2024-Present
Newcomer Program
4501 Central Ave NE, 107 Tulane Drive SE
Artists
Ameerah Bad’r, Sara Abbaspour, Youth Community Action Committee: United Voices for Newcomer Rights
This project is supported by New Mexico Arts, a regranting agency of the National Endowment for the Arts
In 2024 we began a new initiative with Albuquerque middle and high school students that are a part of the Albuquerque Public School Newcomer Supports Program.
This work started as an arts education integration in the APS Newcomer Summer Program, held at Highland High School in 2022 and 2023. Teaching Artists Ameerah Bad’r and Lindsey Fromm worked with summer school students to create personal, self expressive artworks.
In August 2023 we installed an exhibition of this work on the 8th floor of City Hall. It was a beautiful exhibit and we were so proud to share this work with the city!
The Newcomer Summer Program is supported by Lutheran Family Services and the WK Kellogg Foundation, and our exhibition was supported by the CABQ Resiliency Residency Program and NMArts, a regranting initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts.
The artwork made during the Newcomer Summer Program led to a series of banners installed in the Winter of 2023 and Spring of 2024. Over the summer, Ameerah shared poetry with the students and taught them reverse monoprinting, and this work became a banner that stated “I am from there, and I have memories” in both English and Arabic, with monoprint drawing behind the text. These banners were installed from December, 2023 to March 2024 at the former Field and Frame location at 107 Tulane Dr SE.
Field and Frame was an audiovisual company owned by Alan Fulford, an Albuquerque staple in the local film industry for many decades. He passed away unexpectedly in 2022, and we mourn his loss with the rest of the Albuquerque community.
Ameerah continued working with APS Newcomer students in the after school program at Highland High School HUB, an after school center that has transformed the building where FOS originally met with students in 2011 created the designs for the Revivir sign.
The after school program started right after the Eid al-Fitr holiday this spring. Ameerah had already planned to bring supplies to do henna, so it was timed perfectly with the holiday: for festivals like Eid, women gather together and apply henna on one another as a form of reaffirming community and sisterhood, and to bring good luck and happiness.
Out of all of these activities Ameerah did with the students, the activity that drew in the most students was the Henna, which took place on Fridays.
During Ameerah’s other workshops on Mondays and Wednesdays she held watercolor sessions and worked in a sign format, in which she encouraged students to write out phrases they wished to express to others.
For the final two weeks of the program, Ameerah worked with one dedicated student and collaboratively designed the second pairs of signs.
Together they went through the initial design phases, thumbnailing and ideation, typography design, compositional placement, and an intro digital manipulation.
On one side the quote “LOVE FOR ALL HATRED FOR NONE” is in English, on the other it is in Pashto.
In January Lindsey Fromm, a teaching artist from the Newcomer Summer Program (NSP), connected with staff at United Voices for Newcomer Rights, who had started a youth initiative called the Youth Community Advisory Council with middle and high school newcomer students from Del Norte HS, McKinley Middle School, Cleveland Middle School, and Highland High School, a major who had participated in the NSP. She met with a group of students at Highland to learn more about their Photo Voices project, which paired their personal photos with thoughts and feelings about newcomer life.
After going through a curatorial process, Lindsey presented a selection of these photos to the full YCAC group to choose two images for a sign nearby Highland. Two images by young women, speaking about the powerful and supportive relationships they have with their brothers, were resoundingly chosen by their peers.
These banners were installed in April, 2024, and the students had an opportunity to celebrate this work with their families.
For 7 weeks in the spring of 2024, artist and UNM Professor Sara Abbaspour worked with Gloria Valderrama’s Newcomer Supports class at Highland High School. Sara taught the students many forms of exposure photography, including cyanotypes, disposable cameras, Polaroid Film, large-format film cameras and B&W single-lens reflex photograph. The final banners Sara created with the class emphasize their interconnectedness, the strong bond they made through these art exercises, and their ability to communicate across the many languages spoken in one class.