“I really wanted to create an outlet where all of the artists could present their work all in one place and people could cross-pollinate [interests] with one another,” Bell explains. “So people who are film buffs can experience new music for the first time and people who are art lovers can discover all of the other things offered.

The drawing shows a purple bird’s nest holding five eggs, each a different color, balanced on the limb of a tree. Filling the sky around the tree branches is a crowd of birds, open V shapes drawn in orange pastel. It’s a simple drawing, but a big story.

In the back corner of the Clyfford Still Museum, a glass door allows partial views of the interior of the conservation studio, where every few days, a new painting is unrolled and the work of preparing it to be exhibited — often, for the very first time — begins.

When Terrence McNally, the four-time Tony Award-winning playwright, was completing his undergraduate degree at Harvard University in the late ’60s, he spent a summer as program director for a camp of chronic schizophrenics.

What O’Keeffe found, when she came to New Mexico, was a place where her study of line moved from the verticals of the New York City skyscrapers that championed America’s rise as an industrial power to the horizontal adobe structures and mesas of New Mexico — another American icon, but one much more about native people and ancient traditions than the rise of a new world superpower.

In the past few years, a group of North Boulder artists, coalescing as the NoBo Art District, has been diligently showing its work, holding monthly First Friday exhibitions at various locations north of Pearl Street.

When the Museum of Broken Relationships put out a press release in November announcing an upcoming exhibition in Boulder, it began with a question: Do happy people break up too?

At one point in his life, David Mayhew gave up on art.

A group exhibit of mixed media portraits opening at Core New Art Space on Jan. 4 is putting a face on a faceless population in Colorado — groups of refugees from Burma who have arrived in increasing numbers over the last 15 years and been met with all the struggles of strangers in a strange land.

Art is often made in isolation, but the community around its maker can inspire and influence the final result. Sometimes, an art scene is more than the sum of its parts.