On The Road Again

 We visited the Albuquerque Museum on Wednesday and saw there was a new Visiting Artist installation in the Main Lobby by Eric J. García entitled Since 1776 .

 

An Albuquerque native, García is an Assistant Professor of Painting & Drawing at the University of New Mexico.  He is well known for his massive murals of political cartoons.  This one features U.S. Democracy in peril, with Liberty's right hand chained to the foundation myths and the torch-holding left encircled by razor wire. 

 We enjoyed a brief chat with the Curator of Digital Collections, Jill Hartke, who had set up a table with samples from the photo collection featuring celebrities who have visited the city over the years.  A handout gave a good description of the Collection's holdings which encompasses 200,000 items, along with an account of the sophisticated gear and procedures used to preserve the photos and slides at optimal low temperatures.  The handout also included a link for the Albuquerque Emuseum which I had not seen before.

We did a quick walk-through of the big Route 66 Centennial exhibition.  I'm feeling more charitable toward it than on my first visit.  A lot of effort was made to collect and display the historic items. 

For Margaret the show again called up a torrent of fond memories of a cross-country trip with her parents and two older brothers from Boston to the West Coast.  She turned five on the road. and was ecstatic when she found that her parents had secreted her birthday presents in the car.

Photo Murals

 Chip Thomas murals at the Albuquerque Museum

Watch his larger than life story in a PBS video.

 Or, watch the talk Chip gave at the University of Colorado at Boulder about his time as a doctor in the Navajo Nation and the development of his photo mural project.

Unexpected

 I have been shooting digital more lately due mostly to the fact that I am not willing to pay the inflated prices of color film.  When I recently gained unexpected access to the big shop buildings at the Albuquerque Railyards digital seemed a good choice because of the dim lighting and the subtle colors.  Having gone out that day expecting to just shoot film, the only digital camera I had available was my android phone.  That turned out ok as it also gave me the possibility of trying some panoramic compositions.