Jocelyn Catterson doesn’t know if she’d be the successful artist she is today if she’d gone anywhere but the San Luis Valley to start her career in drawing.
The San Luis Valley is a challenging place to make a living. Among its counties are Costilla, Alamosa, and Saguache, the 2nd, 8th and 10th poorest in Colorado. Del Norte, in Rio Grande County, doesn’t fare much better as far as Colorado towns go.
But within six months of settling there, Catterson, who has no formal art training and learned to draw by copying the patterns on the wings of moths and butterflies, says she had “produced a ton of drawings and instantly became very successful.
“I was the featured artist in every place that I could be. I was selling out of prints at the brewery and the coffee shop. Then I started doing bigger commercial projects.”
The 31-year-old then scored the coveted University of Colorado Art Science and Environment Fellowship for $3,000, which helped allow her to turn her prodigious talents toward making art about the San Luis Valley aquifer. She has a full-time job with a local conservation group now, but she would have stayed in Del Norte even if she’d had to cobble together a living.
“It’s a landscape of extremes in all ways, shapes and forms,” she said. “It attracts a particular type of person. For some creative people, when they step into the valley they are instantly inspired.”
An increasing number of artists are starting to move into the San Luis Valley, says Liz Hensley, a business professor at nearby Adams State University and an Alamosa town councilor.
In general, they’re young — 20s through 30s — middle class, educated and looking for a Colorado experience beyond ski towns or the Front Range. Del Norte, Saguache and Monte Vista, she says, are prime alternatives.
“Ski towns and Denver are super expensive and populated. What you still have in the San Luis Valley is fresh air, dark skies, a lot of space” and a newly formed arts district, which Hensley added, “allows Alamosa to get a little bit of grant money to promote art, a huge part of our community.”
Why low-income counties lure artists
Grant money aside, it helps that the San Luis Valley is also one of the least expensive regions in the state to live. The median home price in Saguache, Rio Grande and Alamosa counties was under $350,000 in September, compared with $715,000 in Jefferson County, $642,000 in Chaffee County and $1.8 million in Eagle County. The Economic Policy Institute reports the monthly cost of living for a family of four in Alamosa County is $6,422 versus $9,073 for the same size family living in Boulder County. And a quick Zillow search turns up 32 acres of undeveloped land in a gated community 2.5 miles south of Del Norte for $88,000.
Landing jobless and untethered in the San Luis Valley isn’t for everyone. The weather is harsh, amenities are few and the winds screaming through Del Norte in the spring can drive Catterson crazy. The economy struggles, which is why some are raised there, leave and never go back. And the have/have-not divide is real, said Kaitlin Martinez, a 26-year-old potter who grew up in Del Norte and collaborates frequently with other women artists in southern Colorado.
You can see it in the availability of art and how much art is purchased in towns along the Rio Grande, she added. “In communities upriver from Del Norte, like South Fork and Creede, the population triples in the summertime with second homeowners … and that socioeconomic class has been able to support those upriver artists.”
In downriver communities meanwhile, “are the people who kind of stay here longer, a little bit more of the working class, and maybe haven’t had the ability to support artists,” she said. “It’s an interesting dynamic where the community wants to support artists, they just maybe haven’t had the outlets to support working artists. But Monte Vista and Alamosa kind of throw off my theory, because Monte Vista always seems to have a really strong community, and the Monte Vista Crane Festival, when they invite and welcome all kinds of art.”
A group of supportive artists and a community focused on collaboration is growing along the river, Martinez said. “I think they feel the momentum and that (an arts community) is blossoming. They just can’t help themselves. It’s too exciting.”
Bringing art, and arts support, from the city
Lares Feliciano came to Alamosa during a gig with AmeriCorps, which engages young people in community service across the U.S. Shortly after her stint she moved to Denver, but she kept feeling the pull of the San Luis Valley.
An accomplished visual artist, she bounced between Denver and Alamosa for a time, running an arts studio with friends in Alamosa, then moving to Denver to make art that showed at the Denver Art Museum and hold a residency at the RedLine Contemporary Art Center, a nonprofit fostering education and engagement between artists and communities to create positive social change.
But living in Denver “was spiritually and emotionally draining,” she said. The idea of trying to buy a house? “Demoralizing.” She’d met her husband in Alamosa. They spent a couple of years “finagling and imagining what (a move back) could look like.” They returned in August, “and I’m using all of the things that I love and learned in Denver,” she said, while working for RedLine, which administers Arts in Society grants with funding from Colorado Creative Industries, through the Office of Economic Development and International Trade, and others.
Feliciano, 38, identifies as an artist and a cultural worker, with her cultural work being the arts administration she does for RedLine. “Mostly, I want artists to get money to do things and to have as few strings as possible,” she said. WIth half of RedLine’s grantees in the San Luis Valley, she added, “it wasn’t too hard to convince them to let me come down here and proselytize about the work we’re doing grantwise. But it’s also an opportunity for me as an artist to have a better quality of life.”
When a place like the San Luis Valley is discovered, there is a risk of newcomers driving up housing prices and driving out long-time locals. But Hensley says so far artists aren’t having that effect.
“Here’s the thing. There’s so much space out here. Enough for everyone,” Feliciano added. The artists she knows also anchor into the community. Like 31-year-old Al Stone, who also arrived through the AmeriCorps program.
Stone’s artform is storytelling. In 2021, through the Narrow Gauge Book Cooperative in Alamosa, she started Spadefoot Story Slam inspired by The Moth Radio Hour. It’s been a hit, with eight to 14 people coming each month, she says. She thinks participants are so engaged because “at a basic level, stories connect us.” But Feliciano says Stone does more for the community than just creating a forum for sharing stories. “She’s a storyteller, yes, but she works in food justice. Jocelyn is doing conservation.” Not that there isn’t any gentrification. “But I think there’s a lot of opportunity for this growth to be truly beneficial,” said Feliciano. “It’s like this big, beautiful art-related chain that anyone around here can be part of.”
An art church for the community
If there’s someone who can bring all of the artists in Alamosa, Saguache, Monte Vista, and Del Norte together, it may be Madeleine Ahlborn, an artist, teacher and the new owner of an 8,000-square-foot church she bought for $100,000 in Monte Vista.
The church came to Ahlborn via Ron Douglas, her landlord when she was part of a studio arts collective in Monte Vista. At a certain point, her “life collapsed,” she said, and she could no longer afford her rent. Douglas told her about the church and asked if she was interested in touring it. She fell in love with the space, “and maybe two months after I had moved my stuff in, he informed me he was moving.” Then he offered it to her owner-financed.
Kindnesses like his are the kind of thing that happens in her part of Colorado, Ahlborn said. “I mean, there’s a reason they call us Mystic San Luis Valley.” Her down payment came from money her parents had saved up for her wedding. Douglas agreed to carry her until she could come up with the remaining funds. In December, she received a Rural Women-Led Business Fund loan through the First Southwest Community Fund, a non-profit partner of First Southwest Bank in Alamosa, to buy the church, which she plans to transform into a community space for teaching and celebrating art.
Why? Because she knows the value not only of being an artist but of helping others find their creative sides.
She also knows what it’s like to be an artist with no space to create: full of insecurity, alone with your projects and nowhere to go to simply think. She says she has gained so much from the San Luis Valley community, she wants to give back.
First, she needs to finish an extensive cleanup on the behemoth church, which hasn’t seen a congregation in a decade. Next, she needs to get her materials together, plan classes — acrylics, charcoals and watercolors — and market her ideas.
Then she’ll do something she’s been dreaming of on her artist’s journey: She’ll offer classes, free of charge, to anyone in the community.