiful courtyard here.

And we also are close to architecture.

So all of these creative energies are focused here for engagement.

And your enrollment is very strong right now, I understand.

A lot of talented young people.

Many talented young people.

We're really lucky that we have passionate students from Arizona and beyond that enroll in the School of Art for either painting and drawing, sculpture, printmaking, art history, art and visual culture education, many enthusiastic, passionate students.

(Tom) A lot of things have been redone.

It's very appealing as you walk up to the School of Art.

(karen) Yeah, we're really excited that this is now a gateway to the arts.

We're connected to the UAMA, the University Museum.

And so students can freely go between the School of Art and their classes to do their research in the museum.

We have wonderful exhibitions that the UAMA puts together.

And it's a good collaboration between the museum and the faculty at the School of Art so that the students learn firsthand how to do research in the museum setting with original works of art from many famous and important individuals that they're reading about in their textbooks.

We also have opened the lobby way so that we can have events outside on the patio, which is wonderful most of the year.

It's quite pleasant.

And we can open up the lobby so that people can flow freely in between.

It's set up with new technologies.

And we hope that this opening, more open access to this both physically and sharing information that people will come to our events and share the creative research that people are doing.

We have our upcoming MFA exhibition, which is both in the School of Art galleries as well as the University Gallery at the UAMA, where we collaborate to host our group of... We have eight MFA graduates who will be presenting their research in April.

Closing reception is in May for that event.

And that should be really exciting and fun for anyone who can come to see the show or the closing reception.

(Tom) Like Galen's work that we saw just a few moments ago.

Exactly.

It's the next cohort of grads with their MFA.

They're excited to show their work to the public.

And it's always a really exciting event.

People come to the MFA program to immerse themselves in their art, to work with their faculty mentors and begin their professional journey into their career in arts.

It really is evolving, yeah, with technology, AI, all of the above.

Art is evolving with everything else.

Absolutely.

And artists have been dabbling with how to use AI in interesting and innovative ways that I don't think the engineers necessarily were thinking of.

And so that's where it gets really exciting.

Yeah.

Well, Karen, thank you so much for having us by today.

We've all been there before.

You clean out a closet, dust off a shelf, and come across two or three or four items you just don't use anymore.

Well, before you donate those to a thrift store or try to sell them through an online marketplace, think of another option.

Just give them to someone for free.

(Kevin) COVID struck and I was working at home and I had time to look at my closets and they were way too full.

Every single thrift store in Tucson was closed.

I remember reading about how New York City people put stuff down on the curb and other people take it.

I thought, well, I could do that.

And I put out a table, created a little sign.

And I started an institution that's been continuing for five years.

[ LAUGHING ] - I think it's going to work - Good work.

(Kevin) Not everybody reads the sign and I've had dozens of people knock on our door and say, "Is this a yard sale?

How much is this?"

And I love saying, "No, it's free.

It's gratis.

Take what you need."

(Carol) Well, the free market happens the third Saturday of every month.

People can bring anything that is usable for someone else.

There's no rules about how much you can take or you don't have to bring anything to participate.

About 12 years ago, I was just, actually I was going to the library and I saw the sign and I stopped and things were free.

[ OUTSIDE CHATTER ] (Karina) We've always been fans of clothing swaps.

We've done them in our living room with just like small groups of people.

But the idea just kept growing and the need for it kept growing and there'd be a lot of people who were sad they couldn't come.

So we wanted to move it to a bigger space and luckily I have access to this gallery.

My favorite part is the fashion shows that always tend to happen where we're dressing each other, We're like, this needs to be yours.

You know.

(Paige) You start picking things out for your friends.

(Karina) Yeah.

(Karina) This is a great way to bring people together to have that exchange and information and networking and mutual aid.

[ OUTSIDE CHATTER ] We don't live in the same communities, but we become a community when we're here.

♪ ATMOSHPERIC MUSIC (Scott) I just found out about the free table from the- a buy nothing group on Facebook.

And it's on my way to and from work, so on my way home I'll stop by and my daughters usually cringe and say, "Oh, we don't want to..." and then they all want to hop out and find something.

And it feels satisfying because, like, "Hmm, okay, it could have gone in the trash."

(Karina) It's kind of a win-win.

Like, you get to unload some of your things that you no longer need.

Then you also get to, like, come home with something that you might cherish for a long time.

(Paige) And you didn't have to pay anything for it.

(Matthew) Clothing swaps are a really wonderful way to kind of get people together and offer up stuff that breaks us out of our normal capitalistic roof.

I brought a TV.

I just had a flat screen sitting in my bedroom that I do not use anymore.

It's a nice way to be able to donate without having to worry that your item is going to get marked up like crazy and the money is going to get spent in ways that you didn't really approve of.

(Karina) We can, you know, share people that the items that are left over at the end of the day go to places that actually will be able to use them for free and not just be reselling them.

So, you know, we'll donate to asylum seekers, sometimes we'll take, you know, shoes straight to Santa Rita.

I think that's just a bonus on top of just like the fun of it all when somebody is like, "Oh, I really like this item that you brought."

It's just, it feels so good.

(Angela) When you move into a new place, there's always so many things that you need.

And we have been using the free table since day one.

Like, especially since we... We pass by every day, right?

Basically, yeah.

Usually, it's like very rewarding, but you have days, there's nothing, so you have to persist.

Yeah, you have to try.

And we also bring things to the free table.

Like, we also love that part.

It's also nice to know that, like, you can, you know know that if you bring something home, you just don't need, you can bring it back.

It's okay.

(Angela) It's also cool when you bring some things and you are like, "Oh, let's see if somebody already took it."

And then it feels actually quite great.

That's the one question I tend to ask people.

Have you found any treasures at the table?

Almost everybody says, "Yes."

(Karina) Someone brought in their old tattoo gun.

Yeah, their old tattoo gun.

We've had some pretty sick roller blades here before.

My winter jacket just broke.

And I found a great one here.

(Scott) My daughter, we don't buy her ripped jeans because we think they're tacky.

But if she finds them here, she can have them.

So that's her motivation.

I found a 1960 Blue Note record of Cannonball and Miles Davis.

Yeah.

It's very cool.

It was very cool.

It was like 20 bucks retail.

It's very cool.

Yeah, I got this really cool vintage Gap sweatshirt, which is pretty sick.

(Albrecht) It liberates people.

They suddenly realize, "Well, I'm giving away the stuff I've had in my closet for whatever, two decades, and suddenly somebody needs it."

(Paige) It's really just nice to kind of take that layer of society away and realize, oh, we actually have free will.

We can just freely give things to people.

Facilitating this idea of, "We have a lot already" instead of, "Oh, I don't have enough.

I need to hold on to these items."

(Karina) And everybody's very good about kind of leaving enough for everybody.

It's like nobody's ever hoarding.

(Kevin) We learned lessons along the way.

People would take the tables because the sign said "Free table."

We learned that, "Hey, it rains occasionally."

We've learned that people put things out that they shouldn't be, sharp knives, and expired medications.

So we have to throw away a few things But surprisingly, very little gets thrown away.

(Paige) You know, there have been some challenges, But for the most part, I do think it is a really simple thing that anyone can do anywhere.

Like we don't gain anything personally from this event except that it's a fun thing for us to do, and it's an easy thing for us to do as well.

(Kevin) I'm hopeful people will be inspired to do it in their name.

♪ BUBBLY MUSIC Now we bring you another story we learned about through the U of A School of Art.

Claire Fall Blanchette used mycelium and mushrooms in her MFA thesis to study remediation along the Santa Cruz River and in the process created some other worldly sculptures that you have to see to believe.

(Claire) Mycelium is the root system of a fungus.

It grows in a web-like form and the mushroom is actually the fruiting body.

It's like the bloom that sends off the spores for the fungus to procreate.

I started working with the Mycelium material almost two years ago.

This was my MFA thesis project for my MFA in studio art at the University of Arizona.

I wanted to look at spaces where you could see human impact I was just looking up landfills in Tucson and I came across a map with all of these landfills and you could just see them right next to the river and I just found that really surprising and I figured out how to bring the two, like the material and the concept together because the mycelium and the reishi specifically will remove heavy metals from soils, and they remediate soils.

Instead of being like, "Oh, I wanna go plant these fungus at these sites."

It was more of a way of conceptualizing like what does this actually look like and what do these layers of human waste look like and how could we reimagine those spaces.

♪ RISING VIOLIN I put mycelium material into this bag of hardwood shavings, and then the mycelium slowly colonized the bag.

I have a bunch of prototypes on this shelf.

This one is the first one I did with cardboard, and that's how I kind of knew how the mycelium would grow through the cardboard and start to consume it, because it's a paper product, and the 'Reishi-er,' wood-loving mushrooms—so anything with cellulose—they'll consume.

I had them kind of like shrouded in plastic for about a week, and then I would have them in the greenhouse.

I had a pop-up greenhouse in here, and then I would uncover that, and that's when you would start to see the pinning for the start of the growth of the little mushrooms.

And then I just left them.

Once I filled the cardboard, it was just kind of up to the mycelium in terms of what would happen.

There are screen prints with the spores from the Reishi painted on them.

All of the screen printed marks are taken from documents from the city of Tucson and the state of Arizona about monitoring contamination.

I had the sculptures and then eight of the drawings on the wall.

It was incredibly exciting to see it all come together and it worked the way that I had planned to which is always a relief and exciting to see it in the space.

Throughout the program, I was just trying to kind of figure out what my real interest was.

And it was always centered around, like, a relationship with the environment.

And what does it mean to be a collaborator with a living organism that's not a human?

The students of Give a Little Arizona Magic, or GLAM for short, volunteer their time to dress up as well-known characters and attend kids and family events around town.

You see, not every kid and family can afford expensive theme parks, so the volunteers of GLAM do their best to create that same magic right here in Southern Arizona.

♪ UPBEAT MUSIC (Jordan) I love seeing the kids smile, like knowing that you made a difference in someone's day or just gave them hope or joy or whatever is so rewarding as a volunteer and a performer.

(Madelyn) When you're on an event and you're dressed as a character, you kind of get the kids will look at you like you're literally made out of magic.

(Caitlin) We can't help with anything that they're going through in their life, but we can help them feel better.

Kids have a lot of emotional needs and I feel like GLAM just really fits in there.

(Kylie) So our organization is called Giving a Little Arizona Magic or GLAM.

We're a student run 501c3 nonprofit organization out of the University of Arizona that goes to children's events around mostly southern Arizona and has popular characters.

We have princesses, superheroes and other characters and we go just to see the kids and oftentimes we go to events with kids who might not necessarily get to go to places and meet those characters so we're that opportunity for them to have that magical moment.

I am currently the president of GLAM so I help coordinate stuff with all of our members, coordinate with ASUA and U of A since we're a U of A club as well as help coordinate with the IRS since we're also a nonprofit and then I also play Rapunzel.

I play in GLAM, Ariel and I also play Black Widow and then I'm also the programming coordinator for GLAM so I plan all of our events.

♪ UPBEAT GUITAR I work closely with the programming coordinator to make sure all of our new members get to start going on events and also having trainings and making sure the trainings are interesting for them and our previous members that are coming back.

So there's just a lot to think about when planning up the semester.

♪ UPBEAT GUITAR (Jordan) I've been performing kind of my whole life.

I like to say I grew up in the theater, but I find that theater can be very me-focused, but something that really spoke to me about GLAM is it's less about the, like me, and more about what you can give back through performing.

(Jane) There's just this magic of dressing up and turning into an entirely different person.

It feels almost like you're a bit like a superhero, you know, you don a second identity.

You connect with the community in a way that you normally wouldn't when you just go by as an average Joe.

(Joe) I've been a sidekick for the past year so that's helping with the performers with whatever they need.

I've taken a lot of photos, bringing a little magic music box so kids can sing, just helping out wherever I can.

(Jordan) They also help manage the lines.

Some of the events we go to, we get really popular and we have a long crowd that lines up for us, so they help manage that.

We always need our sidekicks, they're very important.

(Madelyn) We do a lot of book readings, we do foster care events.

We kind of do anything that's kind of giving back to kids.

So usually big events that are free for the families to join.

And anyone who really wants to work with us and think that we're a good fit for their event as well to having characters at their events.

(Kylie) I do a lot with the Reid Park Zoo and do a lot there, especially in October we go to all their Boo at the Zoo events.

Those are really fun because the kids will come dressed up as us and they get really excited to meet us.

We've also done a lot with the Children's Museum recently and started going to their events.

One thing we started a little bit towards the end of last year was doing more in clinical events.

That was something we did really big when GLAM started, but unfortunately the pandemic kind of stopped that from happening just because they could not have extra people in the hospitals.

And it's something we've been slowly trying to get back into and there have been a lot of hurdles with that just because it is such a sensitive environment.

So I think that's something this year I would really like to see us get back into more hospital and clinical events.

(Jordan) Knowing that we were able to provide a experience that they are unable to get, that a lot of kids normally do get to have.

Being able to give that back to underprivileged kids is something that really drew me to GLAM and part of the reason I think it's such a great organization to be a part of.

♪ UPLIFTING MUSIC Before we go here's a sneak peek at a story we're working on.

(Stéphanie) There is that feeling of being an explorer because sometimes you know I start getting ready to work and I think oh maybe today I'll find something that I'm not expecting.

DESI is a Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument and it was built at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab in California and then it was mounted in the telescope here on Kitt Peak in 2019 and it was built specifically to conduct what is called a stage four dark energy experiment.

One of the biggest mysteries in astronomy right now is dark energy.

Dark energy is the name that was given to the phenomenon of the expanse of the universe happening at an accelerated pace.

It's this force that's pushing everything apart.

It's stretching space time.

So we know what it does and we know that the majority of the universe is made out of dark energy but exactly what is it we don't know that yet.

(Tom) Like what you're seeing on Arizona Illustrated?

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Like, follow and subscribe to Arizona Illustrated on Facebook, Instagram and X. Thank you for joining us from here at the Gateway to the Arts on the U of A campus.

I'm Tom McNamara and we'll see you again next week.