Murals, Music and Moves

Across Northern Colorado, women are making their mark in the arts—not just through their creative work, but through the communities they cultivate. Using different mediums, these three female powerhouses embrace their artistic aptitude and inspire others to lean into their talents.

Felisha Bustos

The visual artist building bridges between people

All over Greeley, Felisha Bustos’ art adorns walls and alleyways. Her paintings brighten the hallways of Greeley-Evans District 6 schools, like Northridge High and Chappelow, businesses like La Petite French Bakery and landmarks like the downtown Art Alley. At Aims Community College, her 18-by-15-foot mural honoring the school’s diverse alumni welcomes visitors to the student center with a simple message: “You belong.”

Bustos spreads her creative vision across Greeley without much marketing or, until recently, a website. She relies on word-of-mouth referrals and her own connections to land commissions for painted portraits and murals. It’s obviously working.

“I always need to be talking with people,” she says. “I think of it as scattering seeds.”

These connections are what drives Bustos’ art and motivates her to overcome self-doubt.

“Every single job feels too big, too scary,” she admits. “It’s challenging me and stretching me in ways I never have been, but I say yes and do it anyway. That has worked for me.”

Growing up in Burbank, Calif., Bustos spent her summers sketching and, unknowingly, building a foundation for her future career as an artist. When she began taking commissions in her 20s, she made a commitment to God that she would say yes to the jobs that came through, a commitment she still takes seriously.

“You can’t find this art at Target,” she says. “A bit of my soul is in there.”

However, the path to a career in art hasn’t been direct for Bustos, who, for years, poured her passion into motherhood. Still, life and the people she has met along the way kept nudging her back toward painting.

After taking a 15-year break from college, she enrolled at Aims, where she completed associates degrees in studio art, art history and sociology. Her time there reignited her creative fire and connected her to other artists who reminded her of what’s possible. She then started an art business, Be-ART-ifull, and ramped up her commissions. She’s been quietly building her portfolio ever since.

Now, at age 46, Bustos focuses on building community. She teaches weekly classes at Greeley’s Active Adult Center and hosts a monthly social group, Uncorked, at her home, where she guides a small group through journaling, doodling and discussion.

Through the end of October, she’s encouraging women to join a collaborative annual art exhibition, HerStory, which is planned for Women’s History Month in March (location TBD). Each participant will draw a name from a hat, connecting her with another woman in the group. The idea is for the paired artists to meet and learn about each other, then create art about the other to display during the exhibition.

HerStory is one of many ways Bustos is building bridges between people. But she’s not doing it alone.

“You teach others,” she says. “You unlock doors for other people to unleash their creative spirit.”

To join the HerStory project or Uncorked, contact Bustos at felishabustos@gmail.com.

 

 

 

Liz Barnez

Northern Colorado’s matriarch of music

In 2012, the Fort Collins Musicians Association awarded Liz Barnez the Lifetime Achievement Award a bit prematurely, as she’s far from done creating.

“I will play till I’m dead,” she says.

While it’s been 10 years since the Fort Collins icon released a new album, Barnez is planning to release her fifth and perhaps most personal one to date later this year.

“This is for me,” she says, describing a record that feels “wholehearted,” evoking an old-school R&B sound “bordering on Motown” with playful energy. Over the past decade, she’s grown a lot by writing new music and learning more about herself as both an individual and an artist.

“I’m coming to terms with different parts of me,” she says, sitting on the stage in Old Town Square, where she has performed many times.

At age 60, Barnez says it’s nice to be older. The wisdom that comes with age has made it easier for her to lean into her strengths as both a musician and storyteller. But even as her music evolves, she’s stayed true to her New Orleans roots, where she grew up playing in cover bands on Bourbon Street.

“That was my degree in music,” she says. “It’s a great, fertile place to learn and be peer corrected.”

Moving to Fort Collins in the late ’80s with her former band, The Subdudes, was a risk that has come to define Barnez’s career. It was an opportunity to be reinvented and grow beyond the musician-dense scene back home.

That gamble paid off. Barnez has long been a Northern Colorado fixture, one who was inducted into the Colorado Music Hall of Fame in 2019 as part of the all-women band, The Mother Folkers, which was described as “the most carefully pronounced name in show business.”

These days, she considers herself a music matriarch.

“I feel really proud of the community, which is a very motherly feeling,” she says, reflecting on the rising generation of women making their way in music.

She looks back on her younger years, often as the only woman onstage and with few female colleagues to guide her. As someone who never hesitated to lead a band, however, she has inadvertently become a role model, advocating for women and the LGBTQ+ community through volunteerism, songwriting and benefit shows.

Her upcoming album release will feature one track of particular importance: “Stay Strong,” a protest song with lyrics written by her wife, Lori Daigle.

“She’s not a songwriter or musician,” Barnez says with a pause. “Well, she is now.”

The track pushes back on the divisions and tensions of the moment, calling on the community to “stay strong, march on, side by side…joyfully.”

While “Stay Strong” is already available on streaming platforms, Barnez hopes to release the full album by late October.

 

 

 

Micaela Sabbi

The economist reviving the Fort Collins salsa scene

As the choreographer for the Fort Collins Salsa Collective, Micaela Sabbi sees her role coordinating groups of dancers a bit like managing an economy.

While discussion of supply and demand doesn’t exactly evoke the rhythms of Willie Colón or Héctor Lavoe, for Sabbi, a Fort Collins-based dance instructor and economics student, the subjects harmonize in a surprising way. At Colorado State University, where she’s earning a doctorate, she has had to tap into the analytical and quantitative part of her brain. But it isn’t confined to academics.

“I also need those skills in dance when working out the logistics and the formations and everything else,” she says.

In other words, the music, the rhythm and the artform set certain constraints, and then it’s up to the creative mind to move people within them.

“It’s very much about being a student of that structure,” she says, “and then figuring out how your body individually fits into that space and how you can fluidly and creatively move within it.”

In the studio, Sabbi doesn’t want her students to just have fun, even if the group is largely social and community driven. She also wants them to understand and respect salsa, a genre she immersed herself in while growing up in Puerto Rican and Caribbean communities in Chicago and New York.

“They’re coming because they want to make friends,” she says, “and in the process, they’re learning a new skill that is challenging. It can be intense, but I’ve seen growth from all the dancers.”

Sabbi, 31, has been salsa dancing for 17 years, and it’s long been a serious business for her.

“It was like the dance Olympics,” she says, recalling the expectations at her high school. But they positioned her for success as a dance major at Columbia College Chicago and later in dance companies like Gifted Souls, Zafire and Iroko. She was pleasantly surprised when she moved to Fort Collins, the smallest place she’s ever lived but one with a thriving salsa scene.

“Not only is it large, but people show up and they’re very involved,” she says. “It’s more about community building, bringing new people in and having fun.”

Sabbi is one of several instructors at the Fort Collins Salsa Collective who is pushing the community to grow. She took over the choreography team in March 2024, and by Labor Day weekend, the group of about two dozen students was ready to perform. Last October, they debuted a routine at Denver’s weekend-long dance convention, Caldac.

“Most of them hadn’t performed at all in any style,” Sabbi says, and while her students aren’t looking to become professional dancers, they have committed to their roles in her dance economy.

Sabbi teaches Salsa On2 every Monday at the Masonic Temple in Fort Collins. The collective also offers other Latin dance classes, like bachata, and hosts regular dance nights at Scrumpy’s Hard Cider Bar and Pub.