See also: Photos: Clark Richert on display at Gildar Gallery
Stites and Vaughan met while working at Rocky Mountain and, after leaving the official world of higher education last year, decided to still pursue their love of teaching -- by starting Moxie U. Explains Stites: "Moxie U is an eclectic 'school' -- with quotes because we're not an accredited association -- where experts teach what they are passionate about and the people of the community get to partake in that."
The classes range from lectures to workshops and critiques, and although they're geared to art enthusiasts and connoisseurs, previous knowledge is not required for most of them - not even those taught by some of Denver's best-known artists and intellectuals. For example, artist Clark Richert is offering a three-class art literacy course, and Martin Mendelsberg will do a two-hour class on the Fibonacci Series. Titles of other offerings include "How to Monetize Your Creative Content on YouTube," taught by Mark Putt, and "How Shit Gets Made," with Martha Russo. Moxie U's founders teach classes, too: Stites offers business coaching for artists and Vaughan teaches sewing to individuals and small groups.
"People are coming to us left and right, and it's kind of exciting," says Vaughan. "I think there are a lot of people out there, both in traditional and nontraditional teaching settings, and there's just some cool speciality stuff that they've always wanted to teach but they haven't had a chance to yet."
"I think the summer is really going to be interesting. We have some ideas we're nailing down before we release them to the world," Stites adds.
Many of the courses have been held at RedLine Gallery, but Moxie U doesn't have a home-base. "We want to be totally nomadic and flexible in that the class goes to wherever in town the class is best suited to be. If you're going to talk about mid-century artwork, you better go down to the Vance Kirkland and talk about it there," Vaughan explains. "The whole concept is we're offering experiences, not just information dumps."
For more information and to register for classes, visit the Moxie U website.
