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Artist features the beauty of nature on a 140-foot canvas

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 15:21:21 +0000

Artist features the beauty of nature on a 140-foot canvas Rachel Sauer Fri, 06/20/2025 - 09:21

Rachel Sauer

‘The Tender Hand of the Unseen,’ an immersive video installation by �� artist Molly Valentine Dierks, is featured through June on D&F Tower in downtown Denver

It happens most often in autumn and winter, when large flocks of starlings roost in protected spots like woodlands, marshes and even buildings. Before settling for the night, often in the gloaming twilight, they sometimes paint the sky in formations called murmurations.

Hundreds—sometimes thousands—of starlings dance in undulating, ever-shifting shapes, a spontaneous choreography that fills the sky like the liquid fall of silk.

One day after class while she was earning her MFA at the University of Michigan, Molly Valentine Dierks saw a murmuration of starlings. She pulled out her phone to capture it—footage that wasn’t as good as she’d like it to be but that nevertheless captured a transcendent moment of ephemeral sculpture in the sky.

Molly Valentine Dierks is an assistant teaching professor in the �� Department of Art and Art History.

Memories of that murmuration guided her in creating “The Tender Hand of the Unseen,” an immersive video installation that is a featured work through June on D&F Tower in downtown Denver, part of the Night Lights Denver program.

For Dierks, an assistant teaching professor in the �� Department of Art and Art History, her work represents a confluence of many influences, musing on the nature of time and referencing periods of growth and rebirth.

As a sculptor and interdisciplinary artist, “and also a nature geek—I’m really interested in the idea of this physical sculptural performance in the sky,” Dierks explains. “They’re stunning, the patterns are beautiful, the way that they change is really gorgeous, plus there’s something about the idea of moving intuitively as a group that I think as human beings we don’t have or we’re not comfortable with. This society of beings is so in sync with one another that they can move as a fluid unit, and it’s also performance and also art.

If you go

What: "The Tender Hand of the Unseen" immersive video installation

Where: D&F Tower, 1601 Arapahoe Street, downtown Denver

When: Evenings through June

Learn more

“As an artist and educator, particularly in the classroom I really encourage my students to get in touch with their intuition and develop spiritual understanding of who they are. For me, as an artist, there’s something about looking at big flocks of birds that gets me in that state. We’re all so comfortable looking at screens, for example, but as a society we’re not really encouraged to just look at sky. (This piece) is an excuse to encourage people to look at sky, even though it's a screen that is sneakily subverting that tension.”

A 140-foot canvas

Public, site-specific art and installations are defining aspects of Dierks’ practice for their ability to foster healing, stillness and growth, she explains. So, when a friend told her about the Night Lights Denver program, she contacted the curator, David Moke, with her idea for a large-scale installation focused on starling murmurations.

When her proposal was accepted, the work of art began. The murmuration she recorded in Michigan didn’t work—there were a lot of trees in the way—so she worked with footage shot in the Netherlands that would be crisp and clear when projected onto the side of D&F Tower, a 140-foot canvas.

Molly Valentine Dierks' immersive video installation "The Tender Hand of the Unseen" will show on D&F Tower in downtown Denver through June. (Photos: Molly Valentine Dierks)

She manipulated and sculpted the footage on her computer, then did test projections from the parking garage near the tower that houses the Night Lights Denver projection center.

“I would bring a thumb drive with an hour-and-a-half of tests, and I just sat there and took a bunch of notes to figure out the best settings,” Dierks says. “(The footage) was taken at different times of day and in different weather conditions, so I could start to see that if the background was too dark or too blue or too purple, I couldn’t see the starlings as well as I wanted.

“I played with timing as well, slowing the footage down in spots and thinking about grains of sand or sand in a timer. I was looking for crescendos—not just contrast and brightness, but does it feel like a piece of music?”

The tender hand

The name of the work is a line from the poem “On Pain” by Kahlil Gibran, which also says:

And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;

And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.

“We all go through difficult times: we go through grief, we go through breakups, and I found poetry kind of a resting spot for me,” Dierks explains. “I could read a poem and get outside the nuts and bolts and bureaucracy of everyday life and get to the heart of what I feel, after a while I started naming my pieces after lines in poems that spoke to me about certain stages in my life.”

In describing the work, Dierks wrote, “The work is my way of confronting a socially fractured landscape, where screens more frequently mediate our understanding of self … overshadowing more embodied connections to each other and the natural world.”

The piece is Dierks’ first large-scale projection, and although there’s really nowhere to hide with a 140-foot public canvas, Dierks says she wouldn’t want to. “There’s something really nice when you install in public, outside of the art world, (where) people don’t have to go to a gallery … I prefer it in a lot of ways.

“(D&F Tower) is in this beautiful area on 16th Street and there’s a park so people can walk around and look at it. When I did the first test last August, I could see people stopping and looking at it, looking at these beautiful formations, these birds in flight—just taking that moment to stop and look.”

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‘The Tender Hand of the Unseen,’ an immersive video installation by �� artist Molly Valentine Dierks, is featured through June on D&F Tower in downtown Denver.

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How a California dude became ��’s provost

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 19:23:49 +0000

How a California dude became ��’s provost Rachel Sauer Fri, 06/06/2025 - 13:23

Clint Talbott

Before finding the joy of exploration as a university professor and chief academic officer, Russell Moore found it traveling the world

When Russell Moore went to college, the Vietnam War, Kent State killings, Watergate and an energy crisis dominated the nightly news.

Moore was studying biochemistry at the University of California, Davis, and those tumultuous days made academics less than entrancing. “There was so much going on in the world, and as for college, well, I just didn’t see the point,” Moore recalled recently.

Biochemistry seemed “maybe interesting,” but it also seemed mostly focused on process, and the purpose wasn’t clear, Moore said.

Russell Moore (right) talks with Reiland Rabaka (left), director of the Center for African and African American Studies, before the State of the Campus address. (Photo: Glenn Asakawa/��)

So after two and a half years of college, he dropped out to travel the world. At the time, his sister was a flight attendant for Pan Am Airways, and he got long-haul tickets “virtually free.” He went to the South Pacific, Southeast Asia, New Zealand and Australia.

Once back in the United States, he got a job but soon realized that “this job thing” also wasn’t compelling. So, he returned to college and began working in a research lab.

“That’s when things changed,” he said. “Then I saw the point.”

He was working in the lab of Irwin Segel, then a professor of biochemistry, who framed the scientific enterprise this way: “When you make a scientific discovery, you know something no one else on the planet knows, even if it’s minuscule and for only a few minutes or hours.”

Segel also told his students that science rarely progresses in large leaps; most of the time, it takes small steps. “I thought that was cool, like I could be part of something that was significant,” Moore said.

“I could see myself in that process, even though I wasn’t the quarterback. I was just a small contributor,” but playing that role got him “very, very interested in the research enterprise.”

After earning his BS in biochemistry from UC Davis, Moore studied physiology and earned a PhD from Washington State University.

Leaving college and returning was not so much a detour in his academic journey as a necessary part of the path. As he puts it, the experience widened his aperture, which helped him realize his eventual role as a university professor and chief academic officer for the ��.

Initially, academic life seemed not to offer a foray into the unknown. “What I love about traveling is just a sense of exploration. And part of what I learned about myself is, particularly being in very foreign environments, you don’t have to fear the unknown. You can view it also as an exciting thing.”

Now, he eyes another journey into the unknown. He is about to retire.

From professor to administrator

Today, he is the university’s provost and executive vice chancellor for academic affairs. He has served as provost since 2010 and is a professor of integrative physiology and an adjunct professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.

Moore was appointed associate vice chancellor for research in 2006 and was named interim vice chancellor for research in 2009. He has taught at �� since 1993 and served as chair of the Department of Integrative Physiology from 1994 to 2001.

Russell Moore (front center, wearing blue shirt) and �� deans at a "The Big Lebowski"-themed tribute to Moore at the UMC Connection.

Before the department became dedicated to integrative physiology, it was the department of kinesiology, which had grown out of the university’s physical-education program.

A core group of faculty members launched the move to transform the kinesiology department into a department of physiology. By the early 2000s, ��’s Department of Integrative Physiology’s graduate program was ranked among the nation’s top 10.

Moore’s lab contributed to that reputation, focusing on the cellular basis for exercise-induced protection of the heart against ischemia-reperfusion injury and on the influences of diet and exercise on cardiac energy metabolism.

Moore said he appreciates the physical-education roots of his department. Paraphrasing an early 20th century physiologist, Moore said you can study a locomotive at rest, disassembling its engine and examining its parts, but that won’t really tell you how it works.

“You need to be able to study the locomotive while it’s moving,” Moore said. “And you can study physiology while I’m sitting in this chair, but I have arms and legs, and they’re not designed for me sitting in the chair. They’re designed for me to run and pick fruit and whatever.”

Studying organisms under stress, as they’re designed to function, is more revealing. Another thing that drew him to physiology is that much scientific research focuses on pathology rather than physiology. “And they’re not necessarily just reverses of each other. They’re two different paths. That just gets back to the exploring part, and that’s what’s fun.”

Similarly, conducting research is a different enterprise than becoming an academic administrator. Moore came to that when he “drew the short straw” and was named chair of his department.

“It was hard, really hard. I think department-chair jobs are the hardest jobs on campus, because if you’re making hard decisions, you’re making them with people whom you know really well,” he said.

“It’s easier to make hard decisions when you’re further removed interpersonally. I always know when I make a tough decision is impacting people. But it’s different when you’re working with peers-slash-friends.”

Moore volunteered for a campus-wide committee with a light workload, the research-misconduct committee, which hadn’t heard a case in years. Within months, allegations arose against Ward Churchill, a former ethnic-studies professor whom the university later fired for plagiarism and academic misconduct. Moore co-chaired the inquiry committee that initially investigated the charges against Churchill.

Churchill was also a controversial figure, calling victims of 9-11 terrorist attacks “little Eichmanns,” a reference to Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.

Responding to a question about why such an initiation into academic administration was compelling, Moore said the experience taught him about research administration and research compliance.

“I didn’t know all of that stuff existed,” he said, adding, “Because I have such an affinity for research and discovery, I got really interested in that.” So he applied to be associate vice chancellor for research.

"You need to be able to study the locomotive while it’s moving. And you can study physiology while I’m sitting in this chair, but I have arms and legs, and they’re not designed for me sitting in the chair. They’re designed for me to run and pick fruit."

This, too, was a natural fit, he said, noting that he’s always loved research and scholarly endeavors on campus, whether they’re in science, arts and humanities, music; “it’s all incredibly interesting to me,” because all these disciplines involve the discovery or creation of things that are novel.

The regular-person leader

Bronson Hilliard, �� senior director of academic communications, has worked with six university presidents, five campus chancellors and a host of mid- and upper-level administrators in three decades of university service.

“Russ Moore is a complete human being,” Hilliard said. “He’s not only a good administrator; he’s a good human being. He’s brought into the role of being provost an abundant life experience … of erudition and education and training. But Russ adds to all of that a kind of regular-person quality that I’ve not seen in any administrator I’ve ever worked with.”

“He’s very much in touch with the impact of education on real people’s lives,” Hillard said, adding, as an example, that Moore worked to ensure a smooth path for students transferring from community colleges to ��.

Student success is one of Moore’s passions. As he tells it, in regular meetings with new employees, he’d ask every person a question for which there was, he emphasized, one right answer.

The question: “What’s your job?”

Employees might reply with, “groundskeeper” or “advisor,” for instance.

“The right answer is, ‘I’m here to make students successful,’” Moore observed, adding that Nobel laureates, groundbreaking spinoff companies, startling discoveries about the solar system, soaring musical scores—“we can’t do it without everybody’s contribution.”

Student success, along with knowledge discovery and dissemination, is “why we’re all here.”

Moore, Hillard said, has never lost touch with his roots; he grew up in Northern California, worked as a river-raft guide, enjoys fly fishing, loves to camp and hike and “knows his way around a backyard barbecue grill.”

“Every day I came to work with Russ, I knew I had a real human being at the center of the work,” Hilliard said.

“There’s the stereotype of an ivory tower, and Russ Moore is the antithesis of an ivory tower. If there is a Russ Moore tower, it’s made of very earthy substances, not ivory.”

That relatively unflappable, regular-person quality figures prominently in Moore’s favorite movie, The Big Lebowski. “He appreciates the character of the dude, who stays true to himself from the beginning of the movie to the end, even though all these things around him get completely unhinged,” Hilliard said.

“The dude abides,” a line from the film, suggests equanimity in the eye of a storm.

“So, Russ abides," Hilliard opined, "just like the dude.”

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Before finding the joy of exploration as a university professor and chief academic officer, Russell Moore found it traveling the world.

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College faculty and staff honored at 2025 recognition ceremony

Kylie Clarke — Thu, 01 May 2025 21:51:26 +0000

College faculty and staff honored at 2025 recognition ceremony Kylie Clarke Thu, 05/01/2025 - 15:51

The annual event recognizes excellence in teaching, scholarship and other work that is a highlight of the College of Arts and Sciences

Faculty and staff from across the �� College of Arts and Sciences were honored at the Recognition Reception held Thursday afternoon in the Norlin Library.

Deans of division Irene Blair, Sarah E. Jackson and John-Michael Rivera presented gifts to faculty and staff being recognized for their outstanding achievements during the 2024-2025 academic year.

Awarded recognitions:

College Scholar Awards
Kahn Family Community Teaming Fund
ASCEND Awards
ASSETT Excellence in Teaching with Technology
Award Cogswell Award for Inspirational Instruction
College Professor of Distinction
CU Distinguished Professors
A&S Staﬀ Employees of the Year
Promotion to Full Professor
Tenure & Promotion to Associate Professor
Promotion to Teaching Professor
Promotion to Associate Teaching Professor

View the list of recognized faculty and staff

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The annual event recognizes excellence in teaching, scholarship and other work that is a highlight of the College of Arts and Sciences.

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College of Arts and Sciences faculty win 2025 Best Should Teach Awards

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 13:30:00 +0000

College of Arts and Sciences faculty win 2025 Best Should Teach Awards Rachel Sauer Tue, 04/22/2025 - 07:30

Peter Hunt, Warren Sconiers and Josh Strayhorn will be honored during an awards ceremony May 1

Three College of Arts and Sciences faculty members have been recognized as 2025 Best Should Teach Award winners.

Peter Hunt, a professor of classics; Warren Sconiers, an associate teaching professor of ecology and evolutionary biology; and Josh Strayhorn, an associate professor of political science, will be recognized for their excellence in teaching and academic leadership at an awards ceremony from 6 to 9 p.m. May 1 in the CASE Chancellors Hall and Auditorium.

Peter Hunt (left), Warren Sconiers (center) and Josh Strayhorn (right) have been recognized as 2025 Best Should Teach Award winners.

The Best Should Teach Initiative was established in 1996 by Lindley and Marguerite Stiles to support the idea that “the best should teach.” It celebrates excellence in teaching at primary, secondary and higher education levels and supports the preparation of college and university faculty, as well as public school teachers, in their disciplinary fields.

Hunt, who has been a faculty member at the �� since 2000, is a classical Greek historian who studies warfare and society, slavery, historiography and oratory.

Sconiers trained as an insect ecologist, studying the effects of drought stress and changes in nutritional plant physiology and insect species composition. He also researches how to increase student engagement and learning in large classroom settings, focusing on peer-to-peer collaboration, self-efficacy, bridging biology teaching and research experiences and building instructor approachability.

Strayhorn, who joined the �� faculty in 2013, specializes in formal theory, political institutions and judicial politics. His research applies game-theoretic models in a variety of contexts. His work examines the implications of delegation, oversight and accountability mechanisms for outcomes within political and judicial hierarchies and for democratic governance.

The Best Should Teach Award ceremony is free and open to the public. The keynote speaker will be Alphonse Keasley, former associate vice chancellor in the Office of Diversity, Equity and Community Engagement at �� who has more than 30 years of experience as a faculty member, staff and administrator.

Best Should Teach events and awards are co-funded by the Ira and Ineva Baldwin Fund in the CU Foundation and Brian Good's private Best Should Teach Fund, with additional support from the Center for Teaching and Learning, the School of Education and the College of Arts and Sciences.

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Peter Hunt, Warren Sconiers and Josh Strayhorn will be honored during an awards ceremony May 1.

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