The Art Box

What happens when a family legend turns out to be true? Author Kimberly Nixon grew up hearing that her grandmother had “robbed a train.” Years later, she discovered her grandmother’s 1925 felony conviction papers, stayed up all night reading them, and immediately began writing the novel Rock Bottom, Tennessee.  Kimberly joins us for a wonderful conversation about turning family history into histor...

What happens when one teacher sees something in a shy young student that she hasn't yet discovered in herself? Our guest is Wende Killinger, drama teacher at Virgin Valley High School and one of the founders of Cactus Youth Theatre. Wende takes us back to junior high, where she was painfully shy until a teacher, Mrs. Lloyd, became the catalyst who encouraged her to step beyond small roles and disc...

Welcome friends, to The Art Box Podcast and our Harvest of Thought 2026. Last year, our Harvest of Thought grew into something much bigger than we ever imagined. We gathered so many wonderful voices, poems, stories, and reflections that it took five full episodes to share them all. Well, this year, we’re doing things a little differently. We’re packing the entire Harvest into one very special epis...

Artist, writer, and expressive arts facilitator Christine “Sunshine” DeJuliis joins Steve for a thoughtful conversation about creativity as a pathway to healing, presence, connection, and possibility. Through brilliant color, intuitive abstraction, symbols, mandalas, and the simple act of noticing, Christine explores how art can help us see both the world around us and something deeper within ours...

Writer and educator Kate McElderry joins us for a wonderfully wide-ranging conversation about creativity, learning, and the many different ways our minds work. Kate shares how childhood days spent exploring outdoors, sketching, journaling, and growing up around her mother’s art studio eventually planted the seeds for her novel Declan Someone. We explore Kate’s own nonlinear approach to creativity,...

Christopher Aguilar has been finding his way onto stages since childhood—although one of his earliest may have been the fireplace at his grandmother’s house. In Episode 491, Steve sits down with actor, playwright, teacher, and creative force Christopher Aguilar for a conversation about a life spent discovering what it means to truly “own the character.” Christopher talks about acting as a child, h...

Writer, poet, nurse and mother Kindall Fredricks RN, ADN joins us for a fascinating conversation about what happens when a story refuses to travel in a straight line. Kindall uses unconventional spacing, formatting and punctuation as part of the storytelling itself, allowing the page to fracture as memory and time fracture. The result is writing with a tenuous relationship to time, where past, pre...

On Episode 488, photographer and artist Marie Nygren joins Steve and Addie for a journey across Nevada, one photograph at a time. Marie’s love of photography began when her grandmother gave her a Kodak Brownie as a child. Decades later, a photography class reignited that spark, and a first-place award helped convince her that the camera might become much more than a hobby. Today, Marie wanders Nev...

For Episode 489 of The Art Box, Mesquite Fire Rescue Chief Jayson Andrus and Maryann Mainero join Steve in the Mesquite Works STEAM Center studio for a conversation about service, community, public art, and the future of Mesquite. At the center of our conversation is the new Fire Station #2 and the important difference it is already making by improving emergency response times for residents on the...

For Daniel Brady, creativity has never belonged to just one art form. In Episode 487 of The Art Box, Steve sits down with poet, writer, musician, teacher, and performer Daniel Brady for a conversation about a creative journey that began in elementary school and took shape during the cultural upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s. Poetry, music, dreams, the moon landing, Earth Day, Civil Rights, the Viet...

What happens when you finally achieve the dream you’ve spent your whole life chasing and discover that reaching the summit isn’t what you thought it would be? In Episode 486 of The Art Box, Steve sits down with Jen Guyton, National Geographic Explorer, wildlife photojournalist, ecologist, and founder of Wild Beyond. Jen’s remarkable journey began as a little girl repeatedly watching a National Geo...

Steve makes his annual sojourn to Baker, Nevada, gateway to Great Basin National Park, for another visit with his friends Liz Woolsey and her husband, James, and the remarkable little oasis they have created in one of Nevada’s most remote communities. This time, Steve also arrives carrying copies of The Art of Noticing and Sandcastle Windows. Liz and James will sell the books in their store, with...

In Episode 484, Steve sits down with Matt Hancock, the creative force behind DECO-LUXE, for a conversation about electronic music, creativity, recovery, and the unexpected places where sound can take us. Matt shares how music became part of rebuilding his life and how his earlier, darker work gradually gave way to the warmth, nostalgia, sunsets, and falling-in-love feeling of his upcoming album, E...

Sometimes a story is good enough to bring an old friend out of retirement. After reading Steve’s The Art of Noticing and Sandcastle Windows, former Art Box host Linda Harris reached out with a request: she wanted to return to the studio and interview Steve about his writing. And Steve couldn’t have been more honored. Linda, who hosted more than 250 episodes of The Art Box, returns to the Mesquite...

More than 475 episodes after her first visit to The Art Box, magnificent Mesquite artist Chris Picior returns—and she is still discovering new ways to create. Chris was our guest way back on Episode 6, when we talked about her lifelong journey through art. This time, we catch up on where that journey has taken her and, perhaps more importantly, the new artistic freedom she has discovered. Chris ta...

For nearly three decades, Larry LeMieux has been one of those people who sees something a community could use and then helps make it happen. On Episode 481 of The Art Box, Steve sits down with Larry for a conversation that becomes something of an oral history of Mesquite. We travel from his early newspaper days and the creation of the Mesquite High Rollers to helping establish the Mesquite Senior...

Sometimes the sweetest chapters of our lives have been quietly taking shape for decades. On Episode 480 of The Art Box, Steve visits with Thalia “Beep” Stanton, creator of Grama Beep’s Sweets. Beep’s love of candy making began as a teenager in a friend’s kitchen and became a Christmas tradition filled with memories of family and friends. More than 50 years later, after retiring and moving to Mesqu...

What happens when a moment in nature changes the direction of your life? On this episode of The Art Box, Steve talks with Las Vegas native Shauna Walch, whose lifelong connection to the desert and a powerful moment in the McCullough Mountains inspired Compass, a growing vision for nature-based, values-driven places of hope, healing, reflection, and connection. Shauna shares how doodles become idea...

Making Memories Stories with Paul Benedict Our Episode 478 guest is our good friend Paul Benedict, one of Mesquite’s most outstanding citizens and a man who describes what he does with three wonderfully simple words: “I tell stories.” And Paul has plenty of them to tell. An Air Force veteran, longtime community leader, accomplished public speaker and familiar face on the Mesquite stage, Paul has p...

Our Episode 477 guest, Miles Woods, grew up right here in Mesquite as part of a close-knit local family filled with some truly wonderful people. Miles has left his creative mark on his hometown by painting three community murals, and he stays involved with local theater, building sets alongside his daughter, Emma. His creativity also travels far beyond Mesquite. Miles works for Sally Dark Rides a...

*** I LOVE this bookstore *** For Episode 476, Steve sits down with Josh, owner of Mad Red Books in Las Vegas, for a conversation about books, curiosity, entrepreneurship, and the importance of keeping people reading. Growing up in a family of avid readers, Josh turned a lifelong love of books into a business built around a wonderfully simple philosophy: books don't do anyone any good sitting on a...

What if an empty building could become a doorway to the world? In Episode 475, Edie and Eden join Steve to explore an ambitious vision for a multicultural creativity hub in Southern Nevada where art, technology, education, and human connection come together. Edie shares her plans to repurpose an existing space into an immersive environment using projection mapping, virtual reality, holography, art...

In Episode 474, Dr. Chris Merritt, Utah State Historic Preservation Officer, joins Steve for a conversation about archaeology, preservation, art, and the stories hidden in the landscapes around us. Steve and Chris have worked together on several archaeological projects exploring the lives of Chinese workers in the American West during the 1880s, giving their conversation a personal connection buil...

Randy Bauman, Chair of the Mesquite Fine Arts Photographic Society , returns to The Art Box four years after joining us way back on Episode 7. We pick up where we left off, exploring just how much photographic technology has changed since 2022. But our conversation quickly moves beyond cameras and equipment to something more important: what makes photography art? For Randy, a great photograph is m...

In Episode 472 of The Art Box, we sit down with photographer and artist Bradley Marston to explore a creative journey that began in a small Utah town and continues today through his innovative Intelligent Mirror process. Bradley shares memories of growing up near an artist who created statues of John Wayne. What began with mowing lawns and doing odd jobs eventually led young Bradley into the artis...