In Memory: Stacy Isenbarger, 1982 – 2025, Broadsided artist and friend

Posted on August 11, 2025 | Broadsided

We are sorry to share news of the unexpected passing of our friend and collaborator Stacy Isenbarger.

Stacy Isenbarger joined the Broadsided team in 2013 and was not only a brilliant, creative, thoughtful collaborator in the broadsides she created artwork for, but also a bright, supportive, and animating force at Broadsided, in the art world, and in her community. An esteemed Professor of Art + Design and Acting Associate Dean at the University of Idaho, Stacy described herself as an artist, professor, mover, and shaker. She was all that and more.

For the last visual response she created at Broadsided, a piece responding to Isabel Acevedo’s poem “Los Macheteros,” Stacy sent us this note along with her image:

the necklace in it came from my Grandmother. That moment where her bangles clap hooked me and made me think more about the trinkets we pass down. Seemed fitting to counter that remembered bracelet with this necklace as I picture a child flying higher and freer on her swing after her Grandmother’s release.

Over the years at Broadsided, Stacy created ten brilliant, innovative, mixed-media images in response to poems by Jericho Brown, Erica Reid, Tyler Mills, Robert Wrigley, and others. When I look back over what Stacy shared here, I’m struck by the many times that hands are represented–holding, reaching, caring hands–hands alongside things impossible or difficult to hold, be it barbed wire, light, or (in all of them) our attempt to grasp the ineffable, to hold connection.

In an introductory note to the Broadsided anthology, published in 2022, Stacy writes:

A broadside, here, isn’t only a dialectic between image and viewer, but a triangulation in which poet and artist meet in a space where neither has complete control, where a new, ever-present thrum is amplified. Softening the artistic ego reminds us that we do not always need to speak, for there is power in listening, and listening well. Conversation is gifted constraint, a communal dialogue through which intention is returned to image.

This generosity of spirit is characteristic of all I know of Stacy, who took seriously the beautiful play of living. She is and will be missed by her friends, collaborators, students, and the spaces that have held her art. We are grateful that, here, we have her images and words to return to in the broadsides she animated with her vision.

In answering a question about how the image for “Los Macheteros” came to be, Stacy shared the following:

In the collage, I first tried to split the air with one drastic cut. I weaved that gap with a sense of tangled air and, to offer subtle suggestion of a blood line, I used red, both in the “air” and the silhouetted hand in the lower left section of the image. As I arranged the layers, I wanted to offer a sense of gravity but not a dark or too heavy one, the blade throughout the poem is sharp and powerful, but is rooted in so much strength and good intention.

Stacy’s words feel resonant when we consider the cut of her loss, the strength and good intention that she brought to her relationships and her artwork. The air is tangled in her absence. We are grateful for the ways that her work and memory continue, and our thoughts are will all of those who miss her.

Below are images of the collaborations Stacy created at Broadsided, along with images of her she shared with us.