2024-Present

Newcomer Program

4501 Central Ave NE, 107 Tulane Drive SE

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Artists

Ameerah Bad’r, Sara Abbaspour, Youth Community Action Committee: United Voices for Newcomer Rights

In 2024 Friends of the Orphan Signs 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.

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.

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.

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.

This project is supported by New Mexico Arts, a regranting agency of the National Endowment for the Arts

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