Under the Influence with BMoCA artist family

This week, we're featuring a story from reporter and producer Shay Castle. Shay wrote a piece for the August edition of Caribou Current about a family of artists being featured in a Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art exhibit through September, called "Tres Voces, Un Corazon". 

In this week's episode, the trio tells us who their biggest influences in art are, how they fell in love with their respective mediums, and what it's like being a family of creatives all sharing one heart.

Read the full story at cariboucurrent.com.

We featured some music from Cipriano's band Los Lo Los in this episode. Check them out here: youtube.com/@loslolosrock.

For a full schedule of BMoCA events related to the exhibit, head here: www.bmoca.org/2026/tres-voces-un-corazon-summer-exhibition

Our theme song is courtesy of singer-songwriter Brittney Wagner. Stream her record Better off Dead here.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:27

Hey everyone. We've got a special episode this week from reporter and producer Shay Castle about a story she wrote for the August issue of Caribou Curren. I'm taking a backseat for this one. All I'll say here is when you're done listening today, grab a copy of Caribou Curin and read her story. It's colorful, fresh, and a beautiful profile of the family of artists that you're about to meet. Before we cut to Shay, here's a quick word from this week's sponsor, the Ned Jazz ⁇ Wine Festival. It's almost time for the fifth annual Netherland Jazz and Wine Festival on August 22nd in Capita Park. Grab your tickets for a pairing of sips and sounds. Enjoy six hours of diverse live jazz featuring soul fusion and RB melodies from Joe Fo Key, Gabriel Santiago's Brazilian trio, and headliner River Eckert, playing with his friends from Thievery Court and the Motad. Browse local art and sample over 100 offerings from wineries, breweries, distilleries, and non-alcoholic makers. With food pairings from Oysters to Gator. Head to nedjazzwine.com to check if tickets are still available. That's nedjazzwine.com. Now it's time to meet the family behind Trace Vosses.

SPEAKER_04 1:51

Without Marksan and without all the people that I've mentioned, I would not be doing this. I would not have the confidence, I would not have the history and the research behind me to know other people have done this. And to be part of that heritage is just great.

SPEAKER_02 2:05

That's Cipriano Ortega, discussing his many influences as an artist. Cipriano is one of three artists who contributed to BMOCA's summer exhibition. Tres Voces un corazón. The other artists whose work are featured in Tres Voces are Cipriano's mother and father, Silvia Montero and Tony Ortega. We'll hear from them in just a minute. Welcome to the Mountaineer Podcast. I'm Shea Castle. Today we're exploring the work behind the work with all three Tres Voses artists. It's the cover story for the August edition of Caribou Current. Out now. You can and should read that to get a sense of what the exhibition is all about. We thought we'd do something a little different with the podcast story. Regular readers of the Current will know about our recurring feature, Under the Influence, where we interview musicians about the songs, albums, and artists they draw inspiration from. We thought we'd do the same with Cipriano, Silvia, and Tony. It's our first time branching out to other artistic disciplines, and we could not have picked better subjects. The trio draw heavily from the past and their peers in their work, particularly Cipriano. His list of influences is long. During the hour I spent interviewing Cipriano, he referenced Leonard Cohen, Maya Angelou, Robert Johnson, Hank Williams, Marlon Brando, William Burroughs, Kurt Cobain, Lane Staley, Robbie Krieger from The Doors, and, as you heard earlier, Mark Sandman, frontman of 90s rock band Morphine. Here's Cipriano talking about another musical artist who inspired his work for Bimocha.

SPEAKER_04 3:50

Jack White has been a huge influence since college. His whole song that he has, very short. It's literally just him acoustically or just singing his voice and Meg's on the drums. There's no guitar, but it's called Little Room.

SPEAKER_00 4:04

While you're in your little room, and you're working on something good. You gotta need a bigger room.

SPEAKER_04 4:17

And it's just about the whole idea of developing ideas in a little room and bringing them out forth into the world. So I wanted to kind of create a similar space in the installation.

SPEAKER_02 4:27

Cipriano is referencing the main set piece he created for the B Mocha exhibition, a one-sided home called Lolo House. Inside is a one-string bass he built. Music from his band, Los Lolos, plays over the speakers. Poetry he wrote is pasted on the walls. Elsewhere in the museum are his paintings. Raised by two artists, Cipriano is a master of multiple disciplines. He first displayed his work in a gallery when he was in third grade, a selection of puppets. He was steeped in the arts in a way few children are.

SPEAKER_03 5:07

We've always encouraged our son to be in theater or be a vocalist. So it's always been a family. It's always been, even though we're visual artists and a musician, we've always been interested in the arts. We made a conscious decision not to have cable. We kind of we more or less restricted his TV watching to videos and or PBS. I would always try to get him toys where he could build or be creative, Legos and Tinker toys, and for the things he would see. He would make costumes. So I remember taking him to secondhand stores and buying garments where he would borrow some Sylvia's clothes. He was always inventing. So I remember being a kid, and that was just like the most exciting part of being a kid is just being able to create your own inner creative world and expressing that through changing a costume.

SPEAKER_05 5:57

He just has always been a hands-on creator since he's a little tiny thing. But he just constantly was building, and we would buy him toys, but then he would remake the toy.

SPEAKER_04 6:14

Still to this day, there's never been a movie accurate Woody doll that Disney has ever produced. They've always been not quite right to the original. And as of recent, obviously Toy Story 5 came out, but I've discovered this subculture on YouTube. These adults make film accurate woodies now. A little kid, and I have my quote-unquote, you know, little kid version of the Woody Act. Yeah. The accurate Woody, so I just, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:42

That's Tony and Sylvia, Cipriano's parents. All three of them live in the same house in North Denver, where they each have separate studio spaces. Tony and Sylvia are Cipriano's biggest influences. You can see that when you compare Tony and Cipriano's paintings. Bright colors, visible brush strokes, and often faceless men and women. Tony says growing up in Colorado and New Mexico impacted the way he views and uses color.

SPEAKER_03 7:10

I think probably my use of color would be different had I grown up in Seattle or the East Coast or the Midwest or something like that. I mean, you know, Colorado's just well known for the number of days that gets sunshine. And, you know, being from New Mexico, just another place of sunshine. And the plains are just, Lewis and Clark call it a great American desert. New Mexico they call it a high mountain desert. So you know, it was it's dry and lots of light. So I think that's influenced me.

SPEAKER_02 7:37

Tony's trying's pieces are the exhibitions most vivid, from pinatas to paintings and video installations, all have an undercurrent of humor and a strong narrative thread running through them, with sharp socio-political critique. That's reflective of the show as a whole, which meditates on culture, belonging, and of course, family. Like her son, Sylvia claims many influences. Her first love was black and white television journalism. Good evening from our CBS Newsroom in New York. She parlayed into black and white photography. She still has her first ever camera, purchased in high school. She used it to take the series of photographs that form the bulk of her Trace Vosse's work depicting daily life in Cuba.

SPEAKER_05 8:40

Cuba was a very big inspiring place for me because of how they make things work even though they don't have anything, and the inhumanity that this country shows to the Cuban people. So those kind of people give me inspiration as well and keeps me kind of going, doing our works and things.

SPEAKER_02 8:58

Despite her love for black and white photography and documenting reality, it was actually a fantastical, colorful oil painting that awakened Sylvia as an artist. The Dream by Henry Rousseau.

SPEAKER_05 9:17

That came from going to a thrift store in our neighborhood, and I found a Rousseau image, a poster that just stunned me, floored me to death. You know, as a kid. I'm like, whoa, what is this? What is it? What was the image? It was the one where the woman is uh reclining on the couch with the lion looking at her with the moon. It's in the jungle and it's one of Russo's. And that kind of really powered me. And I've always been a very visual person, even as a child.

SPEAKER_02 9:40

Sylvia's biggest influence, though, was her dance teacher, Jane Tannenbaum.

SPEAKER_05 9:45

She was in her 70s at the time when I was studying with her. She was like the first dance instructor ever that I had. For almost 15 years, did not see me as a brown woman. The others were just like, oh, you're not black enough. Oh, you're just just, you know, you're Latina, Latinos don't dance. So it was kind of really complex, but Janie was never like that. And of course, her technique was so superb. It helped me with my back issues that I had as a child. So she's definitely the person, J Tanimum, that inspired me. Very inspirational for me. Changed my life, that little girl woman. Yeah. She definitely changed my life.

SPEAKER_02 10:19

Tony's biggest influence was a member of his family, his grandmother, a seamstress and storyteller. She raised Tony and was his first introduction to art, much like he would introduce his own son to life as an artist decades later.

SPEAKER_03 10:32

She did everything from alterations to making clothes to quilting to embroidery, crochet. So I always grew up around her making, making objects, making utilitarian objects. I remember literally being underneath a sewing machine cabinet while she was sewing and bothering her for needle and thread and obviously interrupting her work. And she was also quite a storyteller. Or basically, she told me things that happened when she was young, when my mom and my uncles, her brothers were young, growing up in Pecos, New Mexico. So I think that when I would listen to those stories, I would visualize them in my head or visualize what it was like. Trini Ortega. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:32

Thank you.

SPEAKER_03 11:33

Or Trini that would be her name. Trinian.

SPEAKER_02 11:45

Sit and stew. See more from Tony, Silvia, and Cipriano at Tres Voces un Corazon, running through September 13th at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Bimocha is also hosting a series of events, like poetry workshops, concerts from Cipriano's band, and other ways to interact with the art and artists. Visit bimocha.org for details, or check out my story in the August issue of Caribou Current out now.

SPEAKER_01 12:30

Thanks. As she mentioned, you can read the full story for free in this month's edition of Caribou Current or at Caribou Current.com. And a huge thanks to Cipriano, Sylvia, and Tony for being so open and letting us behind the curtain to help tell this story. I highly recommend checking the exhibit out. BMOCA is donation-based, so pay what you can to see the incredible and diverse art before the exhibit closes in September. As always, if you like today's episode, please share it around. It's the best thing you can do to help us grow. You can subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts to get these stories the moment they hit the airwaves. And make sure to pick up a copy of Caribou Current 2. It's packed with profiles on local musicians, authors, and every concert and event happening this month that you won't want to miss. One last thing. And we'll be at the Ned Jazz and Wine Festival too later this month. If you're a regular listener, stop by and say hi. We'd love to meet the folks who make this possible. Once again, this is a Mountaineer podcast. I'm Tyler Hickman. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.