by Birdie Jaworski

Beatriz Gibbs travels in early morning darkness, in the bitter winter cold, to open the doors to her bakery’s kitchen. She adds sugar to finely ground flour, mixes her ingredients in big metal bowls as the clock moves from 3 to 4 a.m. Paintings by local artist Floyd Lujan splash color against the wall as Gibbs kneads and …

by Birdie Jaworski
Filmmaker Romaine Fielding fell in love with New Mexico’s endless sky, with her territorial bustle.  At the turn of the last century, residents of Las Vegas reported seeing him roam the dusty Plaza dressed in an expensive wool coat, his mustache carefully clipped and waxed, the epitome of Hollywood glamour. Fielding wrote and directed some of the first …

I caught this moment a few days ago, when my bank – The 1st Community Bank of Las Vegas, New Mexico, hung their new sign. Whoops! They fixed the mistake, but it made me laugh.

by Birdie Jaworski
Jane Lumsden lifted one of her sculptures, a bronze bat, his wings extended in flight. A centipede dangled from his mouth, life-like, arched in surrender. Lumsden ran her hand over the bat’s head, across his back.
“Nature, the wildlife of New Mexico, is my biggest spiritual influence,” explained Lumsden. “The natural world constantly gives me deep, spiritual fulfillment through …

by Birdie Jaworski

Sixth grade student Mary Miller dipped brush into ink. Her short brown hair fell into her eyes but she didn’t move. She held her breath, attention on a small sheet of tin, on a moment in her life painfully opaque, mysterious. A moment so precious she would shroud her self-portrait in a soft halo.
“Art is supposed to tell …

by Birdie Jaworski

Billie Mathews remembers pressing the keys of an upright piano every Sunday morning. Her grandmother sat beside her on a polished bench. Mathews strung together the kind of eclectic melodies an untrained six-year old dreams, expressions of satisfied joy.
“I used to go to a little country church called Storrie Baptist. It was part of the old Storrie Projects.” …

A wood stove belches ash into a shotgun space that once housed the carriage belonging to Nuestra Senora de los Dolores’ Padre Tehane. Artist Alex Ellis stokes the fire, a shelf of stacked paintings to his left, exposed layered stone behind him. The paintings almost whisper, almost shimmer, their layers of rich color deposited on old wood, on marcasite panel. …