Rocky Flats Then and Now: 25 Years After the Raid, Arvada Center, CO
Imagining the Real: Protest Art and Rocky Flats – Performance and Conversation
Moderator: Bryan Taylor, Professor, Department of Communication, University of Colorado Boulder
Anne Waldman, Poet; Co-Founder, Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics
Kristen Iversen, Author, Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats
Tom Mayer, Author, Rocky Flats: A Nuclear Musical
Barbara Donachy, Ceramic artist and peace activist
Eric Wright, Song writer and peace activist
Carole Gallagher, Nuclear photographer
John Craig Freeman, New media professor and augmented reality artist
Patrick Malone, Poet and peace activist
Free and open to the public
The extraordinary June 6, 1989 FBI and EPA raid on the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant was the beginning of the end for that large, nationally important factory just northwest of Arvada, Colo. The raid preceded the plant’s plutonium production shutdown six months later – an action with local, national, and global impacts. It symbolized a change in U.S. national priorities that began balancing national security policy with environmental protection at a time when the Cold War nuclear arms race had slowed considerably. The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, the same month Rocky Flats was shut down.
On June 6, 7, and 8, 2014 the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities will host a multifaceted art and humanities event commemorating the 25th Anniversary of the raid. It will feature an art and history exhibit (including photographs and artifacts from the Rocky Flats plant) and panel discussions focusing on the raid and its consequences, including a grand jury investigation and subsequent disputed settlement of charges involving environmental crimes. Speakers will include former Colorado Governor Roy Romer, former U.S. Representative David Skaggs, former FBI agent Jon Lipsky, and several plant workers, neighbors, activists, and experts.
The major goals of this event are to educate the public and promote respectful dialogue about a vital, often controversial subject with strong links to the Arvada community. Rocky Flats Then and Now: 25 Years After the Raid has been organized by the Arvada Center in partnership with the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado Boulder and the Rocky Flats Institute and Museum (formerly the Rocky Flats Cold War Museum). Rocky Flats Then and Now: 25 Years after the Raid is sponsored in part by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and John and Carol Balkcom.