It didn鈥檛 exactly come as a shocker: 2012 was the hottest and driest year on record. But winter isn鈥檛 dead yet. Literally or metaphorically. There鈥檚 fresh stuff under the boards from the Sierras to Maine, and in Santa Fe, a cool new creative venture is turning snow into art.
The Snow Poems Project uses spray-on fake snow to stencil poetry on windows around Santa Fe. For the past two weeks, poems written by local residents have been popping up on schools, galleries, government buildings, restaurants, libraries, and yoga studios in town. The poems are short鈥攐ne or two lines of blocky, uppercase type鈥攁nd most of them aren't even about snow, but the feelings they convey are the feelings of winter itself: stark, pristine, and wild. Reading them is a little like watching your breath turn to steam on a frigid morning, or following a single pair of footprints across a high meadow blanketed in powder. Dazzling.
The idea came out of the Cut + Paste Society, a group of Santa Fe women artists and writers, as a way聽to illuminate public spaces in the darkest of seasons. It's a creative statement as much as an environmental one:聽“Winter is a time for reflection and the incubation of ideas,” says Cut + Paste president Edie Tsong, who partnered with the Santa Fe Art Institute for this project, “and poetry reflects this.”聽Many of Cut + Paste's members are mothers, so it鈥檚 also a parent鈥檚 effort to bring art into the everyday and to turn cities into 鈥渓iving books,鈥 written from the perspective of the people who live there. Tsong and her team vetted 175 poems submitted by locals (nearly half of which were from students) and winnowed them down to 40, including this one by 12th-grader Pedro Tena:
Putting a poem on glass is harder than it looks.聽Tsong hand cut letters from cardstock, used them to trace the stencils, and then held a stencil-cutting party at Whole Foods. To install, she and her team of volunteers lay聽lines down with dry erase marker, yardstick and level, and then tape letters and words backwards, so the poem can be read from the outside. Next, the faux frosting: The spray-on snow is squishy until it's dry (when it just becomes chalk). Finally, they remove and wash the letters to reuse again. “People may wonder if it's worth it, but think of the amount of hours of training athletes will do to compete,” says Tsong, “and you never forget a race or some physical challenge.”
Poems will grace the windows of Santa Fe for the rest of winter; by the first day of spring, they'll begin to fade out, like melting snow.
For more information and a complete list of poems and places, go to snowpoemsproject.com and .
鈥擪atie Arnold