Javelina Madness at the Tubac art festival

The slogan for the tiny village (pop.1190) of Tubac, Arizona is “Where Art and History Meet”. Maybe a better slogan would be where art and commerce meet. The four main streets in Tubac are lined with art galleries with a few restaurants tucked in here and there. Selling art appears to be the primary business for this town which is, I suppose, a better choice than what is happening in some of the vanishing small towns I visited in Texas and Louisiana last summer.

When I went there on Saturday the annual Tubac Art Festival was in full swing. I wasn’t much interested in yet another open air art show and intended to visit the historic Tubac Presidio, which I had missed in early January after being pulled over by the Border Patrol. But as I wandered the streets of Tubac I noticed that there were sculptures and other art works of javelinas in nearly every shop.

Javelinas, also called peccaries, are the wild pigs of the Western Hemisphere. (They are not the same creatures as the wild razorback hogs of the U.S. South. Razorback hogs are feral European pigs.)

Anyway… in sculptural form javelinas may be cute; In real life they can be dangerous. And they don’t just live in wild natural places away from humans…unless you consider downtown Tucson a “wild, natural place” where one was photographed and the photo posted on Twitter a week or so ago.

Wild art on clay peccaries

It turns out that the sculptural javelina is the chosen emblem of Tubac. Here are just a few that I saw around town.

And if you don’t want a painted javelina in your home or yard, there were dozens upon dozens of javelinas in metal form.

There were other things to see at the Fair, like unusual modes of transportation. Looking at the horse drawn wagon you’d think it was Tombstone!

And a couple of musical groups were pretty cool, too.

There was one image I really loved: colorful hammocks from Belize– an enticing vision of summertime laziness.

And another image of what Tubac must look like without all the white tents and loads of tourists: a quiet, dusty desert town.

I never found the historic Spanish Presidio, but maybe next year or the year after.

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