Two Yuccas

Somewhere between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, if you know where to look, the yucca stands its ground. It doesn't ask for attention. It simply exists — spiked and resilient, blooming extravagantly once a year as if to remind you it has been here all along. Laurie Waalkes has spent a lifetime noticing plants like this, the ones everyone drives past, and in this piece she has given two of them a stage they fully deserve. The ground beneath them is a world built from memory and document: a vintage map of Northern New Mexico, warm as late afternoon light, floats behind the plants like a remembered landscape. Sheet music from another era drifts in at the lower right — someone's song, someone's living room, now part of this desert story. A quotation, printed in reverse as if seen through glass, whispers along the bottom: 'You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.' The layers don't compete. They conspire. For Laurie, a third-generation Coloradan who spent thirty years teaching before turning fully to art, this piece carries the weight of a life finally given over to its true calling. The yucca, humble and overlooked, is also her — patient, rooted, and when the moment comes, spectacularly in bloom.