Part one: Ernie
26 March 2026
One day back in the winter of 2023-2024, artist Ben Harrison opened the door to his storefront studio on Fifth, just south of Central, and saw a pigeon sitting in the street, in a puddle of water right next to the tire of his car.
Harrison is the type to take notice of such things. He is a fan of pigeons. They are, in fact, his favorite bird, and many have been featured in his paintings.
“They’re the common people,” he said by way of explanation in an interview at his studio last fall.
But back to the story.
“So I go out, I see him, then I come back in and do some work,” Harrison said. “I go back out an hour later, and he’s still there in the exact same spot. I said, ‘jeez, I hope he’s okay.’ So I went in, and about an hour later I went and looked again. It was night by then, and he was still there in the same spot, just sitting there. So I thought, ‘Oh, man, this guy’s hurt.’
Harrison went to fetch a box, picked up the bird with his bare hands without a fuss, and installed him inside the studio.
“He spent the night mostly sleeping in the box and he couldn’t move his wing very well. He got hit by a car or hit a window or something – I don’t know,” Harrison said. “I stayed here too with him. We both hung out all night. I was working on paintings and stuff.”
The next morning, the bird appeared to have improved a bit. Harrison fed him a piece of banana, made sure he had water, and watched as a revival seemed to take hold.
“He started feeling better and he was kind of walking around. I would walk in the other room, and he was following me – like waddling around next to me,” he said. On another occasion, “I had a pillow on the floor that I was sitting on. But I had another one. He would come over and sit on the pillow next to me.”
By this time, Harrison figured that the recuperating pigeon – who he had christened “Ernie” – might be ready to make its way back to the streets of Downtown, so he propped open the door to Fifth as a kind of friendly invitation. But things did not go as expected.
“He’d walk over to the door, and he would go and look out on the sidewalk, look both ways, and then run back in and sit on the pillow,” Harrison said.
Ernie repeated this jaunt to the doorway a few times, then eventually ventured even further afield.
“He walks up to the door, looks both ways, and walks out, and he goes down the sidewalk and around into the alley,” Harrison said. “So I went out there and I said, ‘Ernie, it’s been nice hanging out. I’m glad you’re feeling better. Tell you what: if you ever want to come back and hang out, you are totally welcome.'”
The invitation was accepted sooner than expected: “He turns around, he comes down the sidewalk, comes right around, and goes right in the studio door,” he said.
(For the record, Harrison knows all of this sounds crazy. Throughout the story, he seemed to have a hard time believing it himself, and repeatedly emphasized that he has key moments from the Ernie caper, like the pigeon’s initial foray toward the door and back to the pillow, on video.)
Ernie, in any event, was soon ready to hit the streets once again. Later that day, he left for good. Harrison hasn’t forgotten him, and later even memorialized him in a song.
Following the experience, “I would go out all the time and kind of look for him. I’d look around, and sometimes I would talk to the pigeons on the street, thinking maybe one of them was Ernie.”
Part two: The double steal
The door to Harrison’s studio has since been fortified, but sometime back in 2024, a burglar broke in and made off with a few things.
Returning to the space, “I realized there were a few guitars missing. Also my guitar effects pedals, which I’ve curated over the years. They really meant a lot to me.”
What he did not notice, at least at first, was that some of his drawings – part of a larger collection of work that involves drawing on the pages of old comic books (photos above) – were also missing. Harrison has taught classes on the concept and estimates that he’s finished about 9,000 of the drawings over the years. The fact that a few went missing from the studio without him noticing is not exactly a surprise.
He eventually learned of the heist a few weeks later as he was popping out to run an errand.
“I opened up the door to my studio and there was a woman outside, and she said, ‘are you Ben Harrison?'”
She was short, maybe five feet tall. The state of her clothes, the size of her (multiple) backpacks, and other hints seemed to indicate that she was homeless.
Harrison was taken aback by the question. “I was like, ‘I don’t know. Why do you want to know.’ She said, ‘well, I think I have something that belongs to you.'”
“So then she reached in one of her big backpacks – it was up on her shoulder, like a big Santa bag. She pulls out one of my drawings and says, ‘This is yours, right?’ I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s crazy, thank you so much.’ She goes, ‘oh, hold on.'”
The woman reached back into the Santa bag and pulled out a second, third, and fourth drawing. By the time she was done fishing everything out, there were ten. A flabbergasted Harrison asked where she found them.
“She said, ‘Well, I was hanging out with this guy the other night, and he said he made the drawings. And I just didn’t believe him because he didn’t seem like a very honest person, and I could just kind of tell he didn’t really do it. So I stole them from him, and I decided I was going to find out who made those drawings and give them back.”
The task involved a great deal of shoe leather, but as luck would have it, Harrison had posted a few of the drawings in the window. The woman apparently had an eye for art.
“She said, ‘I looked all over the place and finally I saw this window with these drawings. It looked similar, so I figured these must be yours. So I came to find you.'”
Feeling both delighted and thankful, Harrison tried to give her all the cash in his wallet – about $17, as he remembers it. She took the money, but it took some convincing.
“That wasn’t really what she was trying to do. She just really had it in her mind that somebody’s personal drawings had been stolen, and she was going to get them back,” Harrison said. With all the things going on in her life – I can only imagine – I think it’s amazing that she was kind enough to do that.”
Downtown Albuquerque News covers Downtown, Old Town, and surrounding neighborhoods. We publish on weekdays except for federal holidays. Click here to subscribe, contact us, submit a letter to the editor, or learn more about what we do.