Get Into mutual aid!
Mutual aid is a model of community solidarity where people voluntarily support each other, meeting each other’s needs and combatting social, economic, and political barriers together. Mutual aid activities might include Distributing necessities, connecting people with resources, Creating networks of care, Addressing root causes of need, and/or demanding transformative change.
You may already participate in mutual aid by helping friends, family, or neighbors with meals, rides, child care, elder care, or any other form of free support; or by receiving these kinds of support. As we continue to experience climate disasters and economic instability as a community, expanding your circle of mutual aid is crucial.
mutual aid efforts in Albuquerque:
Albuquerque Mutual Aid
Dare to Struggle NM
Fight For our Lives
Freewheel Mobile Aid
John Brown Breakfast Club
Millions for Prisoners
Mobile Abolition Library
New Mexico Harm Reduction Collaboration
Southwest Solidarity Network
Southwest Organizing Project
Tewa Women United
Three Sisters Collective
YUCCA NM
*Have another group to add to the list? Email ricamaestas at gmail dot com with your recommendation.
Not all resources are material! Participate in a wisdom drive.
Just Like a food or coat drive, a wisdom drive collects a valuable resource (in this case, a piece of our lived experience) to distribute to the community. Everyone has something to contribute and everyone can benefit from encountering a new perspective!
* This could be a lesson you learned, a quote or saying you remember, a value you hold, or an even a helpful tip.
What’s on the signs?
6720 Central Ave SE, Albuquerque, NM, 87108
On view January 15–March 31, 2025
I grieve for our gone is a public artwork installed as part of the Friends of Orphan Signs Symbiosis Residency. the site-specific design visualizes writings by intersectional feminist and civil rights activist Audre Lorde, bringing her poignant cultural criticism into conversation with Albuquerque’s history of activism and mutual aid, as well as its decades-long struggle with police brutality.
Galvanized by a recent community meeting at the International District Library organized by ABQ Mutual Aid, the sign pays homage the essay Eye to Eye, in which Lorde uses the analogy of a she-wolf mutilating herself and her kin to describe how accumulated personal trauma can manifest in a compulsion to judge, police, and/or harm others.
For those with disposable income, please consider donating to Matthew ‘Solo’ Garcia’s family GoFundMe to cover funeral and housing costs in the wake of his violent death at the hands of two APD officers.
Though the essay details Lorde’s personal relationships with colleagues and family, her thoughtful analysis of interpersonal dynamics can apply to any number of adversarial and/or dehumanizing interactions. Read the full essay below:
The auxiliary panels bearing Lorde’s quote that titles the artwork and directive to “Keep Each Other Safe” are adorned with lovingly-rendered goathead plants, which reintroduce crucial nutrients to damaged soil. The invocation of these widely-despised yet ecologically helpful plants ties the work to an ongoing body of work by Maestas that centers the same Lorde essay to consider the enduring psychological and ecological harms of colonization. Learn more –>
about the contributors
Rica Maestas is a burqueñx artist and writer nurturing spaces where no one has to be whole. Inspired by home, loneliness, hybridity, and misunderstanding, Maestas makes little treasures, gifts, and offerings inviting us into dreamy and emotionally demanding spaces.
Maestas holds a MA in public humanities from Brown University and has received numerous grants for their socially engaged projects, performances, paintings, and assemblages. Their multidisciplinary practice has included exhibiting artwork and curating independent and institutional projects, publishing written work in diverse forums, and participating in residencies at the Santa Fe Art Institute, Harwood Art Center, and PASEO Project. Profiles of their work have appeared in the Coastal Post, Providence Journal, Brown Daily Herald, Santa Fe New Mexican, Santa Fe Reporter, and Taos News.
Friends of Orphan Signs (FOS) is a collaborative public art organization of artist-educators that creatively revitalizes abandoned or unused road signs with artwork, with a particular focus along historic Route 66 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. FOS facilitates innovative collaborations and educational workshops with local communities with the aim of designing new imagery to install in the signs as public art pieces. FOS works to revitalize the visual landscape of disinvested neighborhoods while centering the voices of its residents. Signs are public, accessible on foot and in car, and are on major thoroughfares throughout Albuquerque.
Since 2010, FOS has worked to preserve relics of past roadside culture, as many orphan signs (signs currently on empty lots or unused by the current occupants) are deemed unworthy of restoration. These signs are called “orphans” by the historic preservation community. FOS recognizes the historic value of orphans and they develop dynamic, community-oriented, public art projects that utilize these structures as sites for temporary and permanent public artwork.
Their projects also encompass gallery exhibitions and outdoor video screenings meant to inspire broad public participation in the reimagining of signs and empty lots as sites for artworks.
The Symbiosis Artist Residency is funded by a grant from the Urban Enhancement Trust Fund.
rica maestas 