Outside Gambles Hardware in Hotchkiss, there's a newspaper box with no newspapers in it. It's been painted top to bottom by a local artist, and behind its little door sit framed art, blank canvases, sketchbooks, colored pencils and crayons, free to anyone who opens it.
The box is the first of what artist and author Karen Floyd calls News to Muse. Floyd, retired after 30 years in massage, got the boxes from the Delta County Independent, which wasn't using them anymore. Her plan is simple: a different local artist designs each box, and the community keeps it filled.
"I'm the founder of it and the organizer of it and one of the artists," Floyd told KVNF, "but it's meant to bring people together."
There's no charge and nothing to sign. "It's completely free," she said. "It's bring something and or take something." Bring gently used supplies, or art of your own with your name and number on it so whoever takes it home can find you. Take whatever inspires you.
For Floyd, the boxes carry an argument. "I truly believe there is no one who is not an artist because any form of expression is artful, especially if it's consciously created art," she said. "So you're all artists. There's nobody exempt from that title."
Asked why creativity matters right now. It "feels like we're being asked to stop thinking and stop creating and just go along," she said, and like "some of our freedoms are ebbing away quietly and some not so quietly." Making things, she believes, is how a community pushes back.
Her ambition runs well past Hotchkiss. She wants two boxes in every town in Delta County, and after that, "every town and county in Colorado." The boxes, she said, should "work for years as hubs of community. The boxes themselves are a focal point, but the whole point is to bring people together through creativity."
Floyd also plans art trails: maps connecting the boxes through the towns and counties, with a prize for anyone who visits them all.
For now, the box at Gambles is the only one up. Floyd is working on the next locations: Lazy J Coffee Shop in Crawford, Pollinate in Paonia, Sugar Mama's in Cedaredge, and Arts on Main in Delta.
To paint a box, host one, or put your own art out into the world, call Karen Floyd at 970-275-5216.
