"For over a year, I worked in Santa Fe and walked to the train station from Barelas, Downtown, Albuquerque. I was captivated by the rich textures of different stucco colors converging and stark shadows cast over vibrantly painted doors. Mesmerized by the simple beauty and compositional boldness of the streets and buildings, I found myself compulsively taking photographs. Photos from My Neighborhood is an alternative archive of these colors, textures, and shapes and how the light danced across its surfaces. Like photos, encapsulating a moment in time, this series captures how a single sunbeam played with chipping paint. Mundane and fleeting as it is, they depict the Barelas neighborhood through one resident’s evening walks home."

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Petra Brown grew up along the Great Lakes. Fields, forests & rivers filled her childhood & fed her imagination. A rural upbringing also instilled an insatiable hunger for what is beyond small-town America & encouraged Brown to discover alternative realities. This has led her to pursue opportunities such as an internship with a fairtrade clothing company in India, a Work-Away to learn European weaving practices, apprenticing at a Japanese weaving studio in NYC, archiving textiles & cultivating indigo at a Cleveland fiber cooperative, and working as a rug repair technician in Albuquerque. Brown was recently the Collections Manager of the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, & has held collections care positions at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology & the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center. She has also worked at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame & Praxis Fiber Workshop in Cleveland, where she assisted in establishing the latter’s first textile library in collaboration with the Cleveland Museum of Art. Brown currently works in Collections at the Albuquerque Museum.