By Florian Knowles, Ty Bannerman and Megan Kamerick
The season for giving is just around the corner, and on Let’s Talk New Mexico on Thursday, four organizations joined host Ty Bannerman to talk about charitable giving. That included OffCenter Arts, which was recently notified that after 22 years in Downtown Albuquerque it’s losing its lease by year end.
Downtown Albuquerque News reported on a letter from Paula Matteucci, one of the family members who owns the property, to OffCenter.
“The center appears to be allowing trespass or tolerating it, by both people and their belongings,” wrote Matteucci. She added that the allegation was backed up by both “personal observation” of the alley, sidewalk, and adjacent parking lot areas, as well as reports from neighbors and city and county authorities.
“We are deeply saddened that OffCenter Community Arts Project must find a new home, but it must,” she concluded.
KUNM went to OffCenter to talk to people who go there about what the space means to them. Then Let’s Talk host Ty Bannerman talked with Executive Director Mika Maloney about how the nonprofit is navigating its next chapter.
Voices from OffCenter Arts
“OffCenter Arts is the first place in Albuquerque where I really felt at home. It’s really a safe place for all people. It’s been kind of life changing to come here.” Deborah Brandon
I’ve seen it change people’s lives in a lot of ways. I’ve seen it help people get sober. I’ve seen it help people make friends when they hadn’t had a lot of connection with other people, and I’ve seen it like prop people up when you know they lose their housing or they get hospitalized.” Zimmy Chu
“It makes me feel safe, and I could be myself here. It’s a nice place, and it has all the tools you need, like woodworking, sewing, drawing, painting. I mostly do drawing stuff.” Christopher Zuni
“I’m working on wreaths right now, and I’m homeless. So this became one of my safe haven, my soulless place where I can hang out at and just be peaceful, you know, somewhere I know I’m safe.” Jolene Cordero
“I’m a neurodivergent person that has issues with a lot of things, and have major anger problems. And coming to Off Center helps me offset those when I don’t feel like I’m right. I come here and do art, and then I feel much better after that.” Danae Weishun
“Everybody seems pretty miserable out there, but everybody in here is happy. Everybody’s smiling. It’s it’s just like one of the happier places I’ve been. I quit my job and got back into my art 100 because of coming to this place.” Ernest Taylor
“All walks of life, different kind of people come in here, and I like that. I like how it’s just this place where artists can come and connect, and it’s a community place. Like all kinds of people come here, and everybody, everybody’s been chill. Everybody’s been chill with each other, and that kind of stuff is important to me, especially nowadays. You know, it’s the way the world is.” Destiny Patton
TY BANNERMAN: So Mika, you recently got the news that your current lease is ending, and you are figuring out how to keep those programs going while you find a new space. Why is your lease ending?
MIKA MALONEY: Well, we’ve been on an annual, like year-to-year lease for 22 years. We’ve been in the space for a long time, so the landlord doesn’t need a reason. They can just opt to not renew it, which we’ve known was a possibility. They did go ahead and give us some reasons and cited what they saw as allowing trespass and nuisance in the neighborhood, which they attributed primarily to sharing water, access to food, access to bathrooms in the space. Probably about 20% of the folks that we see are unhoused or formerly unhoused, and I think that has been a core piece of OffCenter for the entire time we’ve been in existence. And what we’re seeing right now in the community is, I think, increased pressure with increased lack of resources. In the same way that the food bank is seeing more need, if people don’t have access to the material resources that they need, that was seen sort of as a nuisance or an issue outside the walls of OffCenter.
Again, as you heard in all those voices, we’re a pretty happy, peaceful, fun place to be, and so it can be encouraging and reassuring to me. When I see things that seem really hard and impossible to solve in the world outside to step inside and get to see so many people from so many different walks of life really creatively working together, working side by side, helping each other find material, skill sharing between generations and different makers — it’s amazing. So it’s a beautiful thing, and it’s something I’m excited that we’re going to actually be able to bring out into more spaces in the coming year.
BANNERMAN: How are you guys going to adapt?
MALONEY: I mean, luckily, this is this isn’t coming at us without us having a vision already in place of what the big long-term goal is. OffCenter has wanted kind of bigger space. We hit capacity and have to turn people away a lot, which is heartbreaking. And so, the long-term goal of a larger space, a stable space, where whether that’s building ownership or a strong partnership with other arts or in community organizations, has already been conversation that’s been happening, and that vision has been forming. We can’t get there in two months. What we’re doing right now, over the last couple weeks, my job has really shifted into “okay, what’s 2027 look like?” We’re a stable place for a lot of folks that don’t necessarily have a lot of other stable places. So even though this is going to be disruptive, we are prioritizing finding consistent spots for all of our programs, and that’s really coming together. We’ve had a lot of other art spaces and community organizations step forward and want to share space with us.
BANNERMAN: So for folks who use the studio, what is the best way that they can find information about where these new sites will be?
MALONEY: The best way is probably our newsletter, which we send out about weekly, and that will continue to have updates as as we share things. But not everyone has easy access to that. We rely a lot on word of mouth. Also, we also partner strongly with Berkey Beat, which is a street newspaper project that does a lot of work in the area as well. And so we’ll use their publication and other publications to share updates. We have a website, OffCenterarts.org, and that’ll get updated as we have kind of locations and stuff as well.
