Portrait of the Artist as a Local Legend

Summer tourism brings visitors to the town of Manitou Springs, Colorado (population 4,858), to explore its rugged beauty, natural mineral springs, and paths to Pikes Peak. But for a few days each year the weekend before Mardi Gras, Manitou Springs is transformed into a little Louisiana, complete with a gumbo cook-off, carnival krewes, and handmade puppets on parade. Locals crowd the streets in vibrant costumes and colorful masks for the town’s Carnivale Parade, an annual tradition that has celebrated the area arts community for 32 years.

This year one puppet towered over the parade: a 24-foot-tall likeness of late local artist Charles Rockey, complete with a paintbrush in hand, suspenders, and a thick gray beard. Multimedia artist Sofia Hernandez Crade’13 created the breathtaking likeness of Rockey, who himself was larger than life.

The Charles Rockey puppet towers over the crowd at the 2024 Manitou Springs Carnivale Parade.
Credit: Tom Kindt

Hernandez Crade was raised in Woodland Park, a small town near Manitou Springs. Growing up, she loved to spend time in Manitou Springs, a certified Colorado Creative District known for its historic and vibrant art scene. She’s now living in Colorado Springs, even closer to Manitou Springs, and has a studio there. She has championed other local artists as gallery art director in the area, as well as taught children’s art classes at the Manitou Art Center and art therapy courses for sexual assault survivors.

“I feel fortunate to have made many friends and found incredible mentors in the Pikes Peak region,” she says. “I’m inspired to be part of the transformation that’s happening here as Colorado Springs grows and invests more into developing its arts and culture.”

One artist who played a particularly large role in shaping the town’s whimsical arts scene was Rockey. The multimedia artist was a local celebrity who could often be found working outside his studio, which Hernandez Crade remembers peeking into when she was growing up.

“He was somebody everyone knew and loved. Since it’s such a small town, even if you didn’t know him, you saw him around,” says Hernandez Crade. “He had a ‘Dumbledore-esque’ vibe and he was a very kind and generous person. He’d talk to everyone walking by.”

Rockey’s work in multiple artistic mediums played a role in inspiring Hernandez Crade to pursue art herself. Originally, she’d planned to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, but her father, a professor at Colorado College, encouraged her to consider Beloit. After comparing financial offers, she decided Beloit was the better fit. At Beloit, she studied fine arts and won an award for best senior thesis.

“[Going to Beloit] ended up being such a blessing in disguise. I met some of my all-time favorite people that I’m still friends with,” says Hernandez Crade. She appreciated the variety of classes she was able to take and the ability to explore the intersections of different subjects. “I took classes from an amazing math professor [the late Darrah Chavey] and worked with him on the art component of ethnomathematics. Going to Beloit really informed my art and me as a person.”

Since graduating and moving to her first apartment in Manitou Springs, Hernandez Crade has mostly worked with paint, although she has always felt drawn to sculpture. “I’ve been doing a lot of painting because it’s easier than sculpture in many ways,” she says.

A year and a half ago, she experienced the devastating loss of her 19-year-old brother, Demitri. She didn’t create anything for months. Her therapist recommended only pursuing a project if it evoked “an unequivocal yes.” As that year’s Carnivale Parade approached, she was contacted by a group of artists asking for her help with their puppet. Instead, she decided to create something for herself: a 12-foot blue hare.

It was Hernandez Crade’s first time attending the parade, let alone making a giant puppet for it. “I was trying to build something that helped lift people’s spirits and inspire the imagination and creativity of the community,” she says. “I love the idea that larger-than-life public works and art happenings can bring whimsy to the streets.”

Completed over 14 days, the hare puppet helped her heal. “It was a return to the medium I’ve always felt drawn to. It felt symbolic of coming back to myself after such a hard time. Having a tangible project to pour myself into — and to have it featured and celebrated by my community — was powerful in beginning to feel like myself again. A lot of the work I’ve been doing since the pandemic has been dictated by the client versus what I wanted, and I felt like doing the puppet was kind of a rebirth, of ‘I’m gonna do something wild and weird, and nobody’s telling me what to do. It’s just going to be for me.’”

The hare puppet in the 2023 parade was the biggest in Manitou Springs history. For 2024, Hernandez Crade wanted to surpass her own record. Rockey immediately came to mind as a subject. She had spent lots of time with him when she moved back to Colorado in her 20s.

“I sat with him for hours one day and we just poured our hearts out,” Hernandez Crade says. “He was very encouraging of me as a young artist. I think that it’s important for older artists to be mentors. He actually wanted to see the artwork I was creating and have a small impact on building the next generation.”

She wasn’t Rockey’s only fan. “He was a well-loved part of the community. He could have made a name for himself in a lot of different places, but he chose to be a small-town artist,” Hernandez Crade says.

“I think the piece was beyond just Rockey. It was about the power of an artist in a space and how that can spark the imagination of the people who live in that area. It allows others to imagine, ‘Oh, maybe I can be an artist, too.’”

Once she decided to take on this year’s project, Hernandez Crade knew there was no going back. The puppet required constant creativity and problem solving, which she enjoyed. “It felt freeing to work with sculpting, painting, sewing, and engineering — all these things rolled into one. It’s exciting after primarily working in one medium,” she says.

She started work on the puppet’s focal point first. Made from a barrel, the head was covered with papier mâché and rolls of plaster to create the surface of the skin, which was later painted with acrylics and washes to get a realistic skin tone. Hernandez Crade used a dozen gray wigs and horsehair for Rockey’s hair, eyebrows, and beard, and painted them to give the illusion of highlights and lowlights. She placed the head onto a lazy susan, allowing it to swivel during the parade. The rest of the body was largely made of wood, plaster, fabric, wire, glue, bolts, and screws. The Rockey puppet required a forklift to move throughout the parade, an awe-inspiring 24 feet tall in sitting position.

Hernandez Crade worked on the project for over a month and a half — 15-hour days and well into the night. As the project gained attention, she also had to balance work with interviews from media outlets. Her younger brother Jody helped attract local attention for her puppet. Excited about her project, he contacted local newspapers. “His excitement and initiative helped get the community excited about it,” she says.

Manitou Springs residents were eager to support the project. The materials quickly got expensive, and Hernandez Crade set up a GoFundMe that reached $3,000 in donations. A rental company also helped by donating a forklift and trailer. “A lot of people were really invested. It was a community project, even if I was the one making most of the artistry,” she says.

The day of the parade, people showed up from all over just to see the Rockey puppet. Hernandez Crade says it was an emotional experience. “It was crazy. People wept. Rockey’s family came and said it was more like their dad than any photo they’ve seen. All these people were like, ‘You made an entire town cry,’” she says.

After the success of the past two years, Hernandez Crade is planning her next project. “I want to do an alebrije — they’re Mexican spirit-type animals that are spliced together. I want to do another enormous piece with wings that will actually move, and there will be people in each joint so it can move at the knee,” she says. “So if I can pull that off, it’s going to make the last one look uncomplicated.”

Hernandez Crade wanted to inspire a sense of awe with her Charles Rockey puppet — and remind herself and others that anything is possible. “I needed to do something for myself and not be confined by space, circumstances, or my own limitations of what I thought was possible,” she says. Like the artist it was based on, her puppet inspired an entire community.