Collective Curation
who we are
We’re an amorphous cohort of Tucsonans who cooperate to organize shows in the Golden Saguaro series. Golden Saguaro is not exactly a traditional venue– it’s an idea, a community, a social initiative. While we program at one location, that location is multi-use space, and hosts other events occasionally outside the programming of GS. We arrive at our event bills by consensus, and so we sometimes take extra time to organize. Thanks for your patience.
Current & past members of the collective include:
Cecyl Ruehlen
Chelsey Lee-Trejo
Igloo Martian
John Melillo
Prabjit Virdee
Skye Shadowz
Steev Hise
Zack Lischer-Katz
History
how this came to be
Like many mid-sized cities throughout the US, art and music scenes ebb and flow over time. Tucson is a diverse place filled with a multitude of cultural identities, histories, complexities and transience. It is filled with a magical air only found in the desert southwest, which breeds a particular way of being, a relaxed warmness of personalities. Artists come and go (and come back much of time), and while Tucson has a rich and ongoing story of musical support and community, spaces that center around experimental forms have been few and far between. A certain benefactor approached a group of experimental artists in fall 2019 and said, “I have this space where I would like only challenging, unusual events to happen, would you like to take this project on?”
We immediately got to work and started a monthly series in November of that year. When COVID-19 pandemic became an obvious problem in March 2020.
We shut down. We weren’t sure if it would return.
However, we’ve been back, since October, 2022.
Before reaching out to us to perform, know that we program only performance works that do not have a normal outlet at the usual venues. We take a broad stoke approach to the word “experimental”.
In a few words, music/sound/noise/etc that would usually not be seen at the bars and clubs in town. We do at least one monthly event, there may be other ad hoc events at other times. We tend to run from September through May, because this is the Sonoran Desert, and summer season is that ecstatically hot, sleepy time.