There are a lot of things going on in Mazatlán that you can do or visit if you’re an art lover.

During the season (November to May) you can go on the First Friday Art Walk in Centro Historico.  More than 40 artists show their work in a fairly compact area of Mazatlàn’s Old Town.  The Art Walk is from 4 pm to 8 pm, so after you pick up a map and plan your route you can  finish the evening with dinner in the Plazuela Machado, along Niños Heroes, or along the Malecon.  The last art walk of the season is this coming Friday.

You can participate in a workshop.  Paul went to Glen Roger‘s studio for a Monotype workshop last year.  It was a full week of working with ink on plates to create unique prints.  There were about 6 people altogether, all with varying backgrounds, from novice to professional artists.  Their work, together with other workshop participants was displayed at the Mazatlán Art Museum last year, and will be in a show in San Antonio beginning May 6.  That’s the poster for the show at the top of this post, and Paul and his print (top) at the art museum is below.  If you’re interested in taking a workshop from Glen, take a look at her website (above) or her blog, here.

I participated in a workshop, too.  Mary Ruzich is a fiber artist who spends half the year here in Mazatlán, and the other half in British Columbia. Canada.  She taught a group of us how to dye our own fabrics to use in a fabric collage of our own design.  The first day we described our ideas for our collage and then we learned how to dye the fabrics to give us the desired color and texture.  I decided to do a primitive beach scene, so the sand was the biggest challenge for me… but putting  some cheesecloth and brown dye in a tray and then pressing and rolling my fabric onto it gave me some nice textured sand.  I had to miss the last class because of my trip to California, but I will email Mary as I work on it – stitching by hand around all the individual pieces of fabric and then free-motion machine stitching designs where desired.  Mary has a wonderful blog – and she wrote about our group on April 22, titled Earth Day.  My partially completed collage is below.

There are excellent painters and stained glass artists giving lessons here in Mazatlán, too.  So if you are interested in exploring your inner artist, Mazatlán is a good place to start.