Last chance to see Route 66 exhibit at Mesa Public Library

Step Up Gallery’s Route 66 exhibit, Ode To The Mother Road, reached its final days at Mesa Public Library, with Thursday marked as the last chance to see the show on the library’s top level at 2400 Central Avenue. The limited run gave Los Alamos residents a rare chance to catch a themed exhibit built around one of the Southwest’s most enduring road stories without leaving town.

The show was planned as part of a call for art honoring the 100th anniversary of the construction of Route 66, the historic highway that connected Chicago and southern California. Artists were invited to respond in several ways: by depicting surviving remnants of the route, painting on site in plein air, or drawing from historic photographs and their own imagination. The call also welcomed painting and other visual-art forms, broadening the range of work the gallery could display.

Two of the pieces included in the exhibit were Blue Swallow Nocturne by Michelle Byrne and Route 66 Flying Saucer Races by Ralph Sanders. Those titles pointed directly to the mythology that has long surrounded the Mother Road, from neon roadside imagery to the offbeat Americana that has made Route 66 a fixture in popular memory. In New Mexico, where Route 66 remains a powerful part of tourism, history and local identity, that theme carried an immediate local pull.

The setting mattered as much as the subject. Step Up Gallery sits inside Mesa Public Library, making it one of the most accessible exhibition spaces in Los Alamos. Visitors do not need to plan a museum trip or cross town to see the work; they can encounter it while using the library, which gives the gallery a broader public reach than a typical standalone arts venue. That library setting has also supported other community-history exhibits, including a past display that marked the Los Alamos Concert Association’s 75-year history and noted that the organization had presented a classical concert series since 1946.

Step Up Gallery has also hosted other time-limited shows, including an art quilts exhibit that ran until Nov. 7, underscoring its regular role as a rotating space for local and regional work. Ode To The Mother Road fit that pattern while adding a clear centennial frame: a public-library exhibit that connected Los Alamos to Route 66’s century-long legacy and offered a straightforward, local way to see it before it came down.