Coming up on State of the Arts, an artists' space reopens after a natural disaster, photographing forgotten places, and a tour through haunted Albuquerque.

We're bringing you these stories next on State of the Arts.

Happy New Year, and thank you for tuning in as we welcome 2026 with stories from around the art world.

I'm your host, Mary Paul.

We begin with a story of resilience.

It wasn't too long after opening that a budding artist's space in St.

Petersburg, Florida, known as Artmosphere, was hit by two back-to-back hurricanes.

That could have been the end of its story, but it wasn't.

With determination, the Artmosphere team banded together to rebuild and reopen for the community.

Take a look.

I have been managing Artmosphere since the summer of 2023, and we officially opened in March of 2024.

Since then, we are a community in St.

Pete, and we give space to so many artists to create their work.

Also to showcase their work through our events that we do.

So I feel like the community is very important, as during those events, we open up to everybody.

This is like a safe space for artists to make their work, create their art, and we literally just opened.

It was just starting to pick up, it was starting to create a community, and then it was just gone.

We were scared because we were supposed to have the flood, and with Helene on September 26th, the flood arrived, we tried to remove as much stuff as we can, but it takes time.

And then during the rehab, we heard another notice, the news was, "Oh, another one is coming, Milton.

Wait a moment, let's see what's going on with Milton," and then we start back again to fix everything.

I remember that I got the call from my handyman saying, "Hey, did you hear about the storm?"

I came here, I prepped with all the artists, I remember I sealed the doors with black tape, I put trash bags, I put stuff in the bag, I put sandbags on top, and I was like, "I hope I'm doing this for nothing, it's not going to be anything."

And then I remember going home, and I was looking at the cameras, because we have cameras here, so I was like, "Okay, it's holding on pretty well, it's going good, it's going good," and then I just started to see the water leaking through, and I don't know, it was just so sad.

I don't know, there is a feeling of helplessness, in which there is literally nothing you can do, you just wait and then figure out something after.

What it was up to here, so basically we had to redo all the walls.

This put us so behind, because we not only had Hurricane Helene at first, and if Milton wasn't here, we would already be back, but thankfully our team works so fast and so amazing.

Each studio was a different artist, they put up, for example, Maryna in this studio.

She had so much artwork in here, you would even know, if you just look at all the pins and screws and everything, this studio was full of work and paintings and everything.

Here were all my paintings.

I put the water up to here, so I was able to save this.

I did this mural, it was all the way to the floor, but now of course it's, you know, they cut the piece out.

These artists right here, this is Oliver, he's been our first artist ever, and he's the one that caused the amount of damage, because of course, imagine after a year of being here with all your supplies, and all your art, and unfortunately his house flooded as well.

So he's been dealing with so much.

I got the message that the studios had taken on water.

When I got that news, that's when I started getting a little bit of a sinking filling, that, okay, this looks like this was probably worse than what we thought it was going to be.

And it turned out that it was.

It was probably one of the hardest moments that I've ever faced on a very personal level.

And that's even gone back and looking at 25 years being in the military.

For me, it was a big surprise, because I'm from Western Europe, we have not hurricanes.

And for me, I was in shock to be honest, and it's very unusual when you need to save everything because just the ocean coming.

Do you know, it was like a step back, because studio must work day by day, every day.

I'm beginning for zero in the moment.

I need to create a new studio.

I came here after, and it was just like chaos.

It was just like so messy.

Everything was like all over the place.

Everything was like on top of each other.

It was dirty, it was smelly.

So it was just like very discouraging, I would say, at first.

And then slowly, because we have like an amazing team, we were able to rebuild everything.

The studio's reopening was huge.

It was good, and it was heartbreaking at the same time.

Because you see the amount of work that had to go into rebuilding everything.

It was a bittersweet moment.

If you lost something, of course it's sad in the moment.

But after this, I'm feeling I have, I had a new way for, I had a new way for energy to do new artworks and I did.

It was sad, but at the end, we are here again, and then, you know, we survived.

So now that everything is back to Roma, I'm definitely feeling really good.

It's so nice to come here, have all the artists work in their space, and just, you know, walk in the hallways, and I peek in, and I see, you know, somebody working on their new painting, somebody working on their new sculpture, photography projects and so on.

And I'm back into showing the art studios for new artists.

I show live-in space, so it's really fun.

I was blaming myself for like a long time, and then I realized that my creative energy was going to something equally beautiful, which is, was, you know, creating a community and a space for other artists to create.

Then slowly, once everything went back to normal, it became a pleasure again to be here.

Kim Cunningham of Milwaukee Art Girl Designs is a photographer in Wisconsin who finds beauty in what's been abandoned.

With her camera, she becomes an urban explorer seeking out abandoned buildings in the Midwest.

Here's her story.

My focus on my photography is finding beauty in places where you wouldn't expect to see it in.

My favorite type of room to explore in abandoned buildings will be the boiler room.

I'm fascinated by these big machines or these big, like, pieces of equipment.

We all register things differently through our eyes, and for me, I want people to be able to look at what I see in the social beauty unit.

Like an old staircase with pale, peeling paint and, you know, dust flying around.

There's something that looks like beauty to me when I see that kind of scene.

And for me, that always has this sense of like a wonder, a mystery.

I hope that people can see what I see.

The staircase theme, for me, that seems like there's hope.

There's light on top of the staircase.

You see it, your bottom is dark.

Something can be hopeful up there, something interesting up there.

Those kind of things draw me, like open doors, open windows, lights, and the far off distance, that kind of draws me.

[music] This is my nephew that I took photos of him a lot when he was younger.

So he's about a year and a half old here.

He's now grown, married with two beautiful kids.

So it's interesting looking back on these photos.

So I started in art at an early age, and I always wanted a camera.

And when I was 13, my friends wanted my first camera.

It was a small Vivitar 110, and I would just take it everywhere and take photographs.

So this is a photo I took in 1995 of my father downtown.

When I was in high school, I loved taking my photos of night photography.

My parents would take me out at night and drive around so I could take photographs.

I was taking pictures actually of the Usinger's Building.

And my dad was just kind of leading into the building, waiting for me to finish taking my photo of the water and everything.

And I thought, "Oh, that's a great photo of Dad.

He's leaning there, great, great, great pose."

I took a picture of my father, and it was one of my favorite photographs that I've ever taken.

I was a shy kid.

I didn't talk much because I had a stutter.

And sometimes, you know, just being able to photograph things, and that would kind of help me kind of explain, you know, how I was feeling or how my thoughts are.

One of my undergraduate degrees is in photography.

During that time in college, I started thinking about how my photography is being viewed and what was actually trying to say, communicating to people.

So it made me think about just not absolutely just, "Oh, I'm photographing this, this, this."

Maybe I should think about what I'm doing and why I kind of look more inward to myself.

So I keep going back to the Gary, Indiana.

Initially, it was because it was easy access.

The city has a smaller tax base than most cities.

And Milwaukee, when a building closes down, is boarded up, and, you know, police patrol around.

We have to make sure no one goes in to damage it.

And Gary, when a building closes down or the owners, you know, move away and don't take care of it, you know, it doesn't get boarded up.

It just kind of starts to decay on its own.

It's like this weird husk is dying on a vine almost.

And I started getting really interested in those buildings because I kind of thought, "Well, the beauty is still there.

It's just hidden underneath the decay, underneath the spray paint hidden, you know, behind the broken windows or broken glass."

One of my favorite buildings in Gary was called the Memorial Auditorium.

It was a building where they would have concerts and plays.

You know, I think someone mentioned Frank Sinatra performed there.

I think they mentioned MLK may have spoken there as well.

When I was in Gary in 2020, one of my first trips, I saw that the building was being torn down.

They were in the process of tearing it down, so one wall was already down.

I figured, "Let me just go inside and take a look."

And I walk inside and there's this pink piano just sitting in a lobby area.

I entered that photograph in a contest that David Barnett Gallery was having just for local photographers and it was accepted into the finalist stage.

And there's a contest where people come in and vote for their favorite photograph.

So I actually won second place, which I was very happy about.

In a world where everything is so superficial and everything is very TikTok or social media-focused, this may seem corny, but go outside, look around.

There are things that you may not know that they're right in front of you.

Delving into the eerie history of Old Town Albuquerque, ghost hunter Cody Polston reveals the spirits that still haunt its streets.

Let's venture together into this spooky story from New Mexico.

If you dare.

Why do you think that there are so many ghost stories surrounding Old Town?

There's a lot of sanitized history in Old Town.

We have so much ghost stories and the mixing of cultures and the age of the state.

You know, it just makes... This is like ghost hunting Mecca, I think.

I have not found it in any other state that I've done paranormal investigations.

[Music] Can you share some of the spooky history of the Old Town Cafe and the spirits that are said to haunt it?

So the fascinating parts about it is, first of all, that it survived to present times.

When you go and you look at the old Sanborn maps, that building has changed its configuration so many times over the years.

Originally, it had a big white false front on it when it was a big merchant store.

But then there's also a lot of the ghost stories as well, which are based upon tragedies that have happened in the building over the years.

And it was Casa de Armijo, right?

Right.

The thing I think that's kind of interesting about the Armijo family, my interest in that, it really evolves around one person, and that's Victoriana Armijo.

And she passed away at 18 years old, during childbirth.

So one of the things that also happens in La Placita, you can see stuff from outside.

And one of the stories that I got was from a security guard.

So if you're driving down South Plaza Street, your car aligns with that big window in La Placita.

So he's coming down and his lights were shining in the hallway, and he saw a woman holding a baby.

So he pulled up and stopped.

And he said it's like she looked toward him and then just moved off into another hall.

But he hadn't gotten an alarm, so he's like, "No, they must belong in there."

You know, didn't think anything about it.

But the next morning, he decided to talk to the manager just to make sure, you know.

So he goes inside and he asks the manager, "Hey, I saw a woman in your building last night, and I came up, the alarms weren't on.

I know she was in here.

Is there anybody living in here?"

And he goes, "No, it's a restaurant.

We don't got anybody living in here."

What's the story behind the little girl?

No, who really knows?

We don't even know her name.

Elizabeth is the moniker that the ghost centers gave to that ghost so they can just identify her.

We don't know who she is.

The rumor is she died of tuberculosis, but it's just a rumor.

Her appearance is very distinctive, so she wears a really pretty white dress.

It's like a communion dress.

Her favorite place is the bathroom.

Women will be in there looking at their makeup, and they see the image of the little girl in the bathroom.

Now, the image itself isn't that spooky, except when you look over and there's nobody there.

The general belief is that was her bedroom, back during her time.

The same thing, Victoriana's bedroom is the bedroom right after the stairs, so they would have been right next to each other.

So I've heard there's a curandera who's haunting the Church Street Cafe.

Tell me a little more about this spirit.

So there's not a lot known.

What we do know is, of course, she was a curandera, and we know that Rufina, her daughter, was the last living member of the house, last living family member.

After her death, that's when the building went for sale.

That's when Marie Coleman bought it and turned it to the restaurant.

One of the first places we investigated when that got settled in New Mexico.

At that time, it was just the house, and that beautiful patio in addition.

When Marie Coleman, who is still the owner of the place, was building it, she had a guy named Charlie who was doing work for her, and he would tell her, "You need to talk to that woman.

She keeps moving my tools.

You tell her to stop."

She'd go, "Who?"

"The ghost!"

So there became an interesting relationship between the two of them.

They get along, and as long as you say goodnight to Sara in the evening, it's fine.

You don't, you get in your car, the lights come back on.

You've got to get out, go back in, turn out the light.

Sometimes when Sara wants to get Marie's attention, she chucks little pebbles across the floor.

So they go skipping around, and Marie goes and picks them up, and like, "Okay, what do you want?"

One of the strangest things about the pebble chucking is we asked Marie if she could save some of these pebbles for us.

My friend Bob, who was also into geology, took the pebbles, and the next day he came back and said, "Dude, this is so crazy."

He said, "What?"

"These come from rocks that are on top of the Sandia Mountains, not down here in the valley."

Like, how'd they get down here?

Also the nativity scene inside, when you go inside, there's a display cabinet.

She used to have a nativity scene for sale, and Sara would move the figures, and she says, "They move around.

I'm the only one that has a key, but they move.

They change positions almost nightly."

So that's another interesting phenomenon that seems to happen in that building.

For the most part, the ghost just likes the house, and I think it's because there's been care taken and preserving the house part of it is why it's tolerable.

But there's a lot of ideas among ghost hunting that when you take a building and you renovate it and you do stuff, that's what disturbs things and you start having hauntings.

But again, that's an unproven theory, but ghost hunters commonly believe that.

Still very much in love with her property.

Sometimes it's like she cares about what the diners are experiencing, because some of the staff members have told me, "If someone doesn't have silverware or something, they'll be in the back and silverware will fly off."

So it's little tiny things like that.

And by themselves, they're not spooky, but when you look at it as a whole and it's going on through time, then you kind of get more of that kind of connection.

[music] I was really surprised to learn that part of Old Town used to be the Red Light District, right?

And that there is a ghost that's haunting that part of the town that was associated with the Red Light District.

I believe her name is like Scarlett?

Can you tell me about her?

So, Scarlett is a moniker, again, that we gave for the ghost to identify her.

It did a lot of work to find out who actually died there.

You know, because obviously there's lots of suicides in red light districts.

There's murders and all of this.

The backstory is way strange.

So if you look at the plaza today, you got Old Town Road in the back, and then up front we have South Plaza Street.

That building on the corner used to be called, that was the Armstrong Saloon, okay?

So the Armstrong Saloon, behind it there were two cribs.

One had a prostitute named Belle, the other one had a prostitute named Maude.

They love reading the little dime novels.

And they're reading about how great life is up in the East, and they totally get bummed out.

And so they make a promise that they're going to commit suicide together.

So they leave their little cribs, they go across the street to the drugstore, they get a drug to do the deed with.

When they come back, Maude's lover shows up.

So she's quickly all over him, not paying attention to Belle.

Well, Belle defiantly stands up and does the lid, takes it, and then ended her life.

The reason we think it's that particular brothel is that's the predominant place where she's seen.

So that would be the alley behind South Plaza Street.

The way I found out about this, I was doing a show on 94 Rock many, many, many, many years ago.

And we put our email address and all of that, and somebody emailed me.

This guy named Eddie, and he said, "I think I saw what you guys were talking about."

And he goes, "Well, we were eating.

Me and my girlfriend in La Placita, and we came out, and she went into the Old Town Emporium to shop.

and so I was, I'm a smoker, so I want to have my cigarette.

I got my cigarette out, and the lighter wouldn't light."

So he's like, "Oh, no, it's going to be like an hour before I can get one, because I have to go all the way back to the house."

He looked down the alley, and he saw a woman in the alley smoking.

A dark purple dress on.

He goes, "Light."

So he goes walking down the alley to get a light from her.

He gets about 20 feet away from this lady.

When his girlfriend, she only packed at him, "Eddie, what are you doing?"

"I'm going to go get a light."

And when he turned around, the girl was gone.

Now, the cool thing is, he was an artist, and he drew what he saw.

And so we now kind of have an idea of what this particular ghost looks like.

But over the years, lots of stories.

She's very flirtatious.

But here's the weird part.

She only appears to smokers.

So unless you're a smoker, she doesn't show up to you.

Another thing, the sightings appear mostly in springtime, usually before dusk.

So she's a daylight ghost.

I think the one people know about the most is where she's seen on the balcony of the old Springer House.

Here's the strange part about that.

That part of the building was built in the 1960s, so why would it go from the late 1800s to be walking on a newer piece of the building, but don't know.

So again, there's those questions.

And part of the history is not really understood a lot.

If you stand where the church is, put your back to the church in Old Town and point.

Everywhere you point at one point would have been a brothel or a bar.

That's how rowdy it was at one time.

What role do you think all of these ghost stories play in society?

They do a lot of things.

First of all, they do preserve history, pockets of history, because there has to be a reason why the ghost is haunting.

Secondly, it is a way for us humans to deal with death.

There's ghosts that warn people.

There's ghosts that will give beneficial type things like healing.

You've heard about the Virgin Mary type apparitions kind of thing.

So it's just, it's so tied into our culture.

Ghost stories are old.

They've been told for centuries and centuries and centuries.

They've changed over the years of what we see and how we experience them.

But ultimately it means something.

And they do evolve from storyteller to storyteller over time.

They change a little.

But they will exist as long as people are telling the stories.

Before we go, let's take a look at our Southern Arizona Arts Calendar as this new year kicks off.

Thanks for joining us this New Year's Day for State of the Arts.

I'm Mary Paul.

We're looking forward to sharing more stories from around the arts world in 2026.

We'll see you again next week.