| CPFAN is honored to host a presentation by artist, activist and educator Kristina Maldonado Bad Hand at its October 4 Board Meeting/Program. The meeting is open to the public and will begin at 5:30 pm. Kristina’s program will begin at 6:30 pm. Kristina is a Sicangu Lakota and Cherokee artist who hails from Taos, NM, but Denver is her home now – luckily for us! In describing her “A Story of Denver” mural featuring treasured Denver landmarks (an interactive artwork created through the Storytelling Studio at the Denver Art Museum), she says: “From the moment I came here to attend college I fell in love with the energy. Every time I travel, I always feel a wash of relief when I drive back into town. It’s my city. And I, like so many others, have some really great memories in various places all around the metro area.”
Kristina grew up traveling, singing and dancing with her family at powwows. She spent most of her high school career experimenting with mixed media, participating in youth art shows, painting murals and doing set design for her high school drama class. Arriving in Denver, she studied at the Art Institute of Colorado in the Media Arts and Animation program. She has ten years of experience in after-school and summer programs with organizations like Think 360 Artist.
She is particularly known for her work with Pop Culture Classroom, the nonprofit that “delivers high quality, all-inclusive educational resources to school districts, teachers and educational organizations using comics, graphic novels, and related pop-culture media.” One of the educational materials Kristina developed is the comic narrative, A Tale of Sand Creek, created for third graders. The beautifully rendered cartoon video recounts the story of a Sand Creek survivor – a Denver woman whose great grandfather was put in a saddle bag and sent out of the massacre to be received by family elsewhere. |
