Visually Speaking is a small reader published on the 40th anniversary of Albuquerque's Public Art program. A series of essays provide context for looking at the city's existing public art and offer a deeper understanding of the situations around which public art projects have been created and consumed. This collection of critical writing explores the “public” in public art and the specific ways in which such projects engage with history, culture, the built landscape, and creative practice in New Mexico's largest city. Visually Speaking highlights public art in our city and engages with it openly, honestly, and creatively. Emphasized in each of these essays is the vital dialogue within any public art process and an invitation to think expansively about the future potential of public art in Albuquerque.

Undark

The sun-bleached stretch of the New Mexico desert known as the Jornada del Muerto — the journey of the dead man — is an unlikely spot for Earth’s premier portal to another world. 

The Revelator

The tiny fish doesn’t reproduce well in years when the water doesn’t flow. Several bad years in a row could push the species closer to extinction.

Paste Magazine

Xu Lizhi left his room—the linoleumed sliver where he had spent nearly three years now, off and on. Its fluorescent lights beating down their sterile sunlight on pages of poetry.

Playboy Magazine

"People do not usually ask of themselves how human they feel. But once you ask this question, maybe you realize that you don’t feel 100-percent human, that there’s a part of you that feels something else.”

Southwest Contemporary Magazine

Grace Rosario Perkins describes a drawing she had made years ago, taking Black Flag’s Family Man album and replacing Raymond Pettibon’s violent imagery with a repeated series of pencil drawings of women. She then filled out the liner notes with her mother’s name, whom she credited with everything from production to bass to vocals. “I want to start a punk band with my mom,” she said, one of dozens of brilliant ideas she mentioned offhand over the course of a conversation in her East Downtown studio in Albuquerque.

Headspace.com

I was eight years old when my father passed away. I vividly remember the last time I saw him: he was at the hospital, reclined in a bed, offering me a bite of his ice cream. Now and then I regret shrugging off his offer. The next time I saw him he was laid out in a coffin.

Weekly Alibi

It sometimes seems that it is difficult for human beings, across geographies or generations or cultures, to care about one another—some archaic biological me-before-them mechanism, maybe. But there's life-sustaining worth in what we've built by way of culture, magic in communication, and more specifically, in story.

The Portalist

The Skype ring tone filled the still air of my office before the screen flickered with the image of a woman—bleached blonde hair, dark eyes, blunt bangs that stretched to the top of her ear on the left side, her temple shaved underneath.   

“Hello, Moon?” I asked the screen. It felt surreal, like something out of my cyberpunk fantasies, to be speaking through a digital feed to a cyborg in Barcelona. I've admired the work of Moon Ribas since I first read about it years ago.

Weekly Alibi

In 1972, just a year before his death, Isabel Allende visited the poet Pablo Neruda in his home. At the time Allende was working as a journalist in her native Chile. As relayed in her memoir, Paula, Neruda gave her some life-changing advice.