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GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. — Born and raised in Colorado, Ronna Lee Sharpe did not want to move to Washington, D.C. when her husband landed a job there in 1980.

“It was culture shock. I felt claustrophobic. Here you can see the sky where the sun comes up and goes down. There, there were too many trees,” Sharpe said.

“Socially, geographically, it was a whole different world.”

Sharpe held a bachelor's degree in anthropology and history from the University of Colorado in Denver. She loved college, so she looked around for a graduate program and found one in American Studies and Folklore at George Washington University.

Many of her classmates worked at the Smithsonian Institute, the Library of Congress and the National Endowment of the Arts.

“Once I got to grad school I started loving (Washington, D.C.) except for not being in Colorado,” Sharpe said.

Each year the Festival of American Folklife takes place in Washington covering the entire Washington Mall. It's a two-week festival featuring performers, crafts people and community groups from across the United States and foreign countries. An estimated million people attend the festival over the two-week period.

After she graduated in 1988, one of Sharpe's professors from the college hired her to coordinate a program at the festival to celebrate the centennial of the American Folklore Society.

Hawaiian dancing, Cajun fiddling, Louisiana boat builders, and southern African-American basketmakers are some of the programs that have been featured in the past.

“There's a ton of artists and crafts people and performers,” Sharpe said. “A folklorist is there to talk about the heritage and why it's important.”

After the festival ended Sharpe applied for a 13-week fellowship at the National Endowment for the Arts where she learned about grant making at the national level. While there she heard about a job being created in Grand Junction where her parents had retired.

Sharpe applied and was hired as a cultural heritage specialist — a position created by the Colorado Council on the Arts in partnership with the Museum of Western Colorado.

“They wanted a state arts council presence on the Western Slope,” Sharpe said.

Sharpe's husband agreed to move back to Colorado, but after a year they divorced. He moved on, and she stayed.

Beautiful tools

Sharpe's job is to find people who do traditional arts and crafts, dance and music. She helps promote those traditions through various projects, public performances and apprenticeships.

“In doing that we raise awareness that Colorado culture is so rich and so diverse,” Sharpe said. “Folk art is the artistic expressions that grow out of everyday life.

“It's where art and real life meet.”

For example, saddlemakers take something that's useful and needed like a saddle and often make them elaborately artistic.

The Colorado Saddlemakers Association holds three-day seminars each year in April at the Museum of Western Colorado's Whitman Education Center where the public can learn about saddle making.

Quilt making is another example of a tradition that Sharpe, 58, promotes.

At a quilt exhibit in Glenwood Springs five generations of quilt makers in one family were highlighted, including the youngest daughter who made crayon quilts.

Through grants, Southern Ute tribal members have been paid or the time necessary to teach and pass on their cultural heritage to the next generation.

The late Francis Whitaker was a Carbondale blacksmith who also received grants to apprentice others in the art of blacksmithing.

“He was a classic example of a traditional artist who started as an apprentice at 16 to become one of the most well-known blacksmiths in America,” Sharpe said.

“He wanted to share his knowledge and so he established a teaching forge at the college in Carbondale.”

Whitaker later received the National Heritage Award, a highlight of her career, Sharpe said.

Sharpe learned about a person in Craig who supposedly braided rawhide beautifully.

After she “tracked him down,” she ended up meeting several people who artistically braided leather and rawhide.

“But their neighbors didn't know it. They didn't know there were artists next door,” Sharpe said.

So she organized an exhibit at the museum in Craig where there were “three heaping tables of this incredible artwork,” the community didn't know about, Sharpe said.

The feeling of pride that people have when someone recognizes that what they do is important — that's the best reward for me, Sharpe said.

“There's all these guys in their workshops doing beautiful work,” she said. “They want tools that work well and are beautiful.”

Married at a poetry gathering

Sharpe's job description also included learning about cowboy poetry.

Cowboy poets from several western states gather regularly to recite poetry or sing songs — both originals and old classics —about ranching life and their connections with the land.

They take the stories and put them in poetic form to make them artistic, Sharpe said.

She helped organize her first cowboy poetry gathering in Battlement Mesa in 1989.

In August, 1990, at another cowboy poetry gathering in Silt, a San Luis Valley cowboy poet named Vess Quinlan introduced the newly divorced Sharpe (who at the time went by the name Ronna Widner) to another cowboy poet named Tom Sharpe.

Ronna and Tom Sharpe met again at a poetry gathering in Durango in October. The following year the pair were married by a cowboy poet at the Durango Cowboy Gathering, the day before it started.

Fellow cowboy poets read poems and sang songs during the wedding ceremony.

That night at the reception family and cowboy poets from all over the country — many of whom the couple didn't know — helped the Sharpes celebrate and eat their wedding cake.

Tom Sharpe, who now trains and shows horses, was born and raised in a ranching family outside Trinidad.

“He's a true cowboy poet. He's the real thing,” Sharpe said.

Tom Sharpe was one of the poets featured at a Grand Junction cowboy poetry gathering held Friday and Saturday at the Whitman Education Center, at the corner of Fourth Street and Ute Avenue, where Sharpe has an office.

‘Best job in the world'

Sharpe's job requires she travel around the state meeting with people to help them develop cultural heritage programs for their area. She helped develop a map of south central Colorado's galleries, scenic byways and museums.

“The Colorado Council on the Arts moved into the office of Economic Development so it's working in ways to help people appreciate and utilize arts and cultural resources as part of their economic development plan,” Sharpe said.

“A lot of people think a folklorist is a storyteller. What I try and do is help other people tell their story,” Sharpe said.

“It's the best job in the world.”

Reach Sharon Sullivan at ssullivan@gjfreepress.com