The Art Box

Our nationwide call for short-form personal essays brought voices from many walks of life, each answering the invitation to share a story or insight that could be recited in under six minutes. In this second installment of our Harvest of Thought: Essays series, we continue to explore the richness of human thought and lived experience. These writers look back with humility, forward with imagination...

Three months ago, we invited insightful voices from across the nation to share original essays for a special Harvest of Thought edition — short reflections filled with heart, perspective, memory, and meaning. The only request: each essay had to be able to be spoken aloud in six minutes or less — a challenge that pushed writers toward clarity, honesty, and lyrical brevity. In Part I, we present the...

Three months ago, we set an invitation loose across the country: Send us your words. Send us your heart. Let us hear what you carry inside. The response was extraordinary. Artists from coast to coast shared poems filled with vulnerability, wisdom, humor, and grace. In Part II of our Harvest of Thought poetry edition, we continue celebrating those voices. Some poems arrive soft as dawn. Others shou...

Three months ago, we reached out across the nation, inviting talented friends, poets, writers, and creative souls to lend their voices to a special project. What followed was a generous outpouring of words, emotion, and imagination. Today, in Part I of our Harvest of Thought poetry edition, we share some of those remarkable submissions. These poems explore love, grief, wonder, identity, humor, mem...

In this episode of The Art Box, host MJ Stiles sits down with friend, mystery and thriller author Lana M. Fox , whose gripping stories unfold in the dramatic landscape of Hood River, Oregon. Lana is the author of The Truth Will Set You Free, a Colorado Gold Fiction finalist, and the creator of the Hood River Mystery Series featuring Detective Liz Ellisen, with titles My Sister’s Keeper, Through Fr...

If you listen to one podcast all year, this is the one. In this powerful episode of The Art Box, host MJ speaks with Dr. Lena Cavusoglu, professor at Pacific University, about her remarkable art-based research project, Faces Seen, Voices Heard. Blending academic inquiry with visual storytelling, Dr. Cavusoglu’s work explores how society responds to people with visible facial differences—those livi...

In this special three-part series of The Art Box, host MJ takes us home to Oregon for an intimate look at the stories, friendships, and creative spark that drive Petty Fever, the award-winning Tom Petty tribute band beloved across the Northwest and beyond. Through personal connections with the band and their families, MJ explores the music that shaped their lives, the heart behind their performanc...

In this special three-part series of The Art Box, host MJ takes us home to Oregon for an intimate look at the stories, friendships, and creative spark that drive Petty Fever, the award-winning Tom Petty tribute band beloved across the Northwest and beyond. Through personal connections with the band and their families, MJ explores the music that shaped their lives, the heart behind their performanc...

In this special three-part series of The Art Box, host MJ takes us home to Oregon for an intimate look at the stories, friendships, and creative spark that drive Petty Fever, the award-winning Tom Petty tribute band beloved across the Northwest and beyond. Through personal connections with the band and their families, MJ explores the music that shaped their lives, the heart behind their performanc...

In this special episode, co-founder Steve Dudrow takes a thoughtful pause to share what’s been happening behind the scenes at The Art Box Podcast. After a brief lull between episodes, Steve catches listeners up on the many creative directions the team has been pursuing, from public art projects and poetry collections to new podcast adventures and community outreach. Hear updates on Mesquite Works...

The Art Box travels to Las Vegas to explore one of the valley’s most dynamic creative spaces — the Winchester Dondero Cultural Center . Our guest is Irma Varela, the visionary Cultural Program Supervisor who has spent decades shaping a place where artists, performers, and neighbors gather to imagine and create. Irma shares the story behind the Center’s mission to nurture community through the arts...

In this inspiring conversation, we sit down with Cory Clemetson, founder along with his brother Chad of the Kids for Sports Foundation, a nonprofit committed to helping children in Mesquite and the Virgin Valley experience the joy and life lessons of organized athletics. Cory shares the story behind starting the foundation, the moment he realized cost was keeping too many kids on the sidelines, an...

In Episode 359 of The Art Box, MJ and Steve welcome Kirsten Pope to the STEAM Center recording studio for a lively conversation about IKA Greens , the innovative business she runs with her husband, Alex. We dig into what “IKA” really stands for, how their operation is changing the way our community thinks about fresh, locally grown produce, and why sustainable food systems matter now more than eve...

In this calming, reflective and short episode of The Art Box, Steve invites listeners to slow down and discover the practice of forest bathing, the Japanese art of shinrin-yoku, or “bathing” in the forest atmosphere. Steve explores what forest bathing is, the science behind its benefits, from lowered stress and blood pressure to boosted immunity, and why it has become such a powerful wellness move...

In this inspiring episode of The Art Box, MJ sits down with her friend Oregon golfer Chris Oviatt, the 2024 NAGA Women’s Overall National Champion and Western Region representative for the 2025 USGA Adaptive Open Championship. Chris shares her 32-year journey as a competitive golfer, living with Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, and how braces, a cane, and a positive outlook help her keep playing the s...

In this inspiring episode of The Art Box, we sit down with Mesquite actor Bill Wright Jr. to explore how a soldier became a storyteller. Bill shares how his time in the U.S. Army taught him to speak confidently in front of crowds and cameras, and how reciting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech became a defining moment in his life. That experience opened the door to his first perf...

The Art Box – Episode 355: Echoes of Belonging In this deeply personal conversation, three friends, Mary Jane Stiles, Eydie Ann Lieberman, and William R. Marye, open up about lives shaped by an absence: the missing threads of an unknown or absent parent. Together, they reflect on the emotional weight of not knowing where you come from, how long-kept secrets shaped their sense of self, and what it...

In this special follow-up episode, MJ sits down once again with Linda Villanueva of the Mesquite Cafe Blues Band to catch up on her ever-expanding creative journey. While the band proudly calls Mesquite home, their music now reaches even farther with performances in Las Vegas and Laughlin, sharing their soulful blend of blues and rock with new audiences. Beyond the stage, Linda is a familiar face...

In this episode of The Art Box, we sat down at Mystery Ranch, with Kym Martin, Outreach Coordinator for Desert Love Native Plants , a nonprofit nursery rooted at Cactus Joe’s near the Red Rock Canyon foothills. Desert Love is more than a nursery, it’s a movement to make native plants accessible while inspiring communities to reimagine their landscapes and become stewards of the desert. Kym shares...

In a very special episode of The Art Box, we hand the microphone to an unlikely guest , Josie the Joshua Tree, a wise and witty desert elder rooted at Mystery Ranch in Avi Kwa Ame National Monument. With humor and heart, Josie reflects on centuries of desert life: from her partnership with yucca moths to raising quail families in her shade, from Kim Garrison Means’ childhood at the ranch to witnes...

This episode was deeply personal for me. I had the privilege of sitting down with Alan O’Neill, a man whose life’s work has been devoted to protecting America’s public lands and keeping them open for all of us to experience. Our conversation took place at Mystery Ranch during my art/science residency, with the vast Mojave Desert stretching out below us, a view that matched the depth and meaning of...

MJ welcomes back Paul and Linda of the Mesquite Café Blues Band for a fresh conversation about their musical journey. Since their last appearance on The Art Box in early 2023 (with hosts Linda Harris and Rachel Washington), the band has been on the rise, splitting their performances between Mesquite, Las Vegas, and Laughlin. Known for blending soulful blues with driving rock, their sound now reach...

In this episode of The Art Box, we welcome Dulce Sol, an emerging Las Vegas poet whose words are steeped in dreams, travel, and self-discovery. Since beginning her poetic journey at just 17, Dulce has evolved into a voice that blends the surreal with the lived, weaving imagination and memory into verses that resonate with honesty and wonder. We explore how her dreams often spark poetic imagery, ho...

Hard to believe it’s been a year since we first sat down with Junior Baeza back in Episode 220 to talk about a dream of bringing a unique artisan bakery to Mesquite. That vision, shared with his wife Sabra, has now blossomed into Fat Dough, a beloved cornerstone of our community. On this special one-year anniversary episode, Junior dropped by The Mesquite Works STEAM Center Art Box studio on a Fri...

When most think of art, the first thing they think of is painting, drawing, ceramics, wood working, jewelry making or photography.     In the past few years, the imagination of the public has been captured by chefs or culinary artists, creating art with food design and presentation. It is through their creative process of imagining and blending art and science that chefs create art that is not onl...