Description
This week on Arizona Illustrated, see how a local homeowner’s association is saving money and helping the environment at the same time; the Bowen Stone House in the Tucson Mountains looks ancient, learn how old it really is; multi-disciplinary artist Athena Solan Apodaca uses a sewing machine to excavate the urban and psychological landscapes, and watch our Edward R. Murrow award-winning story on artist Rani Olson.
HOA Embraces Sustainability
Residents in the Agua Dulce Homeowners Association west of downtown Tucson are transforming their common grounds. They have planted native plants that are not cut down or trimmed drastically (“lion tailing”), maintain swales for water harvesting, mulch the plants, and take other steps that are beneficial for the property. The results have resulted in saving water and money, reducing maintenance efforts and costs, and increasing the amount of wildlife in the neighborhood.
Tucson Tours – The Bowen Stone House
Tucked into the foothills of Tucson’s Catalina Mountains lies the Bowen “Stone House,” a crumbling ruin with a mysterious past. Built in the 1930s by newspaperman John Wesley Bowen as a desert retreat, the house was abandoned after his wife fell ill, leaving behind only stone walls and scattered legends. Today, hikers stumble upon its skeletal remains and wonder about the lives once lived there. This episode explores the history, the myths, and the haunting beauty of the Bowen Stone House by showing how even forgotten ruins can become part of Tucson’s odd and enduring story.
Generally Fabricated
Archaeology doesn’t always mean a shovel in the ground—for multi-disciplinary artist, Athena Solan Apodaca, the tool she often uses to excavate the urban and psychological landscape is a sewing machine.
Athena explores social equity and patterns of urban behavior through creating multimedia visual entanglements. She consciously maintains a minimal carbon footprint in her process-oriented work through using repurposed materials and domestically developed renewable resources. Her solo exhibition “Generally Fabricated,” featured her unique style of contemporary landscape art, which blends sewing, sculpture, painting, and drawing to explore the undoing of physical and cognitive space.
Her art transforms ordinary materials into relics and artifacts of collective history: threads become roads, fabric forms windows, and pencil sketches imitate power lines. All are symbols of how people and communities can rebuild from history to organically create change within the structures and systems we live in.
As an MFA student at the UA School of Art, Athena is interested in bridging academic artistic research with local community partnership through collaborations with local galleries and organizations.
MURROW WINNER - Rani Olson-Getting Free
For Rani Olson, “Rocks are poems, memories, mirrors. They are very much alive—and listening.” A process-oriented artist, Rani sees art as a sacred mechanism for alchemizing human experience—transforming the invisible into form, emotion into expression, memory into matter. In her current body of work, she asks a profound question: “What does the world look like from the vantage point of rocks?”
Her inquiry dives into themes of permanence and impermanence, transformation and return. She explores what it means to come home to oneself through the language of stone—through the slow, silent stories embedded in minerals and dust.
Why rocks? Why rock stories? Rani offers a simple truth: This is a rock planet. Nothing we know—no tree, no breath, no body—exists without the foundation of rock. The elements that formed mountains also formed us. The chemistry of the cosmos lives in our blood, our bones, our dreams. We carry ancient geologies in our cells. And when we die, we return—ash to ash, dust to dust, stone to stone.
What if, she wonders, life is simply rocks longing to experience themselves in new forms?
Rani’s work also questions what it means to sit with discomfort, to cradle grief without rushing to erase it. What does it take to be at peace with what is? What does it mean to become new again—and again? In a world ever in flux, how do we learn to be, truly be, in the presence of change?
To her, life and art mirror each other—each an unfolding exploration, a slow erosion, a quiet becoming. Rocks, too, are in motion. Though they appear still, they are always shifting—tumbled in riverbeds, buried beneath oceans, carried by the wind as dust, sand, sediment.
They are shape-shifters, time travelers, silent witnesses.
And isn’t that true of everything? Of all of us, always?