"I've always linked all my art to 'dead,' because anytime I would ever see artwork from when I was a kid, I'd always assume that person must be thinking that they must die soon or they wouldn't focus their concentration all at one time on one project," show organizer and black-triangle painter Jude Pacheco said.
The show is Friday from 5 to 8 p.m. at 808 Park Ave. S.W., next to Java Joe's.
The 7-year-old OFFCenter is a studio packed with art supplies, and it opens its doors to people who lack resources to paint, sculpt or sew at home. It has areas for sewing, diamond cutting, jewelry making, collaging, painting and printing. There's also a back shop full of framing materials.
"The founder, Janice, was very much into promoting OFFCenter as a community model, as a center that should be in every community," director Ron Breen said. "(She believed) that Albuquerque should have dozens of these and that every city should be looking at having these as places for people to go and experience the creative processing of making art, to mix and form a stronger community with art as a bonding process."
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
People can take their art home or sell it in the OFFCenter gallery shop and keep 80 percent of the profit.
Breen said the city did not renew the center's $50,000 grant this year, which covers half its costs. He's looking into holding workshops taught by high-profile artists on weekends, when the center is usually closed, to bring in money.
"We do have some grant money, but it doesn't cover the building's costs, the open studio," he said. "That's a big obstacle there. It's hard to get the sustaining money to have an operating center."
Ayren Valer, a mixed-media artist exhibiting her two-piece photograph display, which includes images of umbrellas, said that with the state of the economy, artists will probably barter more for their work, because there's an interconnected understanding in the art community that artists are swimming through hard times.
"Like Bob Dylan said, 'A hard rain's gonna fall,' and every generation always has this thing like, 'Oooh, Armageddon,' and the world's going to end and what they do is like an umbrella," she said, referring to the umbrella images in her art. "You know how umbrellas are really flimsy and turn inside out? It's ridiculous. Anything that happens, there's nothing you can do to hide or protect yourself from it. It just is."
Her two pieces, which make up one large work, are called "Death: The Great Illusion" and "Reincarnation: The Kaleidoscopey Adventure."
"I had a near-death experience when I was 2 1/2," Valer said. "I fell out of a moving car. In the background, I put these faces, like people. That's to show people's fear of death and anger. A lot of people get angry when they get ill and know they're going to die."
She included a collage image of a bird with no wings in this piece.
"That symbolizes that nobody escapes death," she said. "Has anyone ever really come back and talked about death? Even Houdini, he said to his wife, 'If there is such a way to contact you,' - 'cause séances were big back then - 'I'll drop a feather off the mantel. Wherever you live, always keep a feather on the mantel.' Unfortunately, the feather never moved. But to me that doesn't prove anything. What it proves to me is he went on to some ecstatic place where he didn't want to come back."
