ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (KRQE) — Art featuring road runners, hot air balloons, chile ristras, and everything else New Mexican can be found under one Old Town roof. The best part? One hundred percent of the profits go towards the senior artists themselves.
It all began back in 1978 with this mission — restore creative purpose in older New Mexicans. “Blue Portal started with one of the mayors of the City of Albuquerque getting together with the Assistance League. He had no children and his wife had passed… he said, ‘Well, what about me?’” Blue Portal Chair Sally Ruscitti explained. “Let us have something that’s not for indigent people, ill people. We need something as we age to make us feel good, have some purpose, and away we went with it.”
Nearly 50 years later, Blue Portal has helped just over 4,000 senior artists sell their pieces, and brought almost $4 million to the local senior community. There’s no tax, nor a fee for seniors to put their art up for sale at the Church Street store front. Plus, the sales stay in the Land of Enchantment, as all participating artists are New Mexico residents. And if you step behind Blue Portal’s royal blue doors, you find quite the myriad of different art forms — from glass, to crotchet, quilts, illustrations, and more.
When we asked Ruscitti what type of impact Blue Portal has made over the past few decades, this is what she told us. “We have had people literally living in cars that would go to the senior center in the South Valley, get the materials together, put it, come, sell their work here, and that was what they ate off of,” said Ruscitti. “So you go from that end, to other people who don’t need the money, but they have a particular charity that they love, and so what they make from this goes to help that. It just pays all the way around.”…