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The Grand Canyon: An Artist's View in Winter

Artwork/Pamela Petro<br>
Photography and other work by Pamela Petro will be on display in Grand Canyon Park Headquarters lobby through Feb. 14.

Artwork/Pamela Petro<br> Photography and other work by Pamela Petro will be on display in Grand Canyon Park Headquarters lobby through Feb. 14.

I am the January 2011 Artist in Residence at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. I can hardly believe my luck. America's National Park Service runs a residency program on both rims, North and South. Only six artists are selected for the North Rim - it's closed six months of the year, as the roads are impassable in winter - and 12 artists are chosen to visit the South Rim, one per month, for three weeks each. I figured the odds were better on the South Rim, and so applied to come here. All I have to do in return for lodging at one of the seven natural Wonders of the World is offer three programs to the public - a reading, a class at the local school, a talk - as well as write, look, photograph, and create.

Before I go on to say why I'm especially lucky to be at the Canyon in winter, I have a confession. I am the 13th artist for 2011. Here is the email message I received from Rene Westbrook, the boundlessly creative, enthusiastic, problem-solving coordinator of the South Rim "AIR" program, herself a prominent artist, the day before I left on vacation last year: "Dear Pamela, I'm sorry to tell you that you were not in the top 12 of selected artists for next season's South Artist-in-Residence program. But you were 13th, which is semi-good news as we would like to have you as our alternate, should an artist not be able to come..."

Thirteenth? It was like coming in fourth place in the Olympics. I was devastated, and set off on holiday deeply glum. I print photographs directly on rocks - "petrographs," as I learned to call them, a name that chimed happily and coincidentally with my surname - which I then place back in their natural environment to weather and erode. The documentary photos I take of the process are the only permanent record of my installations. So the Grand Canyon, erosion's most spectacular accomplishment, was a place that called me with the tug of a flood tide.

About a week into my vacation I received another message from her, offering me a space on the 2011 roster. No one had dropped out - "so we have no bad juju on our heads," she wrote - but the slots the artists had selected bunched together in summertime, leaving parts of January and February open. For me. I was jubilant.

And that's how I came to be on the rim of a six million year-old, 7000-foot hole in the planet.


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