Founder of Alma d’Arte to be honored Friday

Alma d’Arte Charter High School is honoring its founder, Irene Oliver-Lewis on Friday, May 9^th by renaming its historic 1941 building the Irene Oliver-Lewis Center for the Arts.

The fundraiser event will be held at 402 W. Court Avenue and will include music, food and presentations from a variety of officials. Dr. Adam Amador, the school’s principal, said the children who attend Alma d’Arte would not have the opportunities to learn and grow as artists anywhere else.

Oliver-Lewis is a theatre artist who grew up in Las Cruces in the Mesquite Historical District. She left Las Cruces in 1981 to run a bilingual theatre company in Albuquerque and continued that work until the mid-1990s when she decided to return to her hometown.

It was then she began volunteering to turn the abandoned Court Junior High School building into a youth center that would offer physical activity and arts activities for at-risk children. Oliver-Lewis told the Bulletin she worked at raising money, but she also did hands-on labor.

To fully renovate the building cost $13 million in capital outlay dollars and ten years of work, Oliver-Lewis said.

By then, the idea of turning the youth center into a charter school had already taken hold. Oliver-Lewis said the youth center had begun teaching writing and visual arts to about 20 at-risk children three times a week. Oliver-Lewis said one of the students said, “this ought to be our school all the time,” and the idea stuck.

“That’s how it started,” Oliver-Lewis said.

Oliver-Lewis said she began learning how to start a charter school and when it became Alma d’Arte Charter High School in 2004, the school started with 127 children.

Oliver-Lewis said it was always intended to be a small school.

Even as Oliver-Lewis gets ready to be honored on Friday, she emphasized that she didn’t do the work alone and that many people in the community embraced Alma d’Arte and many love the school.

“They saw what it did for their children and grandchildren. It really is a part of the community. It’s not an island by itself,” she said.

Oliver-Lewis said the school’s mission to “graduate artists and scholars to prepare to succeed.” She said that mission has not changed in its more than 20 years of existence.

“We were everywhere. The kids were performing, cooking. They were doing visual art, they had shows. That’s how it grew. It was a community,” Oliver-Lewis said.

Oliver-Lewis credited her sister, Sylvia Camuñez, and Amador, as the engines to make the event happen.

Amador said the impact Oliver-Lewis has had on Las Cruces youth “makes her one of the leading Latinas in our region.”

He talked of some of Alma d’Arte’s recent successes, which he said include a 100% graduation rate and all of the school’s graduates being accepted into New Mexico State University.

He said the many successes of the school, which include graduates who have gone on to have creative careers, is the legacy of Oliver-Lewis’ more than 30 years of work, starting with the youth center building into the charter school and where it is today as a fixture in the community.

“We provide that environment for kids who do not fit in anywhere else. They fit in at Alma,” Amador said.