 2010 Summer Exhibitions
SPILL: CRUDE RESPONSE SPILL: CRUDE RESPONSE, combines photography capturing the Gulf Oil Spill and Sculptural installations made from waste stream plastics. Featured artists, Daniel Beltra and Aurora Robson, reveal our culture’s deep connection to oil, uncovering beauty within tragedy. SPILL speaks both to the idea of human beings as indelibly tied to their environment and also to the intellectual rapture found in contemplating organic forms. 212 gallery owner, Katie Kiernan, brought SPILL artists to Aspen to coincide with discussions taking place at the Aspen Institute's, Environment Forum, to share a first hand view of the Gulf Oil Spill and to put a focus on the how important and vital the ocean is to our collective daily existence. Opening Reception
212 Gallery in partnership with The Baum Foundation and Artist's Subjects will donate 10% percent of exhibition proceeds to the following non-profit organizations to clean up plastic and oil from the Ocean. Ocean Voyages Institute - for Project Kaisei - www.projectkaisei.org and Greater New Orleans Foundation - for Gulf Oil Spill Fund - www.gnof.org Katie Kiernan of 212 Gallery and The Baum Foundation
Daniel Beltrá – Photography
Aurora Robson – Sculpture
Kenji Williams – BELLA GAIA Performance
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212 Gallery exhibits contemporary art across media by both established and emerging artists and maintains a diverse exhibition program that includes solo exhibitions for gallery artists as well as thematic group exhibitions, such as in their upcoming show, SPILL: CRUDE RESPONSE, each season. Partnering with the 212 Gallery in this most recent endeavor is 
Daniel Beltrá is a Spanish photographer based in Seattle. Beltrá has photographed some of the last remaining pristine places on the planet, from Patagonia to the Arctic as well as many of the world’s worst disasters as environments hang in a delicate balance. His artistic passion for what he loves is conveyed instantly in images of our environment that are strikingly aesthetic and evocatively poignant. Bringing his early background as a news photographer to the fields of nature and the environment Beltrá captures our changing planet in his striking photographs, which he hopes will increase respect for the natural world. Daniel Beltrá has documented Greenpeace expeditions around the world and his work on the Amazon has received awards from the World Press Photo and China International Press Photo. He was recently admitted to the International League of Conservation Photographers, and in February 2010 received the inaugural “Global Vision Award” from the Pictures of the Year International. 
Aurora Robson is a Canadian born artist who grew up in Hawaii and is currently based in Brooklyn New York. Robson is known predominantly for her large-scale works transforming bodies of plastic waste into ephemeral, uplifting works of art. She is a leader in raising environmental consciousness in the arts and was extensively featured in Art in America in October of 2009. Robson is also a 2009 recipient of the Pollock Krasner Grant and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture and a 2010 recipient of an Arthur Levine Foundation Grant. She has exhibited internationally and has works in major public, corporate and private collections worldwide. Recent monumental projects include What Goes Around, Comes Around (2008), a 9,000-bottle creation that was installed last year in the atrium of a building on Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s corporate campus in New Jersey; and, at Rice University in Houston. In 2009, Robson received grants from the Pollock-Krasner. Aurora is a teacher and an advocate, working with young artists and youth on large-scale installations comprised of thousands of discarded bottles, plastic bags and other waste. She is currently creating new work from discarded plastics for a large-scale solo exhibit/installation at SKYBOX, sponsored by the City of Philadelphia to be unveiled during Design Philadelphia in October 2010. Robson has a profound respect and appreciation for nature and all things organic and explains, “…without intervention, used plastic bottles have basically two options: becoming landfill, or getting ‘downcycled’. “In the past year I have intercepted approximately 40,000 bottles from the waste stream, turning them into art instead of allowing them to go into landfill, our oceans, or the environmentally costly recycling process.” 
BELLA GAIA (Beautiful Earth) is an astoundingly moving multimedia presentation created and composed by award-winning filmmaker, composer, and violinist Kenji Williams. BELLA GAIA successfully simulates space flight, and uses live onstage musical performance, large-scale projected NASA scientific visualizations, cutting-edge technology and a thought-provoking stream of crucial scientific data and cultural imagery to showcase the amazing art and cultural heritage of civilizations inhabiting planet Earth. A “Living Atlas” journey of our planet, BELLA GAIA incorporates satellite imagery of Earth, timelines and data to elucidate the impact on the planet of everything from climate change to air traffic.