A Gallup Renaissance
Mike Smith
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Here in New Mexico, men and women throughout history have refused to leave the creation of art solely in the hands of formally trained professionals. Here, people have embraced the idea of folk art—of art made by…folks, by unschooled but passionate people, by individuals working with little more than ideas and inititiative.
From the hunters who scratched petroglyphs into rock walls across the region centuries ago, to the early-1900s shepherds who carved dendroglyphs into the aspens of Carson National Forest; from the Catholic santeros and their hand-carved and hand-painted icons, to Gallup's Navajo weavers and their elaborate rugs, to the welders in Alamogordo and Moriarty with their metal front-yard dinosaurs, New Mexico has a long tradition of taking art away from the establishment and carrying it quietly out to the masses.
All of this brings us to this week in Gallup—that windy, neon, edge-of-the-rez iconoville of the modern West, seat of McKinley County in northwestern New Mexico—where one such revolutionary and anonymous artist—or art collective—has taken the creation of legal tender currency away from the suits at the U.S. Mint and begun to practice it independently.
Since April 20, reported the May 5, 2008 Albuquerque Journal, crude reproductions of five-dollar bills have been used for payment in at least three Gallup-area convenience stores—at the Mustang on Coal Avenue, at the Mustang on West Highway 66, and at Lowe’s Uptown Shop ‘N Save. These stores are mentioned here by name only because their employees may be of interest to any scientists studying people afflicted with CIPA, or Congenital Insensitivity to Pain with Anhidrosis. CIPA is a condition whose symptoms may include an inability to sense wildly different textures by touch; for instance, someone thus afflicted might be entirely unable to differentiate between the crushed softness of money and the sharp smoothness of printer paper, a task most people wouldn't usually have a problem with.
“The store’s employees have accepted counterfeit $5 bills—all of which were described as poor quality fakes,” reported the May 3-4, 2008 Gallup Independent. “The bills were most likely produced through a color photo printer.”
“‘They’re obviously fake—from the texture, ink and markings,’ [Lieutenant Rick White, a spokesman for the Gallup Police Department] said.”
Evidently, Gallup may be about to experience a multi-disciplinary renaissance of sorts—with scientists descending upon the city to begin studying its medically anomalous gas station clerks, and with an artistic, financially inspired tour-de-force flowing out of the art-for-everyone urinal of Marchel DuChamp (to borrow a metaphor from Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev), coursing out the doors of various gas stations, and pouring wildly into the gutters of the city's streets.
No longer will "The Man" dictate to Gallup's free-spirited artistic pioneers just what shape, size, color, texture, or design money needs to be to be accepted in exchange for goods and services. That day is over! The time has come, these bold new visionaries have implied, to rise up and do it yourself, to make art your way, to create it the way you think it should be done—with your illegally downloaded copy of Photoshop, your home computer, and your $79 Wal-Mart printer—and then to trade that art for lottery tickets.
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Reader Comments (2)
Now if I could just figure out what I want to do with my drupal site.
http://ufomagazine.squarespace.com/
http://machine-elf.squarespace.com/
Thanks for those website addresses. I'll add them to this site's links list. And when Mystrangenewmexico.com's redesign is complete, I'm going to beg you to consider writing a monthly New Mexico UFO column. I can think of no one more qualified.
And yeah, Squarespace is pretty good.