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Zozobra is throwing some heat.
As part of the 98th burning of the marionette, Old Man Gloom is going head-to-head with the Santa Fe Fuego baseball team in an eight-panel mural created by two Santa Fe sophomores.
The aluminum mural was unveiled Tuesday at the ball field at Fort Marcy Park as part of a collaboration between the City of Santa Fe’s Parks and Open Spaces Division, the Santa Fe Waldorf School and the Kiwanis Club of Santa Fe, according to the city’s website.
The mural, featuring a battle between Zozobra and Santa Fe’s independent baseball team, will be placed at the ball field and will remain up through the end of September.
Jessie Benavidez, a longtime parks project specialist for the City of Santa Fe, helped initiate the project.
“Kate Pavuk (admission and development coordinator at The Santa Fe Waldorf School) reached out to me and requested to partner on painting a piece of artwork/mural,” Benavidez said. “So I thought about it and this is when I came up with the idea of having a Zozobra at Fort Marcy Ball Field.”
After that, Waldorf School sophomores Kaieva Carpenter and Athena Rosser teamed up to create the work of art.
“I think it’s just showing that they both have a nice future,” Benavidez said.
Santa Fe hopes to add more murals in the near future.
“We are going to try this project and it is just here for the moment as we are not making it permanent, in case it might get vandalized,” Benavidez said. “I think that’s important to realize, we do get a lot of vandalism and graffiti, so it’s going to have to be somewhere that we can maybe keep an eye on (it) or taken down. … It’ll be a seasonal project with the baseball season and then down once the season ends.”
