Opening Celebration At Telluride Arts HQ With Rob Gonzo
Telluride Arts, Rob Gonzo, and Disco Swell Custom Hats are hosting a free art party to celebrate the start of the 29th Annual Telluride Blues & Brews Festival on Thursday, September 14 from 6-8 pm at Telluride Arts HQ. The party will feature live music from DJ Koko Love, hors d'oeuvres and a bar with beer, wine and cocktails.
As you step into our gallery space, prepare to be captivated by pieces that encapsulate the spirit of the festival and the essence of the blues. Join us to toast to a fantastic festival ahead and the music that awaits us during the coming days.
Rob Gonzo For the month of September, Telluride Arts is featuring works by Rob Gonzo—an artist from Memphis, Tennessee who has recently relocated to North Carolina. Rob’s art—inspired by the likes of Picasso and Basquiat—is considered to be a mix of styles including contemporary, abstract, folk art, neo-expressionism, street art and graffiti. He uses materials such as fabrics, cardboard, and other found objects to build up texture, dimension, and create stories. During his picking days, he gathered a lot of ephemera dating back to the early 1900s that he also uses as small touches of collage. He likes to use bright vivid colors, sometimes straight from the tube.
Rob Gonzo painted the original image for the 2021 & 2022 Telluride Blues & Brews posters and has now debuted a third image for the 2023 festival.
Disco Swell
Telluride Arts is featuring a pop-up exhibit with Disco Swell featuring a capsule collection of over fifteen custom hats with hand-sewn satin liners created in partnership with local Telluride artists. The artists have utilized multiple mediums ranging from photography, painting, digital sculptures, and more to curate the liners. Each hat will be displayed next to a print of the respective artist’s work.
Disco Swell was born on the coast of California and raised in the mountains of Telluride. Each hat is created by hand, using the tried and true traditional handcrafted methods - from hat blocks, sewing in sweatbands, and shaping. Caitlin Sappington, founder and director of Disco Swell, lives and breathes the joys of producing a hat that can be worn for generations, as the techniques themselves have been passed down generationally.
Disco Swell’s handcrafted approach produces wearable art, as each piece features a bespoke jewelry hat band. All hat bands in this capsule collection feature a welded, 24K gold chain with freshwater pearls strung here in Telluride.
Telluride Arts
Telluride Arts is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization that was established in 1971 as the Telluride Council of the Arts and Humanities. The organization was the first non-profit in the region, and served to incubate a culture of the arts that has come to define Telluride.
Over the years Telluride Arts’ mission has remained virtually unchanged and their holistic ethos steadfast. Their unique focus is to advance a culture of the arts in the Telluride Arts District, comprised by numerous institutions, activities, events, and artists of all kinds.
ABOUT the artist
Having been drawn to art at the age of 6, Rob continued to follow that rising passion, studying famous painters on his own while experimenting with various materials and techniques in a makeshift studio. He tried art school, but dropped out after a couple of weeks.
His art career followed the path of typical Outsider Artists where he was giving his paintings away to interested fans, or selling them for $50 or less. Also typical was Rob’s zeal for creating art. He was turning out hundreds and hundreds of paintings.
That path changed when Rob’s style began to take on a more evolved look around 2016. A broader, more seasoned group of art collectors began paying attention to his art using two strong reference points...Jean-Michel Basquait and Pablo Picasso. Rob was suddenly shipping art to New York, London and Los Angeles appealing to, among others, young film producers and directors who recognized the uniqueness and greater value in his paintings.
His odd jobs have dropped to the wayside as he is now dedicating full time to his art, focusing more on quality and details rather than on quantity.
Rob’s art is considered to be a mix of styles including: contemporary, abstract, folk art, neo-expressionism, street art and graffiti. He uses material such as fabrics, cardboard, and other found objects to build up texture, dimension and create stories. During his picking days, he gathered a lot of ephemera dating back to the early 1900s that he also uses as small touches of collage.
He has graduated from his early folk art days where he would paint on almost anything that would stay still long enough. Now Rob prefers canvas, but still paints both large and small images on board. He likes to use bright vivid colors, sometimes straight from the tube.
Rob has recently connected with one of his hometown heroes, nationally acclaimed artist George Hunt. The two have recently completed a couple of “Shared Spaces” paintings together. Hunt, like Rob, has been heavily influenced by Picasso and Basquiat and he shares Rob’s regular use of interesting and unique collage materials.
Some of Rob's inspiration also comes from old-school folk artists like Howard Finster and George Widener, but a major inspiration in his work comes from pre-war and post-war blues music and blues musicians. You will see this in many of his works...following George Hunt’s trailblazing paintings of blues greats like Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson. To see more of Rob’s work, click here.
Explore The Lineup And Schedule
As September 15-17 inches just a bit closer, the 29th Annual Telluride Blues & Brews Festival features a dynamic, well-rounded mix of live blues, funk, indie, rock, jam band, gospel and soul performances featuring Bonnie Raitt, The Roots, The Revivalists, The Word (featuring: Luther Dickinson, Cody Dickinson, Robert Randolph, John Medeski & Rayfield 'Ray Ray' Holloman), The Robert Cray Band, Christone "Kingfish" Ingram and many more. Click here to view the complete lineup and explore the schedule.