Why did you open Clarity Gifts and Gallery?
I opened Clarity because I wanted to have a place in Las Vegas, New Mexico, that I could work with local artists and offer products that were made Fair Trade from around the world as well as here, locally, in New Mexico. Having a great location helps. We’re off the historic Old Plaza …

The face of a man – curiously missing eyes, missing teeth, his brain seemingly evaporated – almost grins from a pedestal in Burris Hall. Spikes protrude from his head, evidence of a piercing gone mad, of the torture of migraine, of a troublesome mauling with oversized golf tees, perhaps, or martini stirrers. Matthew C. Wicker’s, “Stacks,” is both disturbing and hilarious at once. An artist from New York, Wicker is one of over eighty professional iron artists in Iron Tribe.

“I was trying to describe this group of people,” explains David Lobdell, NMHU Department of Fine Arts professor, and curator of the Iron Tribe exhibition, now on display through Friday, March 6. “We are willing to spend our extra money to do this – we’ll drive across the country, drive for 30 hours one way. We didn’t go to school together. I learned it after school, when I was just started out at Highlands. We’re not necessarily friends. We come together out of our mutual interest. The world Tribe seemed to suit the group best, especially for the name of a program that happens in New Mexico.”

A warm pair of soft hands wiped the hair from my forehead. The Pacific Ocean roared from a tiny black boombox, its groan and tumble shifting my reality from winter wind to the promise of summer. I knew her shift of tide and sand, her captured echo of gull, of dried kelp rustling against barnacled moor. It’s been almost five …

An eight-year-old girl stares at the camera, the hot West African sun splashing across her shoulders like a translucent cape. Tightly braided hair hugs her scalp, accentuating a delicate forehead, a slightly furrowed brow. She wears a thin white wrap fastened around her neck with a fraying fiber cord. She shoots the lens an expression that almost approaches a smile, …

Winter nights at my home mean a small glass of red wine for the grownups, a warm mug of hot cocoa topped with marshmallows for my boys. Twilight brings fantastic bedtime stories, a cozy comforter, a plump, lazy dog at the foot of a soft bed. These kinds of comforts aren’t shared by every member of our Las Vegas community. …

The roads of Bernal skirt adobe home and coyote fence, roam past a cottage store where a curly-haired abuela sells you cans of fizzy drinks and bags of spicy hot potato chips. She speaks with a soft voice, with the graceful lilt of her Castilian ancestors. She knows why you’re here, why you let your car wheels embrace the frost-encrused …

by Birdie Jaworski
When I was a kid my Kentucky relatives scared me. We rarely visited them. I can count six times I saw them during my young years, each time a fishin’ pole biscuit haze, my dad hiding outside, far away, with the newspaper and a transistor radio, my mom drinking Tab in the kitchen. My sisters and I tried …