Weekly Workshops
Every Wednesday fellows learned design, color theory, community engagement, and mural technique alongside their mentor muralists.
Neighbors helping neighbors, across generations of Route 66
This mural sits at a literal crossroads — the site is sandwiched between the historic and current alignments of Route 66, in the highway's centennial year — and the composition leans into that. A vintage green pickup, bed piled with fresh produce and marked with an "I ❤ NM" plate, sits in the foreground as a farmer shares what he's grown; just beside him, a woman offers water to a resting dog, prickly pear framing the moment. Behind them, the Rio Grande and the Sandia Mountains ground the scene in this exact stretch of Albuquerque, while the overpass and Route 66 shield tie it to the road that's connected this neighborhood to the rest of the country for a hundred years. Fittingly, given the credit union and thrift store nearby, the mural isn't about the road as a tourist attraction — it's about the everyday generosity that road has carried through generations: neighbors feeding neighbors, tending to each other, building stability the same simple way they always have.
San Pedro Signal
This concept sketch translates The Radio Center's broadcast signal into a wall of motion and sound. Three figures — sprawled against a boombox, dancing with a flower-shaped mic, stretched out under a pair of headphones — are caught mid-listen, mid-groove, each tuned into something different yet moving to the same rhythm. Behind them, concentric arcs sweep like a speaker cone or tuning dial across the wall, while a jagged audio waveform ripples outward on the right, making the signal itself visible — sound rendered as line and shape rather than illustrated literally. Musical notes and lightning-bolt bursts scatter through the composition, and a green ribbon of motion sweeps right to left, pulling the eye across all three figures in one continuous read. Bright, flat color and simple, rounded forms keep the mural legible at a glance, in keeping with the brief's call for bold shapes over literal broadcast iconography — this is San Pedro's airwaves felt as physical energy, not diagrammed as a radio tower.
Mountain to Table: A San Pedro Harvest
Oversized produce and fruit dominate the foreground of this mural — chiles, corn, and orchard fruit rendered large and close, the way a market table piles them high — while a ranch-and-farm landscape unfolds behind them: rolling foothills, grazing cattle, orchard rows, and the thread of an acequia cutting through cultivated fields. The scale shift does the storytelling: what's small and specific up close (a single ristra, a jar of preserves, a cast-iron pan) sits against the vastness of the land that made it possible, tying San Pedro's ranching and irrigation-agriculture roots directly to what ends up on a plate. Historic cattle brand marks run along the mural's edge as a border pattern, echoing the livestock heritage visible in the background scene. Tucked among the foreground produce, multigenerational hands reach in — passing a basket, setting a table — grounding the whole landscape in the everyday act of a family cooking together. It reads less like a farm-to-table slogan and more like a single, layered view: the mountains and ranchland that fed this neighborhood then, brought forward into the home kitchens that still feed it now.