Meet the MasterMind Class of 2009

As an artist, she's probably best known locally for her novel idea of making her own rope shoes and then exhibiting them as sculptures after she's worn them out. "I started doing it eighteen years ago this spring," Le Courtois says. "I started making different pieces based on the movements I did every day. So I came up with the concept of making sculptures by walking. I'm going to be doing it as long as I can walk." For Le Courtois, the process of putting wear on the shoes represents the act of sculpting, even if — or perhaps because — it's inevitable. In other series, she employs such unlikely materials as pickles, mushrooms, hard candy and junk mail.

For her day job, Le Courtois works as program manager at Downtown Aurora Visual Arts — better known as DAVA — where she's been employed for the past nine years. She maintains an open studio there five afternoons a week, where she instructs seven- to seventeen-year-olds about how to be creative, how to get along as a team, and how to make many different things; she also brings in interesting local artists to work with the students on special projects. In addition to her duties at DAVA, Le Courtois teaches 3-D design and sculpture at the University of Colorado at Denver.

The Denver Voice gives Denver's homeless a voice.

Vicky Nolan

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• Ravi Zupa
• Viviane Le Courtois
• Vicky Nolan
• Visual Arts
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For all she does as an accomplished and innovative artist and as an apparently tireless educator, Viviane Le Courtois is this year's MasterMind in the Visual Arts.

—Michael Paglia

2008: Jill Hadley Hooper and Tracy Weil/RiNo

2007: Jimmy Sellars

2006: Katie Taft

2005: Lauri Lynnxe Murphy