Laura Robbins Mosaics

Wildlife corridor community mural project gets underway

From the March Sandoval Signpost

By Laura Robbins and Cirrelda Snider

We are very excited to announce that a community mural entitled “ Protect Our Wildlife Corridors” will be created on the Placitas Recycling wall off Highway 265. We express our gratitude to the Placitas Recycling Board members for unanimously approving this huge endeavor which will take at least two years to complete. We hope to include every person who is interested in working on the project. Laura Robbins and Cirrelda Snider will spearhead the mural and are asking artists who have experience with clay and/or mosaics to be involved in creating the initial large animals. If you are an interested artist and have not already been contacted, please let us know.

Linda Hughes, will coordinate the Placitas Elementary Arts in the School program to involve children in creating flora and part of the landscape.  Also, Albuquerque’s Bosque School art teacher, Ann Dunbar and science teacher, Dan Shaw, have offered to help with this project during the 2008-9 school year. Students at Bosque School have been intimately involved with monitoring Las Huertas Creek for years and have been providing data to UNM, BEMP, and elsewhere. Students will help to create  cacti and other native plants, etc. We will announce workshops for the general community in the future, but if you are a teacher or leader of a group (whether they be Seniors or Scouts) in Placitas or Bernalillo and would like to get involved, please let us know. We are especially in need of a person who would be willing to work on fund-raising.

We believe that the clay and mosaic mural will enhance the Placitas Community by:

• Engaging and educating the community about local wildlife needs and preservation so that this awareness becomes part of the culture of Placitas.

• Involving community members in an artistic project. Placitas and Bernalillo residents will be invited to help in various ways to see the mural progress and reach completion.

• Adding artistic beauty to a wall in the already beautiful landscape.

• Creating historic quality by stamping names of contributing community members  into clay pieces, as well as those of individuals and businesses who are fiscally supportive.

The Sandias and Rio Grande form parts of very crucial  “Wildlife Corridors” (strips of habitat connecting wildlife populations separated by human activities). Thus the Placitas Recycling Center is in a great position to be a place to honor as well as educate our community about these important parts of our land that happen to be in our own backyard.

January 9-16th/ New York City Trip

One week in New York City and saw the Puryear show at the MOMA,the Body (anatomy) show, the Lion King, visited the beautiful Tibetan Buddhist Retreat in Woodstock, NY, saw the Dinner Party by Judy Chicago and a passionate Carribean Art show at the Brooklyn Museum. I feel inspired, balanced, more myself. Julie Taymor’s work is breathtaking. The leopard costume and dancer’s movements, the rhinocerous, the giraffes and leaping antelopes, the shadow puppets… all the fine art combined into the performance….Having taught children for so many years, I’m so appreciative of this synthesis of the visual arts for performance. The Body Show taught me more in 2 1/2 hours than any previous anatomy/biolology studies. I did pray thanks to the spirits of the human bodies preserved and disected and wonder at the insanity of our detachment to death. The use of bodies in this way is certainly unnatural, but I must say they helped to educate me in a life-changing way. Puryear’s work is elegant moving through space, sometimes capturing moments that then slip away. I now know why The Dinner Party is seen as a major work…. It is. I’m curious as to how she financed it and will have to google the information. Understood more of Tiffany Studio technique and saw another beautiful mosaic/stained glass artist (.) I still see the subways as iconic purgatories but smiles and kindnesses are exchanged. I feel hopeful - safe in a global way - with all the different colors and ethnicities. MANY mosaics in the NY subways: tunnel walls of hats, figures….. great use of values towards realism, modern colors in the Pompeii/Roman style. In many cases, the existing tile walls have the outlines of the figures cut out and then the mosaics are placed within the space.