lLza giving a painting demonstration at True West Gallery

Things you might not know about Liza
but were afraid to ask!

• During the Fall of 2015 Liza launched a Kickstarter campaign with the goal of opening Aartz West, a teaching studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The campaign was successful! Aartz West will be opening in the spring of 2016
• In the spring of 2015 she was invited to exhibit her work in True West Gallery at 130 Lincoln Avenue in Santa Fe, NM
• In 2014 Liza returned to Santa Fe, NM to open Aartz West, an arts teaching studio for adults and children.
• In 2014 Liza lead a group of Castleton University students and colleagues on a tour of the Sacred Valley and Machu Picchu in Peru.
• As part of a team of professors from Castleton University, Liza has had great success with FIVE Semesters in the American Southwest! Each one is two and a half months of experiential learning in New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Arizona. 6,000 miles of highway, vast vistas, ancient history and creativity! In addition to Southwest Arts and Ceramics, she teaches Yoga, Pedagogy of Art and Spanish.
• Liza had two solo exhibitions in 2013!
• In 2013 group of art students went to St. John, USVI with Liza for a mid-winter painting class in the sunny Caribbean. It’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it!
• Liza is the recipient of a Wurlitzer Foundation Residency for 2012 and a support grant from Castleton University. She was in Taos, NM at the Wurlitzer Foundation from mid-January- mid-April of 2012
• She was an artist in residence at the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria Virginia for the month of July 2011
• In 2010 she had the good fortune to participate in an artist’s residency at Arti i Natura in Catalonia, Spain.
• Liza was born in Maryland where as a small child she used to make sculptures from native red clay and watch them melt in the rain. She used the same mud again to make something new. She’s still making sculptures from mud, but now she fires them in a kiln. You can have one in your garden!
• When she was 11 her family moved to Mexico, the beginning of a zigzagging migration north and south between the continents, much like the birds whose nests she studies and paints. They lived on the jungle coast on Nicaragua, in the Andean highlands of Colombia, on the llanos of Uruguay and in the steamy, shady, orchid-filled forests of Paraguay.
• Liza went to George School, a Quaker boarding school in Pennsylvania because there was no secondary education for girls in the town her family lived in in Bluefields, Nicaragua.
• • She designed and built the first gas kiln in Paraguay, and taught Art K-12 to 450 students in an International school there for four years.
• She had two pet armadillos in Paraguay. (cute, little three-banded, not big, brutish nine-banded)
• She is the crazy artist in her sibling group of five accomplished scientists.
• She was nominated Art Educator of the Year in 1998 by the Vermont Alliance of Art Educators.
• She likes to windsurf and cross country ski, but can’t skateboard or play hackey-sack worth a darn.
• She lived without running water or electricity for six years in the high-altitude desert near Taos, New Mexico.
• She used to can tomatoes on a campfire because it was too hot to use the wood stove.
• She played guitar and sang in a blues-rock band for 11 years.
• She has written 3 full length children’s musicals, two traveled to DC, and one was performed by 27 Vermont school children in the Russell Senate Building in Washington DC for a full house of aides, assistants and two Senators. Ask her to sing the “Biological Clock Rock” for you. It’s about salmon.
• Liza lived the forest of Vermont for 29 years, with frequent trips to her sagebrush retreat west of Taos.
• She considers the Urubamba, the Rio Grande and Otter Creek to be her personal rivers, but she is happy to share.
• She loves to garden. Peonies and lilies are her favorite flowers. Cucumbers and cilantro are her favorite veggies.
• She loves (good) Mexican food and margaritas on the rocks with extra lime & half salt.
• She has been to Machu Picchu seven times, most recently in July 2014
• She has ten pairs of cowboy boots in many colors, including a Day of the Dead pattern.
• She has a BFA in ceramics and a Masters in mud. (MFA in Ceramic Sculpture)
• She has been exhibiting her work professionally for 20+ years on two continents and across the US.
• She has ALWAYS painted. ALWAYS.
• She is a founding member of the Brandon Artists Guild in Brandon, Vermont.
• Liza and Jim did a 34 mile hike in the Grand Canyon in the spring of 2011, hiking down the Hermit Trail, across the Tonto Trail and back up Bright Angel. At Horn Creek the water is radioactive, but the Park recommends that if you are dying of thirst you drink it anyway. Fortunately we were prepared and didn’t need to.
• She is very grateful to the cosmos and to her friends, parents and family for the un-boring life she has been lucky enough have (so far anyway!)

• 

  Liza in 3rd grade with Halloween pepper sculpture. Definitely a mixed-media piece!

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