48 x 68 in
Acrylic/mixed media on canvas

Artist Statement:

On the fateful day of April 11, 2022, my family’s mountain property was in the direct path of where the Hermit’s Peak fire met the Calf Canyon Fire, when a control burn and a sleeper fire merged and became a mega fire, raging through northern New Mexico. This fire consumed our natural beauty, hearts, roots, and devastated Nuestra Querencia, the place where our souls found sanctuary.

Believing that art can heal, I created a body of artwork to help me cope with the PTSD. This painting is my attempt to attain closure.

I was once a wildland forest firefighter with an all-woman’s crew from Mora, New Mexico, familiar with fire’s impact on the ecology and aftereffects on the community. I am aware of USDS fire policy on Prescription burn, control burn, back burn, and a belief that the removal of 90% of the trees in a dense forest results in a healthy forest. This proposition is a disturbance to what some believe. Many have good intentions, others have scientific knowledge and few have indigenous and cultural knowledge with relationship to living in balance with our forests. The question is, “Who really has control and what of the natural order of la Tierra Madre?”

The center focal point of the painting features a 450-year-old ancestor tree that once towered over our land existing as an anchor of ceremony. By honoring this sentinel guardian, beacon, witness to history, it speaks to the memory of all now erased.

It stands at an intersection within a spiral of fire, which encircles the entire painting acting as a connection of nature to the heavenly realms, reminiscent of the sun dagger at Chaco Canyon, focusing on the longevity and fragility of our nature. Eventually, the Fire Serpent gives birth to the Phoenix that rises from the ashes.

Burnt raices, roots of trees that the fire fell, root ball holes where once a tree stood is all that remains in a river of ash. This is the crux of the fire spiral and unavoidable event of transformation.

Artist Bio:

Pola Lopez is a prominent painter and muralist whose acrylic paintings are driven by color and convey a multi-faceted array of symbolic, cultural and feminine imagery infused with spiritual vision and incendiary composition, establishing her as a key artist in the Latina/Hispana/Chicana/Mestiza genre. Born in Las Vegas, New Mexico, she identifies as an artist of mixed Jicarilla Apache and European heritage. 

An active and fulltime artist, she has operated studio galleries in Las Vegas, Taos and in Santa Fe, exhibited in Contemporary Spanish Market and had the honor to represent New Mexico as the “official portrait artist, at the White House, in Washington D. C., in 2006, when NM provided the People’s Christmas Tree. 

Relocating in 2003 to California in search of the Chicano Art Movement, she maintained a public studio/exhibit space in Los Angeles for 16 years. As a muralist, she produced individual, community and student-assisted murals as a teaching artist. She returned home to Santa Fe, New Mexico in September 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2023 she was the receipt of a WESTAF award and has continued to paint murals in New Mexico communities.

Scientists Statement:

VALUES AT RISK(val-yooz uht risks )

In wildfire management, “values at risk” refers to the people, places, resources, and relationships that could be harmed by fire. They include homes, watersheds, infrastructure, wildlife habitat, cultural resources, livelihoods, and communities. But they also include things much harder to measure: memory, belonging, trust, and querencia.

Managing those values increasingly means choosing among risks.

Decades of fire exclusion, changing land use, accumulated fuels, and a warming climate have created conditions in which doing nothing carries consequences. Federal agencies are charged with reducing those risks, often through thinning and prescribed fire. Yet those actions create risks of their own. An intervention intended to prevent catastrophe can, and has, become the catastrophe itself.

Uncertainty carries fear, and fear is harder to navigate where trust is already fragile. In parts of northern New Mexico, relationships between federal land management agencies and local communities were shaped by generations of conflict over land, access, authority, and management long before the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire.

When two prescribed burns went disastrously wrong in 2022, agency probabilities became real losses. Homes burned. Landscapes held across generations were transformed. Existing distrust deepened. The pain does not become less real because the original decision was intended to protect people and forests.

This is a profound dilemma. Agencies are expected to help mitigate a wildfire crisis they did not create alone, while assuming responsibility when mitigation causes harm. Communities may bear those consequences without sharing equal power in deciding which risks are acceptable.

There is no risk-free path through this landscape. And choosing to do nothing only makes the long-term problem worse.

The challenge is not simply calculating risk, but finding better ways to share decisions, uncertainty, responsibility, and consequences among all of the institutions and communities that must live with fire.

PHOTOS BY ALEX CANCRO