Cee Neuner and I are co-hosting the new Photographing Public Art Challenge (PPAC). As you all can imagine, it is such an honor for me to co-host with Cee on this challenge.

A new challenge is posted each Friday at 9:00 PST. We both will visit all of your entries and we will both post an entry ourselves on a different day. To avoid confusion, please put your links only on the host’s post for that week. Please check out my PPAC Page to learn more.

What Is Public Art?

Public art is encompasses any form of art you see in a public place, large or small, statues, murals, graffiti, gardens, parks, etc. The art should be visible from streets, sidewalks or outdoor public places.

• Seasonal Displays
• Graffiti or Murals, Wall Art
• Statues and Sculptures
• Store Windows
• Car Shows
• Artistic Construction (Bridge, benches and buildings)
• and more

PPAC Featured Bloggers

I want to say thank you to everyone who played along. Cee Neuner, my co-host, had so many wonderful photos to choose from:

Wire – Turtles and other art, Umbrellas, Murals, Mosaic and Graffiti walls, Mountain Man, Floral Ceilings, Howling Coyote, Coffee Cup Building, Archangel, Convict, Comedian, Flamingo-colored tree, Water Towers, Transformational Clock, and Landform Sculpture.

For the curious photographers and community builders, visit Cee’s post, PPAC #2 and check out everyone.

Here are this week’s PPAC Featured Bloggers. They all deserve a visit or two.

• Art or Nature?
• Architecture and Ornaments
• Australian Comedian among Others
• Wire Art
• Chainsaw Coyote Howling at the Moon

My PPAC Photo Story

Prescott Walk #13 Prescott Lakes Petroglyphs

For my entry this week, I went historic. For thousands of years humans have created art. The word petroglyph is Greek meaning rock carving. Images were engraved by pounding a stone against another rock.

Petroglyphs are visible for everyone to enjoy but you might miss them if you were driving past them. You have to look carefully as you walk along the trail to find all ten.

According to one site there are “millions of petroglyphs in Arizona. Arizona Ruins.com. In the Prescott Lakes Planned Community, the rocks were discovered by builders, and some of them moved, and have become public art in seven small “pocket parks” around the planned community where I live. Others are visible on trails around the area.

Here are just a few examples of the public art in the Pocket Park Six on Blooming Hills Drive in Prescott, AZ. See if you can figure out which drawings they are.

The youngest of these drawings around the state of Arizona are believed to be 300 AD to 1300 AD.

The City of Prescott website states that other evidence points to “Hohokam influence on the people of the Prescott region. The predominant period of occupation was A.D. 900 to 1100.” 

Puppy Girl and I found one park on a walk down Blooming Hills Drive. The rocks are labeled with a number, then you find the sign at the opening of the pocket park, and locate the number on the sign to see what archaeologists thought they might mean.

We went back June 30 after our first monsoon in Prescott. The rain made them much clearer. Some of the photos have the numbers to make it easier to identify. See if you can identify them. The captions are not their real numbers. There is one extra.

Humans typically respect art unless there it represents an enormous conflict of ideology. Walls with murals usually don’t get covered with graffiti. That is why public art involves planning with more than just the artist. The parks in the Prescott Lakes community were created to preserve this ancient artwork.

Were you able to identify the drawings?

I am also linking up to Natalie the Explorer’s post for today.

Coming Up

• July Story Chat: “Sometimes a Miracle” a family medical drama by Gary A. Wilson.
• Writer’s Quotes Wednesdays Writing Challenge.

Thank you Cee for co-hosting this challenge with me and providing much of the structure for doing it. We have received so many enthusiastic comments which tells us that you have many photos in your archives and new photos you have just taken that work for this challenge. It’s been wonderful seeing your photographs.

Thank you Lisa Coleman from Our Eyes Open – the Bird Weekly Challenge for designing my new ID card to give people when I’m out taking pictures at car shows and other public events.

Have a great week-end. Happy Fourth of July!