Link + Ink: Desert Edition

Custom made for Shepard Fairey by Todd Sanders

Post-pop neon signs, public art that kept homeless warm gets an award, and street art for Navajo Nation are some of the field notes about art for the public space of the desert.

---

Todd Sanders

As a graphic design design major in the 1990s, Todd Sanders lived in a vintage trailer while working as neon sign shop apprentice. He's now the retro neon king of Austin, Texas, creating “crude charm.”  I American Profile

---

Four artists have been selected to serve as Artists-in-Residence in Zion National Park in 2015: Camila Galofre, painter from Ecuador, South America (February 2 – March 3).   2D mixed media from Bowling Green, Kentucky (April 1 – April 30): Benjamin Rusnak, photographer, from Boca Raton, Florida (September 1 – September 30), and  Earnest Ward, art journalist, from Fort Worth, Texas ( October 16 – November 14). 

---

From photographs to pop-meets-petroglyphs paintings, an exhibit in New Mexico shows 68 pieces new acquisitions for Bernalillo County Public Art Collection. That county's Public Art Program was established in 1992 with the adoption of the county’s Art in Public Places Ordinance in 1992. I Albuquerque Journal. 

---

Phoenix, Arizona, artist Ann Morton's idea, The Ground Cover Public Art Project from 2013, received a first place award in Arizona Forward’s 34th Annual Environmental Excellence Awards. Morton and her 600 “blanketeers” produced 300 handmade blankets that were assembled into a 116-by-50-foot art piece in a downtown Phoenix vacant lot. Each tapestry worked as a pixel within a larger tapestry, then disassembled to be passed out as blankets to the homeless. There's video of the installation. 

---

James Marshall  with "Radiate" 2014. Photo: Sean Deckert

Street artist / muralist James Marshall ( a.k.a. Dalek) returns to SMoCA for a series of weekend events November 7 and 8

---

It was "one of the busiest (street art) seasons in the cities history," writes 303 Magazine in their "roundup to celebrate all of the unbelievable murals of 2014."  Denver Street Art of the Season: Part Two.

---

Muralists in New Mexico with an interest in Latino influences, or street artists who depend on clean lines, should take in "Miguel Covarrubias: Drawing a Cosmopolitan Line"  at the Georgia O'Keefe Museum. It "firmly establishes Covarrubias as a man of his time, a man connected to the modernist painters and writers of his day, it takes a critical look at the artist as well" writes Michael Abatemarco at Pasatiempo.

Pictured: Catalogue of an exhibition at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum using "Miguel Covarrubias, Self-portrait" for the cover  (1937).

---

Repairs to a levee in Pueblo Colorado will take down what Guinness World Records calls "The largest mural in the world." It's been a three mile long concrete canvas for 40 years. The first painting was a fish in a bathtub painted at night back in the 1970s, says local artist and teacher Cynthia Ramu, coordinator of the levee mural for the last two decades.. Plans are being made for new work to be installed after the levee is replaced. Shanna Lewis of Colorado Public Radio reports.

---

The State Press on ASU student "Clyde" and his un-commissioned large-scale work that seems to win over the neighborhoods. “When the cuardo (painting) appeared it made me happy,” said 64-year-old Rosaria Barrera. “It reminds me of the paredes de las artes (walls of the arts) back home in Mexico. I wish for it to stay.” State Press.

---

 Photo © Jetsonorama.

The Painted Desert Project is overseen by Chip Thomas and he is adapting street art to reflect the culture of Navajo Nation in isolated landscape. Artists are invited to an extended stay, compared to the 4 or 5 days of a typical street art  festival, so they can "study their new environment and to fully immerse themselves before conjuring a new work," reports Brooklyn Street Art. More coverage at Beautiful Decay and HuffPo.

The work of urban artist, Alexis Diaz, in Antelope Hills, approximately 20 miles north of Flagstaff Arizona on Interstate 89. 
Photo © Jetsonorama.