April 1, 2026

A new publication is bringing “They Had No Time to Say Goodbye” about MMIW to a wider audience! Plus travel, presentations, workshops and an exhibition

Dear friends,

What a whirlwind trip! First to the Tampa Bay Area. In the ten days I was there I taught a Daylong Mixed Media workshop (both in person and online) followed by a They Had No Time to Say Goodbye workshop. The latter was on our multimedia collaborative art project, about the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW). In every presentation and workshop I share statistics on MMIW. For instance: despite having the 5th largest Native population in the U.S., New Mexico leads the U.S. in MMIWG cases. According to the Urban Indian Health Institute, Albuquerque and Gallup are the cities with the highest rate of MMIWG in our state.

Our Daylong Mixed Media Workshop at The Off-Cental. Row 1: Warm up project in watercolors and mixed media by L to R: Bob Pope, Jackie Meister and Hope Meister. Row 2: L to R: Linda Roberts and Dee Perconti hard at work. The in-person participants, L to R: Marie Chirico, Dee Perconti, Linda Roberts, Florence Durand-Schumann, Bob Pope. Online participants: Colette Marie Molyneaux, Andrea de Souza, Hope and Jackie Meister. Row 3: L to R: Andrea de Souza’s mixed media project, Jackie Meister’s mixed media project, a work-in-progress, Colette Marie Molyneaux’s mixed media project (detail).

 

 

I want to extend a huge thank you to Karen Riffe and her staff at The Off-Central, St Petersburg, for generously allowing us to use their space for the workshops.

I also presented on They Had No Time to Say Goodbye to 1 Million Cups in Tampa. This was in preparation for my presentation at the Museum of Motherhood (MoM) conference themed Reproductive Identities and Resistance. I received excellent feedback from the large and diverse audience at the 1 Million Cups meeting. Thanks to their input I felt better prepared for my MoM presentation two days later on USF St Petersburg’s beautiful campus on the Bay.

 

Left and center, photos from my 1 Million Cups presentation. Right: with one of my longtime painting students, Natalie Velez–now a doctoral candidate–on the USF, St Petersburg, campus during the MoM conference lunch break.

 

I was enchanted by the ancient tram that took me from the offices of 1 Million Cups in Ybor City—the old cigar manufacturing area of Tampa—to downtown’s River Walk. This is the location of the Museum of Art where I spent time exploring the collection. I was there during Women’s History Month and got to see a exhibition of diverse work by the women artists in their collection: “Avant Garde: Remarkable Women in the Permanent Collection.” One of my favorite works was by a Dutch artist, Hannah van Bart.

 

L: The University of Tampa’s campus viewed from River Walk. R: the interior of a Tampa tram.

 

After leaving St Petersburg, I flew to Virginia and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, an artists’ retreat. It is located on what was once a dairy farm in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I was greeted by a spring shower, but for the rest of my stay the weather was lovely. And the VCCA grounds, with purple and white violets shyly showing their faces in the lawns, the blooming redbuds and dogwoods brought back fond memories of previous springs spent at the VCCA.

 

Clockwise, L to R: The Studio Barn at the VCCA (top), lunch–delivered to the Studio Barn (bottom), cupola at the Studio Barn, gazebo on the VCCA grounds.

 

While at the VCCA, I worked in my vast studio adding red paint to numerous 9” x 8” X-rays etched by artists throughout the USA for They Had No Time to Say Goodbye. Red is the color signifying the MMIW movement. I also found time to start a new series of collages using treasures (trash to some!) that I’ve been salvaging from the streets of Albuquerque for some time.

 

L to R: two X-rays etched by Betsy Gordon for “They Had No Time to Say Goodbye,” a display of some of the etched X-rays that I added red paint to while at the VCCA. Several were etched by Native students from Jemez Valley High School.

 

Some of my mixed media works-in-progress made while at the VCCA. The two images on X-rays are details of a larger work. I am grateful to Bob Pope and Betsy Gordon for their donations of X-rays.

 

Before leaving the VCCA, I gave a presentation on They Had No Time to Say Goodbye to the other visual artists, writers and composers in residence. Several of the Fellows offered to etch X-rays, including a couple of writers (at the VCCA all artists are referred to as Fellows). To date we now have over 150 artists and others from the world over—Asia, Europe, Canada, Mexico and throughout the USA—who have either etched X-rays or committed to etching X-rays. These depict the countless anonymous Indigenous women who go missing without a trace.

If you would like to participate and help us get the word out about the MMIW crisis, please get in touch with me. Etching an X-ray is a simple process, no special supplies needed. A screw driver or dremel tool can be used to etch the x-ray on a light box, but a dull pair of scissors and a glass window pane works just as well. Every participant will be acknowledged in our exhibitions. If you are one of the people to whom we’ve mailed an X-ray, please finish etching it and mail it back soon so we can add red paint to it—red signifies the MMIW movement. I plan on holding another paint get-together in my studio in May to add red paint to etched X-rays. If you’ve changed your mind about etching it, please mail it back as X-rays are expensive and hard to come by these days!

Scroll to the end to see instructions for etching an Indigenous woman’s face on an X-ray

Besides myself, the other members of our They Had No Time to Say Goodbye collective are Sandi Ludescher, a New Mexican figurative painter who is painting portraits of several actual missing or murdered Indigenous women. The one exception is her portrait of Kimberly (Diné)—Sandi portrays her as the powerful warrior woman that she is. A survivor of sex trafficking, Kimberly is now a passionate advocate for trafficked Native people. Thankfully Kimberly is alive and thriving and is an asset to our collective. Linda Piper, Black activist, theater director, writer and storyteller is the fourth member of our collective.

 

Portrait of Kimberly Wahpepah (Diné) by Sandi Ludescher

 

My final stop on my trip was Petersburg, Virginia, where I stayed with a writer friend in her lovely home in Old Town. I spent much of my time there wandering the streets of Old Town with its old red brick buildings and evidence of its past dating back to the days of the British colony and the Civil War. I saw more than one Confederate flag while I was en route from the VCCA to Petersburg as well as in the town itself. However, I was impressed by how well integrated this city is — its population is 80% Black. It reminded me in that respect of Atlanta.

 

Scenes from my visit to the historic city of Petersburg, Virginia

 

We had time to pay a quick visit to the Richmond Museum, now much larger than when I last visited. This was before the Great Recession that caused so many art galleries to close; and when I was exhibiting my art throughout the country as well as up and down the East Coast, including in Richmond. I was disappointed to learn that the retrospective of Mary Lovelace O’Neal’s art won’t open there until later in April. Mary was one of my painting instructors at the San Francisco Art Institute when I was working on my BFA.

As I type this on the return flight to Albuquerque, while I know I will miss many aspects of the East Coast (including the beautiful beaches!), I look forward to the launch party of the Horizon Review. This is a brand new annual arts publication put out by FUSION of Albuquerque featuring work by New Mexican writers, visual artists, and activists. Our They Had No Time to Say Goodbye collective was interviewed extensively by the Horizon Review team. We are honored to have an in-depth article about our project included in the inaugural edition.

The launch party, Margins of Light, Takes place on Sunday (THIS Sunday!), April 26 at 4pm. Snacks will be provided with drinks available for purchase. The program will include readings from contributors a musical performance, and social hour. There will also be copies of Horizon Review, Issue 1 for sale and attendees can pick up their preordered copies as well. A couple of members of our collective will be giving a brief presentation on our They Had No Time to Say Goodbye project and the crisis of MMIW. To read the entire article, click on the QR code below and order your copy of Horizon Review.

 

 

One of the images included in the article is of the They Had No Time to Say Goodbye book that accompanies our installation. I did most of the work on it during a three month residency in Guadalajara, Mexico, in late ’23 and early ’24. It’s an altered book with collaged images, some taken from a booklet I received in the early 2000s when I trained to become a member of the arts in healthcare team, Creative Care, in the Tampa Bay Area.

 

 

 

Page from altered book, They Had No Time to Say Goodbye with collaged images from Tickled Milk

 

Now, in 2026, I realized I needed to get permission in order to publish those images! Having cut up the booklet to make collages, I had no idea what the title was or who had published it. After weeks of futile searching, I finally tracked down the artist responsible for the publication, Tickled Milk, at Arts Care in Belfast, Ireland. Tickled Milk was the result of a collaboration between St Luke’s Hospital, Armagh, Ireland, and Sterkfontein Hospital, Johannesburg, South Africa. Patients at both locations contributed to the publication. I am deeply grateful to Arts Care artist Eddie Rafferty for his support and cooperation. And for agreeing to let me use images and text from Tickled Milk. I am also grateful to Jenny Baxley Lee for assisting me in locating Eddie.

 

 

We are welcoming Spring! Flower paintings by Maria Chirico (left), acrylics on canvas, Barnali Dey (center) watercolors on paper and Colette Marie Molyneaux (right), oils on canvas, a work-in-progress.

 

 

Before the Horizon Review launch party, I’ll be back teaching in my Nob Hill, Albuquerque, studio. We meet on Wednesday evenings for two-and-a-half hours. I teach oils, watercolors acrylics and mixed media in my studio as well as on line. The next six week course starts on May 6. If you’d like to learn more about my painting classes, both group and private, contact me at rosemarieprins.com.

In spite of my other activities, I still find time to make my own art! I learned this week that a mixed media painting from my A Leaf in the Wind series has been accepted into the Museum of Encaustic Art’s juried exhibition, INSPIRATION. The opening is on Saturday, June, 6. More on that in my next newsletter!

Creatively yours,

Rose Marie

 

Instructions for Etching a Face on an X-ray

Thank you for offering to contribute your time and talent to help make our collaborative multimedia art project, They Had No Time to Say Goodbye, a success by etching an Indigenous woman’s face on an x-ray. We, Kimberly Wahpepah (Diné), Sandi Ludescher, Linda Piper and I appreciate every contribution to They Had No Time to Say Goodbye. Every participant will be acknowledged in our exhibitions.

Before you start, please view the video explaining the project on my website:
https://rosemarieprins.com/they-had-no-time-to-say-goodbye/#bwg35/1000

1. Find the face of an Indigenous woman you want to work with. Here’s a link to one option:
https://www.shutterstock.com/search/native-american-woman-face (Please don’t use an actual MMIW as we need to respect the grieving family’s privacy.)

2. Draw the face on tracing paper with a dark (4B, 6B or ebony) pencil, or black marker, so it will fit onto the x-ray, final size = 9” x 7 7/8”  (Your image MUST be vertical.)

3. Tape the tracing paper to your light box or a window.

4. Tape the x-ray over the tracing paper and, using a pair of dull pointed scissors, Phillips screw driver or dremel tool, etch the lines of your drawing onto the x-ray.

5. When you have completed the process of etching the lines of the face, remove the x-ray and the tracing paper.

6. IMPORTANT! Flip the x-ray over, and tape the back to the light box or window. Now etch over all the lines you etched on the front so light shines through the marks defining the Indigenous woman’s face.

7. When you think you’ve etched all the lines, hold the x-ray up to the light to be sure all the lines on the front are etched on the back.

Please mail it to me. My studio address is:

Rose Marie Prins

122 Bryn Mawr SE, Albuquerque, NM 87106

Should you decide you would rather not participate, please mail the unused x-ray to this address so someone else may use it.

Note: We will add the red color to the x-ray so the color is uniform.

Rose Marie

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