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On a balmy spring morning in March, I joined fellow Burque帽os for a Community Mural Paint Day led by artist Jade Cruz at the Rail Yards Market. While painting the jeans of a farmer sketched onto the historic Pattern House, I meditated on public art's unique potential to reflect the diverse human experience, affirm belonging to a physical place and promote a sense of shared communal responsibility. Artists of varying ages, backgrounds and identities were connecting, laughing, dancing and transforming an everyday public space into a stage for multicultural connection.

sa国际传媒官网网页入口 is famous for its rich and robust art galleries. Our greatest collective gallery is the public space. The ambitious sa国际传媒官网网页入口 and Bernalillo County 2024 Public Art Census conducted by Rokh Research & Design Studio affirms this assertion. Canvassing for the census uncovered 11,225 artworks across 20,000 linear miles. I share Mayor Tim Keller鈥檚 belief in his 鈥淟etter from the Mayor鈥� for the published census that, 鈥淭his effort has made sure our public art 鈥� an important part of our community鈥檚 identity 鈥� is recorded and examined through the lens of spatial justice.鈥�

As chair of the sa国际传媒官网网页入口 Arts Board, I take the opportunity to ensure spatial justice seriously. As such, I am deeply concerned about a City Council ordinance that allows the city to create Enhanced Service and Safety Zones, increasing patrols and criminalization for sidewalk utilization. When we restrict public space and criminalize the people who inhabit it, we don鈥檛 clean up our streets. We destroy the accessibility and empathy that are integral to a vibrant arts culture.

Like our democratic processes, true public space and art should engage, represent and be made available to everyone. Consider the Department of Arts & Culture and Public Art Urban Enhancement Division鈥檚 City Brights initiative, now in its third iteration. This year's series of installations seeks to celebrate the Route 66 Centennial and the highway鈥檚 former stretch running through Downtown. sa国际传媒官网网页入口 residents can engage with an array of interactive installations from public sidewalks along the Downtown corridor. But an authentic reflection of Route 66 requires acknowledging and honoring its historic use as a place of respite for the unhoused community. If our public spaces and public art installations are only designed for those of us who have the economic means to leave and return home, they become tourist destinations and private galleries. Public art becomes a tool for displacement and disenfranchisement rather than a tool for authentic communal immersion and improvement.

True public space and art, again, like our democratic processes, should also be messy and uncomfortable. We are not arrested by Francisco Goya鈥檚 鈥淪aturn Devouring His Son鈥� for its idyllic representation of the father-son bond. Rather, we are deeply troubled by the cruelty of Saturn and the potential for cruelty in our own social and political lives. When we use that cruelty to remove blight, we are engaging in a form of censorship. We are violently erasing a part of our community that makes us uncomfortable. Erasure is the very thing great art refuses to do. True public art and true spatial justice demand we keep everyone, regardless of housing status, in the mural and in our public spaces.

An sa国际传媒官网网页入口 that views its most vulnerable residents as a design flaw is an sa国际传媒官网网页入口 that has lost its creative soul. It is an sa国际传媒官网网页入口 that accepts the brutality of Goya鈥檚 depiction of gluttonous power as the right of city government. It is an sa国际传媒官网网页入口 at risk of abandoning its greatest collective gallery and all the connection, laughter and dancing that it creates.

Caleb Ferganchick is the chair of the sa国际传媒官网网页入口 Arts Board. He represents District 7.