2020-2021

Elevation

107 Tulane Drive SE

Artist

Lindsey Fromm

Over the Fall, Winter and Spring of 2020 and 2021, students at the Elevation Children’s Center worked with Teaching Artist Lindsey Fromm to create artwork for an empty street sign at Field and Frame, a film and video production company located at 107 Tulane Dr. SE, Albuquerque, NM.

This collaboration, called the Elevation Project, is an initiative of Friends of the Orphan Signs (FOS), a collaborative public art and educational organization that revitalizes abandoned road signs in New Mexico and along historic Route 66. FOS facilitates collaborations with local communities with the aim of designing new imagery and text to install in empty signs as public art pieces that explore neighborhood identity.

Elevation Children’s Center offers “immersive outdoor programs that benefit from the ecological diversity and beauty of our region.” Between September 2020, and May 2021, Fromm met the children at various base camps around the city to artistically collaborate and explore the natural world, and documented the process. She brought art supplies that were easy to transport to the sites on foot and worked with the children to make creative responses in the environment. Fromm used documentation of their creative and exploratory acts to create final artworks that were installed on the Field and Frame sign on five separate occasions, from December to May.

The purpose of the Elevation Project is to give local children some ownership over how their neighborhood looks, and to show them at earliest stages in their education they can have a positive, visible, and lasting impact on the community. This idea aligns with the mission of Elevation Children’s Center: to emphasize the importance of children in our society by making their presence more visible in public space. By sharing the unique artistic perspectives of local children on a sign that would otherwise be empty, we build on the school’s philosophy that children should have an active presence in the Albuquerque community.

This project is supported in part by New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, by the National Endowment for the Arts, and by the City of Albuquerque Urban enhancement Trust Fund.