friends of orphan signs symbiosis residency: billboard and program
risolana book cohort: book
6720 Central Ave SE, Albuquerque, NM, 87108
On view January–May, 2025
I grieve for our gone was a site-specific public artwork visualizing writings by Audre Lorde and bringing her poignant cultural criticism into conversation with Albuquerque’s history of activism, mutual aid, and police brutality.
Shortly before the billboard was to be installed, two members of the Albuquerque Police Department (APD) shot and killed a handcuffed man, Matthew “Solo” Garcia, while he was lying face-down in their custody, less than a mile from the site. Solo’s absence weighed heavily on my mind, though I didn’t know him and now, never would. Lorde’s wisdom guided my grief as an Albuquerque resident living through yet another APD murder amid decades of more killings per capita than any other police force in the US.
But my intention was for the billboard to temporarily elevate one of my go-to wisdoms as an opening to a broader conversation with neighborhood residents, and ideally, a more lasting project by and for International District neighbors.
So for a week in March, 2025, I asked International District Library patrons to share a piece of wisdom they’d like to be put in a library book. Like a community drive for coats or cans, the wisdom drive gathered community knowledge for future redistribution in a book.
In collaboration with Risolana’s Book Cohort, I produced Our Wisdoms, an edition of 100 160-page books, wrapped in a 3-color risograph folio depicting wisdoms left on a table outside the library. This incomplete collection of generous donations of time and knowledge is a snapshot of the vast non-material wealth of a community plagued by chronic under-resourcing and over-policing.
Sales of Our Wisdoms fund the production of professional (i.e. hardier) books of the same content for donation to Albuquerque Libraries. Contact for details.
rica maestas 