Nature’s Balancing Act

Petra Holländer is an artist and illustrator from Vienna, Austria. A graduate of the University of Applied Arts Vienna, her work combines bold characters with organic shapes, vibrant colors, and dynamic compositions to bring a sense of joy and ease to current issues.

For her Sketchbook pieces, Holländer explores the subject of balance, a theme that she tells Zócalo has become increasingly important in her life. Her playful collages reflect on the space between work and play, routine and spontaneity, hard and soft. “It is not an either/or,” she explains, “it …

Floral Fabrications

Mashanda Lazarus is a Los Angeles-based artist. For their Sketchbook series, Lazarus turned their eye to organic material. “I chose flowers and mosses of significance to base these textile sculptures …

Melanie Almeder Wins the 2024 Zócalo Poetry Prize

‘Coyote Hour’ Tracks a Summer in Southern Maine

Melanie Almeder is the winner of the 2024 Zócalo Public Square Poetry Prize for “Coyote Hour.” The poem tracks the rhythms of summer in a part of coastal New England …

Is the Wilderness Act Still Protecting Nature?

The Landmark 1964 Law Is Now Preventing Effective Land Management and Critical Climate Research

At the end of 2023, four environmental groups sued the National Park Service and invoked the Wilderness Act to stop the replanting of trees following a catastrophic wildfire in Sequoia and …

Innovative Extinction

Matt Wood is an illustrator and the co-founder of the cooperative animation team Bad Idea Motion Studios.   

Wood’s Zócalo Sketchbook imagines “what nature might look like if it insisted on innovating …

The New Mexico Oppenheimer Erases

Films and Tourism Campaigns Depict an Empty State That Is In Fact Full of Life

Los Alamos, New Mexico’s tourism website quickly clues visitors into what the city considers its two principal assets. There’s the national laboratory, represented by an illustrated atom, and there are …