Current Artists

Matt Harline

Meet the 2025 Artists-in-Residence

Matt Harline

Since his earliest memories, Matt Harline has been an artist. After high school, his life took a 41-year detour to be an electrical/computer hardware engineer. Through college and throughout his engineering career, Matt would draw, paint, and take art classes when time permitted. In 2016, his life was turned upside down by a bicycle accident. A traumatic brain injury changed everything, ending his ability to work as an engineer, but giving him the time to do what he had always dreamed of: creating works of art.

Matt’s artwork focuses on depicting the peace, strength, and resilience of nature and people, reflecting his journey of recovery from brain injury. Trees have come to represent the feelings that Matt seeks. Trees like the redwoods of the California coast, the Great Basin Bristlecone pine in the white mountains of eastern California, and the oaks that populate his home near Placerville, California all represent peace, strength, and resilience. They become the favorite subject matter for Matt.

Matt’s artwork has been included in a number of exhibits in central California: exhibits hosted by the Placerville Arts Association (including the National Mother Lode Art Exhibition), as well as exhibits hosted by Rancho Cordova Arts, and the Sacramento Fine Arts Center. He had a solo show titled “Brain Reconnected”, featuring his artwork on his brain injury experience, with a number of works centered on the strength of trees. Matt has self-published two books of his art and his written word on his experiences with recovery from brain injuries.

Matt is now working on writing and illustrating a book that will tell the story of a redwood and the forest it grows in, from seed, to sapling, to maturity, to old age, and eventually to returning to the earth. The stories this redwood will tell recounts the experiences it has with the environment, other trees, plants, animals of all varieties, the humans that care for them, and the humans that would exploit them. Matt hopes to inspire others to understand the peace, strength, and resilience that we as humans can draw from redwoods to heal and strengthen ourselves.

 

Kit Frost

Kit Frost

A lifetime artist and passionate educator, Kit Frost has been teaching and making art for over 50 years. As an art teacher in New Jersey, Kit is a Princeton Distinguished Teacher who has been awarded the New Jersey Teacher of the Year and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Artist/Teacher Fellowship. Kit relocated to Durango, Colorado after her career in New Jersey. She is the principal at Chase the Light Photography Adventures which specializes in lessons on capturing grand and intimate landscapes for her students and workshop participants.

Residencies speak to Kit’s need for exploring locations at depth: spending creatively charged time observing and capturing images. Kit expresses her residency experiences through still and video, time-lapse sequences, and images made with both her Holga plastic camera as well as large format images. Her mission is showing that a single image is often not enough to speak for the immensity of her visual experience. Constantly challenged to record intimacy and grandeur, Kit is passionate about making, teaching, art, landscapes, and life.

Kit has been awarded residencies in other National Parks including Crater Lake, Acadia, Capitol Reef, Glacier, Mesa Verde and Yellowstone. She has also been in residence at Bighorn National Recreation Area along the Wyoming-Montana border. Throughout 2025, Kit will be in residence in Provence, France and at Redwoods State and National Parks.

 

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