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It's impossible to ignore Augustine Romero's artwork.

Big panels of wood are bolted into the wall. They're spray-painted in the bold colors and forms of graffiti, sanded in spots like old cars. On each floats an image that symbolizes the last Aztec emperor, Cuauthemoc, the fallen eagle.

Romero's art is urban. It's street. It's political.

He deftly blends the power of culture with the beauty of abstract form.

His sculptural pieces are built of plywood, steel, Plexiglas, auto parts and skateboards. He does outdoor "winter solstice" sculptures that use the moving sun to throw ever-growing shadows, climaxing on Dec. 21 of each year.

"My pieces change," Romero says. "You have to be there on any given day to see something happen."

His artwork addresses border security and illegal immigration, environmental neglect, consumerism, revolution, pop culture, our country's leadership. His conscience is embedded in the art.

"I always have a message," he says.

Romero a year ago was named curator of the art galleries at the South Broadway Cultural Center and the KiMo Theater, and hopes to showcase the work of inner city artists.

"I want to bring in people who have grown with the artist community in this area," he says. "I want to see the Albuquerque art scene be more up and down the dial instead of in one place."

Romero, a native of Pueblo, Colo., took to art as a teenager, watching his brother, an electrical engineer, draw. "At that point, art was the only thing I wanted to do," he says.

He got a bachelor's degree in art from Colorado State University at Pueblo, doing editorial cartoons for the campus newspaper to make ends meet.

He was a ski bum for a while after graduating, then got a break when the city of Pueblo agreed to let him create memorial sculptures of Emiliano Zapata and C‚sar Ch vez for a public park. The rub was that Romero had to raise the money.

"At that point I realized graduate school would be helpful," he says.

Romero applied "all over the place," looking for a college with a vibrant art community nearby. He found a big one - New York University. He moved to Manhattan in 1995 and graduated from NYU in 1997 with a master's in art.

NYU was eye-opening. "I was challenged in all ways possible," he says. "I had ideas of what art was, and had to re-think a lot of things. I became a better artist."

Romero stayed in the city another four years as a teacher at the Parsons School of Design, and on summer trips home raised the money to complete the Zapata and Ch vez monuments. A third public work was a sad postscript: a monument to two priests who were stabbed to death in Pueblo in 1998, one of whom had helped Romero raise money.

He and his wife, Nancy Lopez, moved to Albuquerque in 2001 when she got a job as a sociology professor at UNM.

With his 5- and 3-year-old daughters close by, Romero does his artwork in the yard of his Duranes home.

"In New York I missed making art outside," he says. "I wanted to get back under the big sky."