[ Loiosh, an orange tabby wearing a green harness, is laying at his ease on a concrete patio. His leash, also green, is draped decoratively around him, and his eyes are mostly squinted shut. ]
Friday the weather was decent & Loiosh was a WIGGLEBUTT, so I took him along to Gallup for a wander. We didn’t run into a lot of people, alas, but he did get some pets, & I got a bunch of pictures of Gallup.
One of the things I LOVE about Gallup is the amount of art, much of it just … kinda strewn around. This is just one of MANY murals:
[ A mural painted on the side of a concrete building, consisting of several ‘town’ scenes spiralling out from the center of the photo. Most have people; some also show important buildings in town. ]
They’re tearing up part of Coal Avenue to make a pedestrian square. This is where ArtsCrawl is held when there isn’t a panda going on, so I’ve got some hope that this will be the successful kind of pedestrian thing; in the meantime, there’s a lot of chain link fence. But it’s not all UGLY chain link fence, cos people have put art on it. Look at all this crochet! (I think it’s crochet.)
[ A good twenty-foot length of chain link fence has had long, narrow strips of crochet in various colours woven through it in a gentle wave pattern. Big flowers, shaped like sunflowers but in a bunch of colours, are scattered around on that backdrop. ]
Here’s another one, on the other side of the street:
[ This one has long strips of fabric woven through the fence, in zigzags and chevrons. Words are picked out in braided red yarn, but I’m having a hard time figuring out what they say from the photo. ]
Comedy is an art:
[ The front of an old-fashioned movie theatre. Big letters say ‘Events Center’ and below that, ‘Now Playing Everywhere: Home Alone’. ]
The grates that cover tree roots? Art.
[ There’s a tree planted in the middle of the sidewalk. Instead of a boring metal grate covering the dirt it’s planted in, there are metal cutouts of Kokopelli and stylized eagles painted pale blue and fastened to the grate. ]
Yeah, even the trash cans. Art.
[ Six concrete trash can holders are lined up against a wall. Each one is brightly painted — one with red-orange leaves against sky blue, one in jagged mountain outlines in blues and white and deep pink, one with flowers against a different shade of sky blue. All are gorgeous. And Loiosh is walking along the line like he’s inspecting the troops. ]
Also, a leashcat.
