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Women Create Magazine
TERESA CASTANEDA is a multidisciplinary artist and certified bench jeweler based in Colorado. Her drawings, paintings, photography, sculptures, and installations have been included in exhibitions, commissions, and publications. Teresa has been recognized twice by the National Endowment for the Arts for her invention in printmaking and her environmental impact organization, ReArranging Denver, a zerowaste project sustained with nonrecyclable materials. Art from the project has been sold in several retail stores and art museums.
Teresa in her own words:
Most of the time, the journey begins far before we realize it. As a young child, I remember balancing on my tippy toes to see my father’s blueprints of power plants on his drafting table. When visiting my grandparents, I remember grandma’s ornate knit afghans and the excitement of riding in grandpa’s truck to the landfill. He would empty his trash, then scavenge for metals as I climbed the soft mountains of trash in search of my own treasures. In my thirties, I found a support letter my father wrote about my great-grandparents, who were jewelers in Spain. My journey, unknowingly, was already predetermined in my DNA. Much like my journey, my dreams changed as I gained perspective. As a child, I dreamed of being an artist like my father and going to school for art.
In college, it was the dream of having the same success as the visiting artists and my peers, and my father’s pride. After graduating, I worked as a contract photographer and got certified as a bench jeweler while dreaming of selling my art in shows. With years of unbreakable determination, my dreams became reality. Commissions in every media, exhibition inclusion and sales, visiting artist lecturer, national recognitions, and publications about my work all got checked off the list. Each accomplishment fueled the next, like the unrelenting gambler’s itch for the next big win, yet there was an emptiness in it because I realized the superficiality of those dreams in comparison to my childhood vignette.
The power plants my father drew weren’t for a show; they supplied thousands of people with electricity. Grandma’s beautiful blankets weren’t for sale; they warmed visitors and family and were given as gifts to generations. The trips to the landfill ingrained waste awareness and its global impact on millions of people’s groundwater. Art is people. Those trips led up to and remain the common thread incorporated in my courses at my alma mater, where I am a foundations art professor, integrating these discoveries of what art is and isn’t. Its purpose is far deeper than well-executed techniques, classroom competition, or a decoration for the wall. It is the mastery of discipline that it took to bring the subconscious vignette into reality, not waiting for some idiot’s acceptance or rejection. When I tell people I am an artist, they respond with: “I went to school for art, but reality hit,” or “I used to be an artist, but life happened,” or “Maybe I will pick it up again when I retire.”
I was always scared I would eventually say the same. Years of defending art as my real job, seeing fellow artists confuse their value with being or not being in a gallery, my art professors expressed regrets of unachieved goals in exchange for a paycheck, the political slope of the art world, and seeing the only example I looked up to as an artist, my father, quit, all scared the hell out me! No one on either side of my lineage claimed “artist” as a profession, but what scared me more was not claiming it either.
On the other side of all those lessons, I visually said a lot of things I wanted to say. A pun on the lack of art movements “ism’s” with my invention in printmaking, Crinkleism, which received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts through the Colorado Council of the Arts. Green Roses, made from recycled materials, has sold over 10,000 roses and counting. The National Endowment for the Arts posted my zero-waste organization, ReArranging Denver, on their website for its positive impact on 60,000 participants and is still contracted out today.
I connect art students to collaborate with professionals with art degrees that didn’t end in gallery representation, but used their creative vision to impact others. Impact over “show.” I make art every day, embracing the uncertainty of the next invention. That resilient bloodline, combined with a stubborn inner child, helped me survive domestic abuse, overcome homelessness, and promote my career in 24-hour copy centers to get off the streets at night. I worked three jobs to get off welfare and snuck my jeweler’s bench and darkroom into my apartments to work on jewelry repairs and photo orders. I continue to shoot my own portfolio and jewelry, market, frame, and ship. I’m the delivery guy for my rose and sculpture business, and piecemeal teaching contracts to buy another day of creating. I ask a million questions, break rules, and don’t listen to discouragement.
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