Artists.
Rocket Rustler is a small, curated collection of local artists and makers — each with a distinct hand, a personal style, and an eye for the overlooked and the uniquely made. No two pieces come from the same process: some are carved, some are cast, some are pulled back from the brink of a junk pile and given a second life. What they share is craft you can see up close, and a story behind every piece — the kind of artwork that gives you a little charge every time you walk past it, and gets people asking where it's from, and who made it.
Esperanza "Chepa" Ortiz
Fourth-generation santera building three-dimensional saint shrines (nichos) from found tins, cigar boxes, scrap wood, rusted hardware, and hand-carved santos — devotional folk art finished to look decades older than it is.
Hank Delgado
Restorer of Wild West memorabilia — saddles, chaps, trade blankets, cast-iron kitchen tools — hand-cleaned and reconditioned from ranch estate sales across the Gila region. Treats every piece as an act of preservation, not a project.
Marisol Vega
Builds obsessively detailed shadow boxes celebrating classic arcade and console art — Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, early Mario — combining cut paper, hand-painted pixel work, and real vintage game parts framed like museum cases.
Rocket Rustler
SHORT BIO (used on the Artists directory, max ~280 characters)
Rosa Trujillo
Oil and natural-pigment painter working close to the Tularosa Basin she grew up in. Her canvases weave desert imagery with her family's quiet history near the Trinity Site, exploring land, memory, and inheritance across generations.
Walt Espinoza
Retired TV repairman turned metal sculptor. Builds tin-and-chrome robots, tabletop rockets, and mid-size sculptures from salvaged radios, hubcaps, and toy parts. Calls it "reverse archaeology" — turning yesterday's junk drawer into tomorrow's relics.