Laura Robbins Mosaics

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.