19 OCTOBER 2026

Most of us view art as a permanent thing. You can walk into a museum right now and see a painting and then come back a year or maybe 10 years from now and see that same painting exactly as it was. Certain art is considered so precious that it might be encased in glass for fear that any elements will affect it.

But what if art wasn’t so permanent? What if it changed or even disappeared forever? This is the idea Chip Thomas – aka “jetsonorama” – has been exploring for years with his massive photographic murals. He knows that due to the effects of nature, his work won’t always be there, and that’s kind of the point.

MMIP (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons) mural https://jetsonorama.net/journal/mmip/

Thomas grew up in North Carolina, and after deciding he wanted to be a doctor, attended Meharry Medical College in Nashville, TN. To repay a National Health Service Corps scholarship, he moved to the Southwest to provide volunteer medical services to the Diné people of the Navajo Nation. He originally thought he’d only be there two years, but because he loved the area and the people, he chose to stay. He particularly liked spending time with his patients in their homes and camps, eventually getting to know them as friends. As he grew closer to them, he started taking their pictures.

In 2009, Thomas had his epiphany moment when he took a three-month sabbatical to Brazil. There he met a group of street artists and they allowed him to see how they worked painting pieces on city walls around Salvador. Along with photography, from an early age, Thomas had been interested in street art, particularly Keith Haring and the punk and hip hop scenes in 1980s New York City. His trip to Brazil – along with learning about another street artist – sparked a passion that’s still smoldering.

Water is Life mural https://jetsonorama.net/journal/water-is-life/

The same year of his Brazil excursion, a friend showed Thomas some work of French street artist Jean-René, known as JR, who was becoming well known for his huge black-and-white photographic images he would put up in public spaces. This was the real turning point, says Thomas, as this combined his two passions: black-and-white photography and street art.

“It was like, oh, my God, this is it,” he said. “This person has figured out how to take a documentary black-and-white photograph, blow it up to scale and to use it as street art. My mind was blown. It's like, I have to figure this out.”

Thomas then starting looking around to find different buildings that could work. Mundane drives became much more, as even a trip to the supermarket “stopped being routine,” he said. “It suddenly became the setting for a dialogue with the land and the people.”

While Thomas didn’t give up his day job as a doctor (he retired in 2023), he did start taking his photographs of people and animals and superimposing them on abandoned buildings, dilapidated structures, grain silos, and anything else that would work. In 2012, he self-funded the Painted Desert Project. This involved street artists from around the globe coming to the Navajo Nation and working with locals to design and create murals.

In addition to creating beauty in often bleak landscapes, Thomas also wanted to raise awareness of issues affecting Native Americans. This includes crime, poverty, poor nutrition, and high cancer rates related to uranium mining. Perhaps because of his medical background, health is a common theme in his murals.

“I've always been interested in messaging,” he said, “especially around health-related issues and one of the first interventions I took part in here was there was a billboard erected by the Pepsi Company on the reservation that showed four large cans of pop with water dripping off of them because they were cold and refreshing and it said, ‘Welcome to Pepsi Country.’ But this was advertised in a community where one out of four adults over the age of 45 has adult-onset diabetes, so a Public Health Nurse and I, named Lorie Smith, went out one night and wanted to correct that sign to get people to think about the messaging a little differently. So we changed the message to read, ‘Welcome to Diabetes Country.’”

Even at almost 70 years old, Thomas has no plans to stop creating new work and telling new stories. He also has no intention of selling his art. While free for everyone, he says his primary audience is the Navajo people.

And as striking as his murals are – art historian Kevin Moore called them “haunting” when seeing them while driving across the desert – Thomas understands that they won’t last forever:

“The work is ephemeral, you know, is paper versus the elements, and the elements – Mother Nature always wins.”

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