“I experienced so much brutality, abuse and crime, and it was hard to stay positive,” he recalls. “I grew up in a house that was more than a hundred years old made out of cob mud and grass. I remember that I would help my grandmother once a month mixing and patching up the holes that animals and erosion made on the wall.”
Since his family struggled to put food on the table, buying toys was out of the question so Monterroso started creating his own.
“I started to make shelters with branches and mud to play with my friends imagining a beautiful and safe place where no one could get in to hurt us,” he says. “I made toys [and] cars out of carved wood. I would make spaceships, plates and just about any shape with mud and clay. I learned to use what materials were around to create my own imaginary toys and games, to the point that kids that had toys preferred to play with the toys I was making.”
Denver filmmaker Jonathan Martin will release his first full-length film this year,
The Confrontation Project, a look at the heated relationship between African-Americans and the police told through rhyming dialogue. It s his most ambitious project yet.
Martin got his start dabbling in video when he was playing college football at the University of Northern Colorado Greeley. He dug up a video camera from the basement of a house he rented and started writing and recording comedic shorts and sketches.
“I called them
Chronicles of Boredom. It was like a poor college kid s version of
Key & Peele,” Martin recalls. “My teammates and other students started to watch them, so I kept making more and more. My skills barely got better, and the videos got more complex.”
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Williams jumped at the chance and showed her portfolio of pen and ink watercolor portraits. There were images of her family and friends; acrylic paintings of birds and other animals; sketches from years of art classes; and photos of murals of the Statue of Liberty. There was even an image of the Go Green slogan with smokestacks wrapped in foliage, solar panels, and a figure of Mother Nature wrapped in a recycling symbol.
At the time that Williams and her mom had gone to the shop, five permanent artists and various guest artists were working at Endless Ink. They were impressed with Williams’s work when they saw it, and they took her under their wings.
Around 2005, Justin Johnson at the time a football player for Temple University in Philadelphia was looking for an outlet while recovering from a broken fibula and dislocated ankle. Fortunately, the school had a tech center with a music room and a recording studio, and Johnson turned to producing music.
“I started going there when I was going through rehab for football,” he recalls. “I learned how to make beats on different software and would get coached by some students. Making melodies at Temple was the starting point that made me realize how much I truly love music, sounds and the vibes.