Trees will turn blue in ABQ

Tree New Mexico is bringing the art project “The Blue Tree Project” by Australian artist Konstantin Dimopoulos to town.

The international project has been installed in Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The installation in Albuquerque makes the city the seventh U.S. city to host the project. Some of the other cities that have hosted are Sacramento, Calif., Seattle and Gainsville, Fla., to name a few.

	If you go WHAT: “The Blue Trees” WHEN and WHERE: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Friday, April 12 at Tingley Beach; and 9:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday, April 13 at Fourth Street Mall in Downtown Albuquerque INFORMATION: To volunteer and participate email christina@treenm.com

“This puts Albuquerque in great company,” says Suzanne Probart, executive director of Tree New Mexico. “We’re on the forefront of this special movement and I think the community will enjoy this.”

The purpose of “The Blue Tree Project” is to bring awareness to global deforestation. In the project, an area of trees is selected and then painted with a blue colorant. The colorant isn’t paint, but is a biologically safe ultramarine mineral pigment in a water base. It is safe for plants, animals, insects, humans and waterways.

“As purveyors of water, consumers of carbon, treasure houses of species, the world’s forests are ecological miracles,” Dimopoulos says. “They must not be allowed to vanish.”

He also feels strongly about the connection of the project and the community in which it is installed. He says artists can change the environment continually through their practices.

“Whether painting on canvas, creating sculptures or a digital artwork we take reality and alter it,” he says. “The viewer then sees this altered world through our eyes.”

Dimopoulos says “The Blue Trees” takes an urban landscape with which you are familiar and changes it for a brief period of time so that it becomes something unfamiliar, even uncomfortable.

He says we often become disconcerted when our environment changes, yet we have altered or destroyed much of the global environment.

“The primordial forests of the world are disappearing at an alarming rate,” he says. “It is easy to restore the trees we have colored blue back to their natural state. … This social art installation is a global project, carrying a message that needs to be repeated in multiple locations on as many continents as possible.”

The Albuquerque locations chosen are the Fourth Street Mall in Downtown Albuquerque and 25 cottonwood trees located at Tingley Beach.

Probart says trees are canvases and we don’t realize how much work that trees do for the environment.

“It’s just that we don’t really sit and see the kind of works of art that they are,” she says. “It isn’t until you see the blue on them that they truly come alive. This is a project that garners a lot of attention.”

Probart says she got involved with the project after learning from friends that it was installed in Seattle and Sacramento.

“A friend from Sacramento got the ball rolling and hooked me up with Konstantin and his wife,” she says. “I began constructing a game plan to see what it would take to get them out here.”

Dimopoulos will arrive in Albuquerque on Wednesday and the project will begin on Friday, she says.

“He’ll spend a week here and speak to students and do some presentations,” she says. “The city has really stepped up and been a great partner in this. We’ll also have a videographer from the city who will work on a documentary.”

Probart says the locations in Albuquerque are perfect because there are chances for many people to see them.

“Downtown has a lot of foot traffic, so we’re hoping that people take the time to sit down and take in the scenery,” she says. “Tingley Beach will have a bunch and right now, we’re working with the city on having some trees that were donated to be planted in a park and then invite children to help paint them.”