Gloria K. Alford and Robert Sward

Santa Cruz treasures, partners and artists Gloria K. Alford and Robert Sward were guests for May 17, 2011 KZSC’s Artists on Art show.

Currently, Gloria three pieces at the R. Blitzer Gallery in the exhibition, EDGE-Art on the Westside. Sixteen Westside artists present paintings, woodcuts, ceramic sculpture, steel sculpture, mixed media works and collage. The Artists’s Reception will be held Saturday May 21st from 4-8pm.

Mixed Media artist Gloria K. Alford is truly a “mixed media” artist in the sense that she has over the years working on screen printing, sound sculptures,  and textiles. In the 1970s, Gloria worked on art pieces ranging from screen printing, vacuum forming plastic into molds, and an early form of computer graphics, all of which were combined into mixed media multiples. The latter part of the decade, she completed two major pieces, Solar Sound Sculpture and The Jaded Princess, a replica of an ancient Chinese jade burial suit.  Currently Gloria has been working on acrylic painting abstract form that range from description as biological, landscape, surreal, southwestern,  botanical.

Poet, novelist, workshop leader Robert Sward is the author of 30 books of poetry, fiction and nonfictions such as God is in the Cracks, a Narrative of voices,, The Collected Poems, 1957-2004, and the upcoming, The Dog in My Life. Robert also has a blog entitled, Dr. Swards’s Cure for Melancholia.

A Fulbright Scholar and Guggenheim Fellow, he was chosen by Lucille Clifton to receive a $500 Villa Montalvo Literary Arts Award. He has been published widely in numerous anthologies and traditional literary magazines, such as The New Yorker, Poetry Chicago, and The Hudson Review. Sward later worked as technical writer and editor for Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), and served as “bridge person” between traditional hard copy academic periodicals and literary eZines.

Robert has taught at Cornell University, 1964-65, where he first experimented with computer-generated poetry and served on the editorial board of Epoch. He went on to teach at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the University of Victoria, and here at UCSC. In the 1980s he worked for the CBC, where he interviewed and produced 60-minute radio features on Leonard Cohen, Margaret Atwood, Earle Birney, John Robert Colombo and other leading Canadian figures. His Quill & Quire interview with Saul Bellow was widely read.

Painting by Jim Aschbacher

Robert also worked as journalist, book reviewer and feature writer for The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, and The Financial Times in Toronto, Ontario while living on the Toronto Islands. He received a Canada Council grant to research and write The Toronto Islands (1983), a best-selling (Source: Dreadnaught Press publisher, 1983) illustrated history of a unique community, from prehistoric times to the present.

Here’s a little video we took right before our show:

To hear our interview,  please press play: