ABQ Artwalk's 7-year anniversary sparks reflections on the future of art in the city

On Friday, April 4, ABQ Artwalk celebrates its 7-year anniversary with new venues and events, plus the season’s final City Brights light installation. It’s a milestone that’s causing local art lovers to reflect on the continued expansion of public art and technology-focused art in Albuquerque.

Sherri Brueggemann, a recent Creative Bravos Award winner and the manager of the Public Art Urban Enhancement Division of the city of Albuquerque, said she has witnessed a profound transformation of Albuquerque’s art scene.

“We went through what I call some dark times where murals were only categorized as graffiti, not as fine art,” Brueggemann said. “So, I’m really proud that the public art program was able to transcend that way of thinking about wall art.”

In less than two decades, Albuquerque has blossomed into a city where public art is everywhere.

The Public Art Census that Brueggemann’s department recently completed identified over 11,000 public artworks in Albuquerque and surrounding areas of Bernalillo County, including almost 1,800 murals.

“We only funded probably 30 or 40 of them,” Brueggemann said, “We’ve just been blown away by the data.”

“We also found that overall the condition of artworks that we can see out in the public realm are in either good or excellent condition,” she said, “so that says that we take care of our stuff.”

Brueggemann’s Public Art division also sponsored the City Brights program, which has enhanced Downtown Albuquerque with cutting-edge light displays by local artists. City Brights was the brainchild of the city’s Arts and Culture director Shelle Sanchez.

“We did the first one right before the pandemic,” Brueggeman said.

Although City Brights was enormously popular, she said it took a few years to recover from the pandemic before launching City Brights II this past summer. The city will announce an open call for City Brights III in the coming months, with the goal of making City Brights an annual occurrence.

For the final City Brights project of the season, “Occ Station 22,” artist Celestino Crowhill will create a visual real-time weather monitoring station on the columns of the Occidental Life Building, using open-source weather data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other remote weather sensors. Visitors can experience this interactive installation during April’s Artwalk.

Jordan MacHardy was a recipient of a City Brights grant for “Robot Laser Show,” a collaborative project with fellow tech artist Aaron Mancha, which dazzled spectators at this month’s Artwalk.

MacHardy debuted his laser-shooting robots – and robot DJ – at Café Entropy, a two-story Downtown space he recently purchased. He has big plans for turning Café Entropy into a community gathering space and a center for immersive, technology-centric art experiences – something of a combination of Meow Wolf and a more traditional museum, as he explains it.

MacHardy lived in Albuquerque 20 years ago but left for a career in ecologically focused technology on the West Coast. After dabbling in technological art and producing immersive public art installations in Oakland, California, he decided to focus full-time on building a community for high-tech art.

Because real estate in the Bay Area was out of his budget, he started looking around the country for places where he might set up Café Entropy.

“I looked all over the country for a place that would make sense – a place that had enough of an art scene and that was affordable enough. And Albuquerque started to look more and more appealing,” MacHardy said. “Then, I came down to check out the FUSE Makerspace, and that place was just awesome.”

“It happened to be when there was an art walk happening, and I saw all the energy that was here and all the desire to pump up an art scene,” he said.

Those factors made his decision to return to Albuquerque an easy one, and he was happy to come home.

MacHardy expects Café Entropy to be ready for its full-scale launch this summer, and he hopes it will add to Albuquerque’s already vibrant art tech scene.

“There’s a couple things happening here that are helpful for the art and technology scene,” said MacHardy, “like the CURRENTS New Media festival up in Santa Fe, Paseo Project in Taos and obviously Meow Wolf has a lot of people doing experiential art. Then, there’s a really cool program at (University of New Mexico) called ARTSLab that focuses a lot on tech art, and they have a really cool facility with a bunch of cool equipment and cool artists coming out of it.”

UNM’s Experimental Art and Technology program and its interdisciplinary ARTSLab, along with the Internet of Things boot camp at Central New Mexico Community College, are often cited as key institutional incubators that feed and support Albuquerque’s thriving art and technology culture.

“Many of the City Brights artists went through the Internet of Things boot camp,” Brueggeman said.

From community murals to robots shooting lasers, the future of Albuquerque’s art scene looks bright.

ABQ Artwalk's 7-year anniversary sparks reflections on the future of art in the city