Kathy Morrow is a Las Cruces resident and an artist who created a public rock sculpture across the Tortugas Dam. Her art had to be moved due to upcoming construction plans, but with the help of volunteers, her artwork is being reconfigured in front of the NMSU Golfcourse Clubhouse.
Morrow said that she didn’t realize at first how vast her original art project would be.
“It wasn’t my intention, my intention was to go for a walk and oh look at the funny rocks over there and [say] ‘let me put some down and see how far they go to the next one.’ And then it just grew, and grew, and grew,” she said.
Morrow had been piecing together her work on the dam for over five years, and as time went on, her pieces got larger.
“I did a turtle, and I did a small butterfly, and I started working. Pretty soon I was making more and more. At this point, the community was so interested in what I was doing, that as I walked along the dam there would be piles of yellow, or white, or green rocks,” she said.
As the scale of her artwork grew, so did the interest of the public. Now, Morrow had a following within the community supporting her work.
“As I started doing the artwork, people got sucked in, and pretty soon we were talking, and I was getting to know them, and they were getting to know me, then they were talking to each other and it became a community. ‘Did you see the art on the dam, oh did you know she does this or this.’ It just changed the whole character of people walking and passing each other to becoming involved,” she said.
Morrow explained that due to plans for the Tortugas Dam to be rebuilt, her artwork would either have to be moved or destroyed.
“So EBID, Elephant Butte Irrigation District allowed me to move all the art to this location here on the hill, [and] NMSU allowed me to have this location on the hill,” she said.
Morrow said that her artwork on the dam became a point of interest for tourists and locals alike, and she hopes that the new location is able to conjure up a similar sentiment within the community.
“I noticed that when I was doing it on the dam that we were getting a lot of visitors from out of state, and they would be visiting family in las cruces, and it became something you must go see, you must walk and go see this. So I think this will be an attraction that will be a positive for NMSU and for Las Cruces,” she said.
Morrow says she is thankful to NMSU and the EBID for allowing her to reconfigure her project on university property. She hopes to have the project completed in the next 12 months. For KRWG Public Media, I’m Jonny Coker.
