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So, this beautiful work of art is about to be installed in the new pop-up park in the International District of Albuquerque. Imagine it surrounded by triangular and square, mobile containers with trees and plants. Three large water containers hiding inside rectangular murals. All will transform a dirt lot (one of too many in the neighborhood) into an oasis. We’ve been working in this idea for almost 5 years and it’s finally coming to fruition--we’re pumped.! Learn more. Thanks to our project partners, The Nature Conservancy, Rocky Mountain Youth Corps, NM State Forestry, the So. San Pedro Neighborhood Association, AMAFCA and the Int’l District Economic Development Center. Thanks to lead artist Billy Joe Miller for this and its companion piece, the gorgeous “Morning Glory.” Join us for a community build day (Aug 3) and/or the ribbon-cutting (Aug 6).

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With thanks to the ABCF

All of us at Artful Life are grateful to the Albuquerque Community Foundation and its donors for choosing our projects, along with the work of four other service organizations, for their annual Great Grant Giveaway. Check out the video they created about our work: http://albuquerquefoundation.org/2019-great-grant-giveaway.aspx.  Every dollar enables us to do the work we do with the communities we love.

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Artist Corps

In 2017, New Mexico Senator Tom Udall introduced the CREATE Act bill in the US Congress in order to, in his words,  “help ensure that artists, galleries and museums, and aspiring artistic entrepreneurs can access resources and programs to help grow their businesses, create jobs and stimulate the economy, and share their artwork with our communities." 

Section 301 of the CREATE Act proposes a national service program to support Artist Corps that will “carry out activities such as—“(i) providing skilled visual and performance artists to address community needs through artistic activities in education, health care, and therapeutic settings, and in other settings in the community; or “(ii) providing other artistic activities, addressing unmet community needs, that the Corporation may designate, such as technical assistance for grant writing, marketing, and financial planning.”

Artful Life stands strongly in favor of all provisions of the CREATE act and of the Artist Corps program, in particular. Learn more about the bill and how to support it at the Americans for the Arts website:  https://www.americansforthearts.org/by-program/reports-and-data/legislation-policy/legislative-issue-center/the-create-act

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Mark your calendars for “Iluminarte 2018,” Saturday, December 8, 2018, at the National Hispanic Cultural Center--a day-long mini-festival which will include an illuminated bicycle parade on the Paseo del Bosque Trail (along the Rio Grande), a talk on the facts, fictions and urban legends of the farolito/luminaria, and art and stories about luminarias/farolitos by kids and their elders.  Artful Life is happy to partner with the NHCC and Storyriders to present this first annual and unusual event in the Barelas neighborhood.  Free and open to the public. Join us: https://www.artful-life.org/barelas

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Everything we do, at Artful Life, is a creative collaboration. We come together as artists, residents, ordinary people to connect, talk, move, write, draw, paint, sculpt, map, feel, relate. We imagine, together. We build, together. We project our dreams into the future, together.  We are not the same, but together we are new and beautiful because we treat each other with care, compassion and respect. We know this is the way to heal ourselves, each other, the world. Especially right now.

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This is what it’s all about--connecting. This photo, from one of the “art dinners’ that helped to launch our community project in Barelas, shows each resident with their own place setting--something we asked them to bring to the occasion. As we ate, each person told us the story of their plate, cup, silverware and/or glass which created a rich tapestry of local stories and histories. These gatherings helped us to get to know each other and reach more and more residents of this historic and beautiful Albuquerque neighborhood.  Now, months later, residents are deep into a process of community, creative collaboration that will result in a first community art event, “PoeTrees: Verses from Barelas,” on May 6, 2018.  Newly-planted trees will get poems on their budding branches, a “moving feast” of poetry from and about Barelas, followed by food and drink.  Learn more about this event and the spring event in the International District on our website: www.artful-life.org.

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We’ve had a busy year at Artful Life–creating the Diversity mural at the corner of Zuni & Louisiana, permanently installing “Morning Glory”–both works in the Int’l District of Albuquerque (where we have been working for 6 ½ years). There, too, we formed the Int’l District Youth Team that spent this fall and early winter with team-building and community outreach. The team will be creating pop-up works of art in the neighborhood next year. In Barelas, we completed a second year of relationship-building and are gearing up for a 5 month process of arts engagement, with a trained team and community members, starting in January.  In the South Valley, we completed a two-year long process of co-creating designs for 3 beautiful community tables with residents. The tables move into fabrication next year. The EKCO project created a powerful 45 minute performance, “Women on War,” in collaboration with women vets who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. We also continue to be an active part of the Global 505 Coalition, serving ABQ’s immigrant and refugee communities. The coalition is completing a Health Impact Assessment around language access in schools, transportation hubs and job sites. Artful Life is also leading member organizations through a coalition-building process. Finally, we continue to co-coordinate and co-sponsor Women & Creativity Month–celebrating women in the arts in New Mexico. All the details are on our website:  www.artful-life.org. Our work is due to the dozens of community members and organizations who participate in our projects, partner with us,  and guide us along the way.  The work is also due to our wide range of phenomenal funders and supporters, who buoy the work (and us) up every day.  And to our artists and creative facilitators and practitioners–thank you for your vision, flexibility, tenaciousness and deep commitment to people and neighborhoods. We build from the grass-roots upward; art-making is our vehicle for activating and deepening relationships and capacity; imagination, resilience, and creativity is the fuel.  Thank you, Everyone.

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This is a complicated holiday, Thanksgiving, fraught with historical myth and collective amnesia.  I sit with it in two ways, asserting the truth and injustices of the past and embracing thanks for what exists now. Yes, even in this maelstrom of contemporary life. At Artful Life, we are so very fortunate to continue to gather--in our neighborhoods, with our fellow artists, alongside our many organizational partners--to create, to work, to eat, to laugh, to weep. We recognize our many challenges while we lean forward, into a future we want to make for ourselves in all our gorgeous diversity. We are resilient; we are creative; we are motivated by our respect and love for each other.  We give thanks for the ways we insist on connecting, and the ways others teach us to be responsible and loving in this world. Happy Thanksgiving 2017.

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Congratulations to Tim Keller on becoming Mayor of Albuquerque! Thanks to Keller, Artful Life’s Valerie Martinez has been working with ABQ’s International District community since 2011. As then state senator for the district, Keller invited us in to work with residents, using art to build community capacity and leadership. Keller has earned broad support from the district’s native, immigrant and refugee populations and worked tirelessly on behalf of his constituents.  We believe he will do the same for all of Albuquerque. Thanks to Tim and his family for a terrific campaign that embraced ABQ’s beautifully diverse population.

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Again, our hearts are broken. Again. We send our love to all in Sutherland Springs, TX.

Photo: Mohammad Khursheed/Reuters                     

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Last Saturday we took the Int’l District Youth Team to the City of Albuquerque Murals Conference, including a tour of downtown ABQ murals.  They’re inspired and fired up to start creating pop-up works of art in their neighborhood. https://www.artful-life.org/copy-of-dream-team

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We are grateful to have facilitated three community sessions in ABQ’s Int’l District to learn how language access would change the lives of refugees and immigrants--part of the Global 505 coalition’s work to complete a Health Impact Assessment (HIA). Next week, we start coalition-building project with our wonderful Global 505 partners.  Stay tuned...

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Today Artful Life and Tiaso were happy to host a group of Albuquerque and Santa Fe artists, arts administrators, educators, evaluators, curators and others to learn more about Animating Democracy’s new framework, “Aesthetic Attributes in Arts for Change” (http://www.animatingdemocracy.org/aesthetic-perspectives).  Thanks to AD’ s Pam Korza for facilitating an exchange about such things as “stickiness,” “cultural integrity,” “communal meaning,” “risk-taking,” and “openness.”  Thanks to all for their “commitment” to increasing the potency of creative expression to create change.

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Int’l District Youth Team: it is our pleasure, at Artful Life, to be working with these amazing teens from ABQ’s International District. They will be working hard to create new and vibrant places in their neighborhood.  Learn more: https://www.artful-life.org/copy-of-dream-team

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It was my pleasure, just under a year ago, to attend the Culture/Shift 2016 convening in St. Louis.  Take a look at part of what we heard, said, experienced...

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Sending our love to the people of Florida, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Mexico City, Barbuda and all those affected by Hurricanes Irma, Jose and Maria and the Mexico City earthquake.

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Our work with the University of New Mexico Dream Team, DACA students, was one of the most inspiring projects we’ve ever done.  Their lives, stories and perspectives are part of the fabric of our US culture--a culture deeply informed, since the beginning, by immigrants. We defend DACA.  We support the right of children of immigrants to become full citizens of the US and recognize the tremendous talent and resources they bring to this nation of native peoples and immigrants.