Special Events
Past Events
Weird & Wonderful
a site-specific dance performance by UCCS Dance Composition II Students
April 26, 2024, 2:30 - 3:45 pm
GOCA and UCCS Visual and Performing Arts department are proud to present Weird and Wonderful, a site-specific dance performance by UCCS Dance Composition II Students, inspired by Martha Russo’s phase shift (wattling). The Weird and Wonderful performance will happen at the Ent Center for the Arts, on Friday, April 26th from 2:30 – 3:45 pm.
UCCS Dance Composition II students step into a realm where movement and art converge in Weird and Wonderful, a site-specific performance amongst the intricate wattle installation of visual artist Martha Russo’s piece, phase shift (wattling). Immersed in a dynamic dialogue between movement and form, the dancers navigate the relationships and possibilities presented by the wattles with boundless creativity in an evening length collaboration that moves through various spaces of the Ent Center for the Arts.
For Weird and Wonderful, the UCCS Dance Composition II students took on the roles of choreographer and performer, composing original routines for the performance. The student performers are Sophia Agupugo, Marrisa Baker, Weston Buhr, Jacel Castillo, Kaley Corinaldi, Ryn Day, Georgia Gabriel, Elijah Gleason, Diana Ochoa Estrada, Miguel Mejia, Heather Pitts, Jordan Reynolds, Kristine Selvidge, Rhea Shrestha, Alex Wilson, and Briauna Wood. The student choreographers for Weird and Wonderful are Sophia Agupugo, Marissa Baker, Jacel Castillo, Ryn Day, Elijah Gleason, Miguel Mejia, Diana Ochoa Estrada, Heather Pitts, Jordan Reynolds, Kristine Selvidge, Rhea Shrestha, Alex Wilson, and Briauna Wood.
Visual AIDS: Day With(out) Art 2023
Everyone I Know Is Sick
December 1,2023, 10:00 am - 5:00 pm
GOCA is proud to partner with Visual AIDS for Day With(out) Art 2023 by presenting Everyone I Know Is Sick, a program of five videos generating connections between HIV and other forms of illness and disability.
On December 1, the videos will play on a loop from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm in the GOCA Project Space at the Ent Center for the Arts. It will take approximately 1 hour to watch all the videos. The films may contain mature content that is not suitable for all ages. Join us at 12:00 to watch the videos together then participate in a community talk led by UCCS MOSAIC and the Southern Colorado Health Network.
The program features newly commissioned work by Dorothy Cheung (Hong Kong), Hiura Fernandes & Lili Nascimento (Brazil), Beau Gomez (Canada/Philippines), Dolissa Medina & Ananias P. Soria (USA), and Kurt Weston (USA).
Inspired by a statement from Cyrée Jarelle Johnson in the book Black Futures, Everyone I Know Is Sick examines how our society excludes disabled and sick people by upholding a false dichotomy of health and sickness. Inviting us to understand disability as a common experience rather than an exception to the norm, the program highlights a range of experiences spanning HIV, COVID, mental health, and aging. The commissioned artists foreground the knowledge and expertise of disabled and sick people in a world still grappling with multiple ongoing pandemics.
Visual AIDS is a New York-based non-profit that utilizes art to fight AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV+ artists, and preserving a legacy, because AIDS is not over.
Dorothy Cheung, Heart Murmurs
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Heart Murmurs is a poetic dialogue between the filmmaker and Dean, a young man living in Hong Kong. In reflecting on his experience living with a congenital disability and HIV during the first years of the COVID pandemic, Dean expresses his sense of self in the face of regular medical challenges.
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Dorothy Cheung (she/her) is a filmmaker and artist currently based in Hong Kong. Her practice explores the notion of identities and home through dual perspectives: the personal and the political, memory and forgetfulness. Her moving-image works have been exhibited internationally at Kunstinstituut Melly (formerly known as Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art), EYE Filmmuseum, and Korzo Theater, and selected for film festivals including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Leeds International Film Festival, Seoul Women’s Film Festival, South Taiwan Film Festival and Queer Lisboa.
Dolissa Medina and Ananias P. Soria,
Viejito/Enfermito/Grito (Old Man/Sick Man/Shout)
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Ananias, a San Francisco Bay Area artist and immigrant, performs the folkloric Danza de los Viejitos (the Dance of the Old Men). Originally from Michoacán, Mexico, where the dance originates, Ananias interprets its movements through the lens of his spirituality, his long-term HIV-related disabilities, and his search for a place in the world.
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Dolissa Medina (she/her) and Ananias P. Soria (he/him) are the current incarnation of Grito Viejito, an artist collective devoted to queer world-mending through the adaptation of the Mexican folkloric “Danza de los Viejitos” (Dance of the Old Men). Medina, a filmmaker, writer, and organizer from the borderlands of South Texas, founded the research-creation project, which uses the Viejito figure as a vessel to hold dialogues around health, HIV histories, and queer futures. In the project’s first iteration, Medina partners with Soria, a multidisciplinary artist interested in transformative energetic expression through movement, music, and dance.
Kurt Weston, Losing the Light
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Losing the Light reflects the artist’s bitter battle to stay in this world as a long-term survivor of AIDS who has lost his vision to CMV retinitis. An experimental self-portrait, the video evokes the dissolution and fragmentation of the artist's body, representing the impact of blindness, long-term HIV infection, and the cumulative effects of decades of antiretroviral medication.
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Kurt Weston (he/him) is an artist working primarily with photography. He was diagnosed with AIDS in 1991 and became legally blind in 1996 due to a related condition, Cytomegalovirus retinitis. For a time he was easily identified as having AIDS due to purplish red lesions—Kaposi’s sarcoma—all over his face and body. His artwork reflects on this experience of visibility and disability, examining cultural stigmas surrounding HIV and AIDS, the disabled body, mortality, and loss. Weston’s photographs are in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum of Contemporary Photography, and the National AIDS Museum and have been featured in exhibitions at the Kennedy Center for the Arts (Washington, DC), the Berkeley Art Museum (Berkeley, CA), and the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art (Santa Ana, CA), among others.
Hiura Fernandes and Lili Nascimento,
Aquela criança com AID$ (That Child with AID$)
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That Child with AID$ tells the story of Brazilian advocate and artist Lili Nascimento, who was born with HIV in 1990. Lili has worked to expand narratives about living with HIV beyond the limited images and ideologies that permeate the AIDS industry.
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Hiura Fernandes (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist, cultural producer, and product designer living in João Pessoa, Brazil. Her audiovisual and performance work seeks to unite the body with cinematographic practices. Her work considers original forms of communication through the body and ancestrality as pathways to healing and embodied living. As a Black travesti, she experiences in her body and in her art the stereotypes of counter-hegemonic experiences. She seeks to understand the expressions of the body as a power capable of generating love, fear, anguish, and hate.
Lili Nascimento (they/them) is a transpersonal psychologist, columnist, and artist who studies and works with children living with HIV and AIDS in Brazil. They work at the intersection of art and the clinic, provoking poetic and political possibilities for existence.
Beau Gomez, This Bed I Made
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This Bed I Made presents the bed as a place of solace and agency beyond just a site of illness or isolation. Through the shared stories of two Filipino men living with HIV, the video explores modes of care, restoration, and abundance in the midst of pandemic pervasion.
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Beau Gomez (he/him) is a visual artist based in Montréal and Toronto whose practice is informed by ideas, challenges, and conversations around cross-cultural narratives, as they relate to positions of queerness and community. His work is grounded in image-making as a conduit between individual and collective experience, giving permission to shared means of learning, nurturing, and renewal. He has exhibited projects and engaged in discourse surrounding image arts and community-building practices in various establishments, including VU Photo, Artspace Gallery, Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, Reel Asian, Toronto International Film Festival, and Critical Distance Centre for Curators.
2023 Trailer
DARIA Magazine Launch Event
November 4th, 2023, 2:00-4:00pm
GOCA Lobby
DARIA: Denver Art Review, Inquiry, and Analysis is a publication devoted to art writing and criticism focused on the Denver-area visual art scene. DARIA seeks to promote diverse voices and artists while fostering critical dialogue around art.
GOCA will be hosting the launch event for DARIA’s winter issue. Join us for snacks, good company, and free copies of the new magazine!
Limited capacity special event!
Lunch Beat
August 5, 2022, 12 - 1 pm @ GOCA Downtown
$10 advance / $15 door
free for UCCS students* and GOCA PAC members
Lunch provided by La Casita Family Restaurant Catering
Deejay services by Tamara and Kirk Moore / Moore Interactive
THE DEAL
We provide water, a 1-hour DJ set and a takeaway healthy lunch. You show up and dance. We guarantee you'll leave feeling happier, smarter, and like you just had your best lunch ever. GOCA first brought Colorado Springs community LUNCH BEAT in 2012 and we are delighted to bring it back in person this August! Come dance Colorado Springs!
LUNCH BEAT was founded by Molly Ränge in June 2010, and the first event was arranged in the Fabel garage under Hötorget in the city of Stockholm, Sweden. 14 people attended the event. Now it's an international phenomenon, with a basic concept.
THE RULES ARE SIMPLE:
LUNCH BEAT MANIFESTO
1st rule: If it's your first lunch at Lunch Beat, you have to dance.
2nd rule: If it's your second, third or fourth time lunch at Lunch Beat, you have to dance.
3rd rule: If you are getting too tired to actually dance at Lunch Beat, please have your lunch at some other place.
4th rule: You don't talk about your job at Lunch Beat.
5th rule: At Lunch Beat everyone present is your dance partner.
6th rule: Any Lunch Beat are to be no longer than 60 minutes long and set during "lunchtime".
7th rule: Lunch Beat always serve their guest with a 1 Dj-set and 1 take away meal.
8th rule: Water is always served during a Lunch Beat for free.
9th rule: Lunch Beat is a preferably drug-free environment.
10th rule: Lunch Beat can be set up anywhere by anyone as long as they are announced as public events, are nonprofit arrangements and are directed by this manifesto.
Kick Ass for the Arts Award 2020
The UCCS Galleries of Contemporary Art Advisory Board was delighted to honor Carol and James Montgomery as the 2020 "Ron Brasch Kick Ass for the Arts Award" recipients on Thursday, November 5, via a special Zoom virtual event.
If you are involved in the arts community in Colorado Springs, you surely know Carol and James (Jim) Montgomery and have likely benefited from their passionate and tireless support of visual arts, theater, music, dance, and student/developing artists. This dynamic duo have "kicked ass" for the Colorado Springs arts community for many years, creating a legacy that is highly admirable and totally humble - much like Carol and Jim.
History of the Award
The UCCS Galleries of Contemporary Art (GOCA) awarded Ron Brasch the inaugural “Ron Brasch ‘Kick-Ass’ for the Arts” award in 2014. The award was created to honor the service and spirit of Ron Brasch, whose trademark necklace of the same phrase and passionate commitment to the arts in the Pikes Peak region inspired the name.
GOCA has bestowed this award annually to an individual or individuals who embody the spirit of commitment and dedication to advancing arts and culture in the region. Said GOCA Director Daisy McGowan of the award, “Ron Brasch made a tremendous impact on GOCA during his tenure on our board and has served many other arts organizations in the region in similar fashion.
We wanted to recognize his contributions to not just the arts and culture sector, but to the entire Pikes Peak region. Ron “kicked-ass” for GOCA, so to speak, serving the organization during a time when we quadrupled our audience and fundraising efforts and received multiple awards. We are grateful for Ron’s service and honored to be able to present this award with a hope to inspire others to step up and “kick-ass” for the arts in Colorado Springs."
Special thanks to Colorado Springs-based sculptor Sean O’Meallie for creating the Kick Ass for the Arts Award, to Chelsea Poch and Patrice Ravenscroft and the UCCS Advancement team for event support and production, and to Ron Brasch for generously sponsoring the event.