Art City, New Mexico

                      "People wish to be settled [but] only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them."

                                                                                        -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Last April, my friend, Alan, and I took a trip to Tucumcari, NM, primarily to photograph iconic buildings and locations related to old Route 66, whose 100th anniversary is this year.  I wrote a couple of blog posts with our photos which you can see here and here.

A few miles outside Tucumcari is another area with much more contemporary art:  Art City, a 40-acre glamping and sculpture park which features large-scale installations similar to those you might see at Nevada's "Burning Man" festival.  

Art City is more than just an art park.  It aims to use art installations to create sustainable economic development in small, overlooked (i.e., bypassed) highway towns like Tucumcari.

We had a great time photographing the imaginative and intriguing pieces scattered throughout an open field.  Here are some examples:

The Lips

This is a stainless steel and aluminum piece by San Francisco-based street artist fnnch.  It's 10' x 20', weighs 3,000 pounds, and is the only large-scale sculpture he ever created.

Launch Intention

This is a 25'-long piece by Griffin Loop in the shape of a paper airplane.  It's made of steel and weighs four tons!  (Don't ask me how they transported it.)

Evolution Field

A visually fascinating piece by Matt McConnell, 12' x 30' of curving steel.

Centered

Five 8'-diameter concentric rings made of stainless steel and weighing 4,000 pounds; created by Darrell Ansted.

If you look carefully along the axis of the cylinder of rings, in the distance you will see . . .

Facing the Fear Beast

This gigantic piece, created by Tigre Marshaal-Lively, is made of steel and motorcycle tires.  It's 25 feet tall and 36 feet long, and weighs 8,000 pounds.

Facing the beast is a statue of a small human:

Art City is on NM highway 104 north of Tucumcari.  Google Maps says it's closed temporarily -- I hope not permanently because it's worth the side trip if you're traveling through Tucumcari on I-40.

If you would like to see these images in a larger format, please visit my photography website, Todos Juntos Photography, by clicking here.

Enjoy!

Two Operas, Part 2 - The Farolitos of Christmas

 

NOTE:  This is the second of two posts about opera dress rehearsals I photographed last fall.  See post immediately below this one for the post about the other opera.

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The December dress rehearsal was The Farolitos of Christmas, a one-act opera based on a story by New Mexico author Rudolfo Anaya, author of the beloved Bildungsroman, Bless Me, Ultima. The opera's book and score were written/composed by Hector Armienta, whose operas Bless Me, Ultima (2018) and Zorro (2022) have also been presented by Opera Southwest.  Hector was present and engaged at the dress rehearsal.

Farolitos, in northern New Mexico, are the small paper bags ballasted with sand and filled with votive candles to decorate the exterior of homes and buildings during the Christmas season.  You may have heard them referred to as luminarias.  Today the terms are interchangeable, but in northern New Mexico back in the day, luminarias were originally small bonfires lit on Christmas Eve to symbolically guide the shepherds (villagers as pastores) in a ritual procession to the birthplace of Christ.

And -- at least the way Rudolfo Anaya tells it -- the paper bag version (farolitos) didn't exist until 1944 when, in a northern New Mexico village, there was a mischievous, joyful girl named Luz ("light" in Spanish, natch!).

Luz's father is away at war, recovering from wounds and longing to be home in time for Christmas.

Luz lives with her mother and grandfather . . .

. . . but her grandfather is too sick to build the bonfires (luminarias) for the village this year.

Luz wishes that her father was home to take over the work from her grandfather, and they sing a beautiful duet as Luz resolves to assume responsibility for the luminarias.  Her solution is to use . . . yes, paper bags filled with sand and a candle as a substitute for the bonfires:  farolitos (which means "little lanterns" in Spanish).

On Christmas Eve, the villagers re-enact the procession of the pastores, each carrying a candle through the darkened village.

But Luz is ready with her paper bags, sand, and candles, and she enlists her friends, her mother, and her grandfather to help set them out.

Soon, the villagers return to help light the candles.

Then the first snow of the season begins to fall . . .

and, unbeknownst to Luz, her father has returned from the war.

The opera ends with a joyful family reunion and, thanks to a girl named Luz, the beginning of a new tradition:  the farolitos of Christmas.

The Farolitos of Christmas is a heartwarming story for the Christmas season, and perhaps the beginning of a new tradition for Opera Southwest.

If you would like to see the complete dress rehearsal images, please visit my photography website, Todos Juntos Photography, by clicking here.

Enjoy!

Two Operas, Part 1 - Dolores

 

Last fall I photographed two operas (one in October, one in December) presented by Albuquerque's local opera company, Opera Southwest.  Both have their origins in Hispanic culture and traditions, and both featured scores by Hispanic composers.  This post is about the first one, Dolores.  I will post a separate installment for the second one, The Farolitos of Christmas.

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The October opera was Dolores, based on events in the life of Dolores Huerta, a labor organizer and leader born in New Mexico who worked side by side with Cesar Chavez in the 1960s to co-found the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), which evolved later into the United Farm Workers (UFW).  The opera takes place in 1968, during the Delano (CA) vineyard workers' strike and California grape boycott . . .

 and depicts key moments in the workers' struggles including Chavez's hunger strike; 

Martin Luther King's and RFK's support for the strike, and their tragic assassinations barely two months apart.

One of the most moving moments was an aria sung by the character of the Ambassador Hotel busboy who held the dying RFK in his arms:

Dolores, Chavez, and the workers' movement faced oppression by growers and the U.S. government (embodied in the character of Richard Nixon, whom my camera loved and who nearly stole the show) . . .

. . . as well as internal disputes among the strike leadership . . .

. . . and, for Dolores, a dark night of the soul:

The opera ends as Dolores rallies the workers to continue the strike and their mission.

We were honored to have the librettist and composer -- Marella Martin Koch and Nicolas Lell Benavides -- attending the rehearsal . . . 

with Nic literally cutting and pasting last-minute changes in the show . . .

 and fine-tuning things with the director and the conductor.

If  you would like to see images from the complete dress rehearsal in a larger format, please visit my photography website, Todos Juntos Photography, by clicking here.

Enjoy!