With a training crop duct taped to his arm and his long braid swinging behind, Stanford Addison gentles wild horses off the plains near his home on the Wind River Reservation. He does the sitting in his wheelchair.

Addison lost the use of his legs nearly 30 years ago when the truck he was traveling in hit a herd of wild horses. Since his accident, Addison has "learned to make friends with horses again" and has developed an intuitive approach to horse training. In the process of working with wild horses, Addison shows people positive alternatives to many of the obstacles they face. Social Services and the justice system request his assistance to help youth find positive ways of dealing with hardships on the reservations, helping them draw strength from traditional Arapaho ways.

Addison's life today on the reservation has been captured in "Upbroken Spirit," an exhibit of photographs by Sarah Kariko. The Art Association displays Kariko's work in the ArtSpace Theater Gallery. An artist reception will take place at 7:00 p.m. on Friday, June 12, followed by a special program in the Center Theater at 7:30 p.m.

Sarah Kariko
Sarah Kariko is an artist and community organizer whose work explores the transformative power of art. She uses art to create community, raise social awareness, challenge assumptions, and inspire people to take action.

After graduating with a degree in the History of Science from Harvard, Sarah taught natural history at the Teton Science School in Kelly, Wyoming. She then received a Fulbright scholarship and studied spiders in the rain forests of Madagascar.

When she returned to the U.S., she studied with Peter Schumann of Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont. She was influenced by his philosophy and Cheap Art Manifesto that "art is food" and "should be as basic to life as bread." She became interested in creating socially aware work with community participants and turned her attention to the intersection of art and science.

With a grant from the Wyoming Arts Council, she collaborated with local artists and created a "spider performance" piece with children at the Art Association of Jackson Hole that combined arachnology, large-scale puppetry, and Malagasy cultural traditions.
 
She received pARTners grants to design and teach integrated art/science field courses in Teton County, and her students' work appeared on exhibit at the National Museum of Wildlife Art. As artist-in-residence at Community Entry Services in Jackson, she taught mask-making and pageant puppetry.

In 1996 Sarah created Homage, a 60-totem site-specific bone sculpture for the Buffalo Jubilee sponsored by the Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative. The piece used elk bones that were borrowed with permission from the National Elk Refuge and was created to honor the 60 million wild bison that once roamed the Western Plains. It was installed in Grand Teton National Park. She also worked with 80 school kids exploring the cultural and ecological significance of bison. Students wrote a book of poetry and made bone chimes that surrounded the sculpture.

Homage engaged the environmental issues that had driven her studies but also was large and complex enough to hold the sacred and the secular. It could touch people in places scientific data did not, and contribute to dialogue in a different way. It could reach a broader audience and extend across socio-political lines to touch people in those wordless spaces.

After moving to Vermont, Sarah envisioned "Painting Faces on War: The Brave Hearts of the Lost Boys and Girls of Sudan" to create awareness of the civil war in southern Sudan. She collaborated with local academic institutions, art organizations and the growing population of recently resettled Lost Boys and Girls living in Vermont. The resulting nine-day event included an exhibit of paintings by refugees still living in the camps, a Story Wall of oral histories and photographs, a benefit dinner and auction, and art workshops for local Sudanese culminating in an exhibit. Art supplies and community responses were sent back to the camp to let artists know they had been heard and people cared.

Sarah founded The Giving Voice Project to continue this work. GVP is a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing a visual voice to important stories that may otherwise go unheard. In 2008, GVP brought Northern Arapaho traditional healer and horse gentler Stanford Addison to Harvard's Peabody Museum to bless its Arapaho collection. He also spoke at the University of Vermont and St. Michael's College, where his universal message received standing ovations. Sarah's photographs of Stanford Addison will appear in the exhibit “Unbroken Spirit” at the Art Association of Jackson Hole, in High Country News, The Denver Post, and in the book “Broken: A Love Story” by Lisa Jones.

Sarah's work in mixed media includes wood and bone reliquaries, tin can sculptures and environmental guerrilla art. She has an ongoing series of paper quilts using MRIs of the tennis ball-sized brain tumor her fiancé had. The original quilt hangs in their kitchen – a daily reminder to bite deeply into life everyday, and that for any of us, all we ever have is this very moment.