Name: The Mountain in its Seasons Artist Talk
Start: 2026-03-12T19:00:00-07:00
End: 2026-03-12T20:30:00-07:00
Location: Natural History Institute

Join us for an artist talk with Bonny Stauffer in conjunction with her exhibition The Mountain in its Seasons.
About this Event
Event Photos

Join us for an artist talk with Bonny Stauffer in conjunction with her exhibition The Mountain in its Seasons, a two-year exploration of Granite Mountain as a living system shaped by season, light, and relationship.

For more than 50 years, Stauffer has walked Granite Mountain’s trails, sketching and observing its shifting forms. In this talk, she shares how field studies in watercolor evolve into digital compositions and layered, constructed works on Plexiglas. Each stage is an effort to capture the awe and interconnectedness she experiences in the landscape

How does an artist compose a mountain? Where does the landscape end and the wider universe begin? Stauffer reflects on her creative process and invites us to see Granite Mountain not as a backdrop, but as a dynamic presence embedded in both intimate ecological relationships and cosmic space.

Doors open at 6:30pm. The presentation starts at 7:00pm.

*The event is free, but space is limited, and registration is required. For those unable to attend in person, the talk will be live-streamed on our YouTube Channel.

Bonny Stauffer is an Arizona artist whose long academic career includes graphic designer, art professor, exhibiting artist, and Dean of the Yavapai College Visual and Performing Arts Division.

In recent years, there has been more time to explore new media and exhibit her work through a range of opportunities and venues. A number of silent retreats at Nada, a Carmelite Hermitage in SW Colorado provided time, space, and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains for hiking and drawing on location. Works from those retreats were shown in a 3-person exhibition, Conversations with Beauty: Carol Rawlings, Diane Gilbert, Bonny Stauffer, at Prescott College Sam Hill Art Gallery. Stauffer was awarded a 5-week fellowship at PLAYA, near Summer Lake, Oregon, and a new body of work that originated there was shown in a solo exhibition, Presence, Place and Perception, at the Chandler Center for the Arts. Other work from the PLAYA residency was selected for inclusion in Sediments, Sequences and Solitude, and traveled to several venues in Oregon.