The sixteenth of the Endangered Species Murals is finished! This big wall is located near the Convention Center in downtown El Paso, Texas, and features five endangered species from the US/Mexico borderlands: the Chiricahua Leopard Frog, Northern Aplomado Falcon, Mexican Grey Wolf, Ocelot, and Sneed’s Pincushion Cactus. The mural was created by me and three other artists: Jesus “Cimi” Alvarado and Martin “Blast” Zubia from El Paso, and Ivan “Shack” Melendez from Ciudad Juarez. We also worked with the students of La Fe Prep school in El Paso’s Segundo Barrio neighborhood on the cactus. We employed a technique that was new to me- painting on a polyester substrate called Polytab, which is then adhered to the wall with a gel medium. This made it possible to work on the heads indoors at a downtown studio, and to bring the panels into the school to work with the youth.

It was a real pleasure to work with these artists and students to create this international collaboration, and I think it does a pretty good job of summarizing one big truth about the border- that these lands are intrinsically connected, that there’s nothing that separates them, and that the communities of humans, animals and plants that inhabit them deserve freedom of movement and protection from harm. You can read some great press on the project here, here, and here. This was sponsored by the Center for Biological Diversity (see all the murals in the series here) and the City of El Paso Museums and Cultural Affairs Department as well as Kalavera Culture Shop. Follow the artists on social media as @elcimi, @blastertsb, @shack_clvr, and @toosphexy.

In physics, resilience is the word used to describe the ability of a body to withstand stress. For us, resilience means the capacity to recover from or adjust to misfortune or change. This guide to twelve plants that can help increase or enhance resilience in times of upheaval and uncertainty includes essays about the physiology of stress, instructions for making herbal medicine, and twelve essays about particular plant medicines, their indications, and their use, accompanied by original woodcut illustrations of each species.

This zine is a collaboration between my colleague and I: Janet Kent, an herbalist, writer, and founder of Medicine County Herbs and the Terra Sylva School of Herbal Medicine, both based out of rural Eastern North Carolina, wrote the essays. I did the woodcut illustrations.

The cover is screenprinted by hand on heavy 100lb stock.

The Taylor’s Checkerspot Butterfly was once abundant in the valleys and prairies of the Pacific Northwest, but agriculture and land conversion have reduced its habitat to a few fragments and it clings to the edge of life.- This is another in the Endangered Species Mural Series that I curate and produce for the Center for Biological Diversity This is located in downtown Cottage Grove, OR. Check it out if you’re in the south Willamette Valley!

I spent a week aboard the R/V Falkor, science vessel of the Schmidt Ocean institute, painting a mural in the aft passageway on rolling seas. The subject: the Ghostfish, deepest fish ever recorded, found at the bottom of the Mariana trench when it swam in front of of a camera operated by scientists aboard the Falkor. A pleasure to be invited, a challenge to paint, and a satisfactory result.

Insects are pollinators, decomposers, and food for our food, and without them we’re nothing. It’s enormously difficult to get past the terror and loathing people have for them, something which has deep roots in the structures of class, race, and poverty in this country and beyond. That work has to be done, however, and it’s part of the broader effort to bring people closer to the real world of nature, that we might all know what we’re a part of. I wrote more about the idea behind this image here. The top image is an illustration I created for In These Times magazine, the second is a three color screenprint, available at Justseeds.