This northern New Mexico nonprofit is teaching students how STEM, AI and the arts intersect

TAOS — Can a line of computer code be a work of art? Agnes Chavez certainly thinks so.

Chavez is the mind and new media artist behind STEMarts Lab, a Taos-based nonprofit that teaches young people to connect the dots between the seemingly disparate worlds of science, technology, engineering and math — subjects often abbreviated under the acronym STEM — and art.

“I started it off as a research and development project in 2009, because it was just when the STEM movement was starting,” Chavez told the Journal. “It’s a term so ingrained in the culture now, but back then there was a push towards putting money into innovative solutions to close the gap in science and math scores in the United States.”

When that renewed emphasis on STEM led many schools to deemphasize art, Agnes saw an opportunity to blend the two disciplines with newly affordable digital art technologies, like computers, virtual reality, augmented reality and robotics.

Since becoming a nonprofit in 2020, STEMarts Lab has evolved into a robust youth leadership program and is considered one of the vanguards of STEAM in the Southwest, teaching students in their mid-teens to early 20s how science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics intersect.

Every year STEMarts Lab provides dozens of northern New Mexico students with educational experiences, funding and early-career opportunities that can be hard to come by in New Mexico schools, where STEM learning outcomes consistently lag behind national standards, especially in rural areas.

“Our mission is really to serve the rural communities of New Mexico,” Chavez said. “That’s really who we are, but this year we’ve come together and found a way to create remote learning so that our students are now from all over New Mexico. They don’t just have to be from Taos.”

Google also made STEMarts Lab an affiliate of its Code Next program this year, awarding the program with $50,000 in funding over three years in addition to providing curriculum support and professional development training.

Students participate in STEMarts Lab ambassador and paid apprenticeship programs, the latter of which is designed exclusively to introduce young women into the historically male-dominated STEM field. These tracks can lead to full-time work with the nonprofit, which continues to expand its team.

Zion Flores, for example, is a senior at Cimarron High School. She began as an apprentice in 2023 and over the last two years has learned everything from basic computer skills to how to create custom language learning models in ChatGPT.

“Agnes specifically went over how to make these like really intricate models and teaches how to be creative in a way that I had never really thought about before, how to take your ideas of creativity, of art, and how to integrate that to science,” Flores said. “I had never really thought about the two going together before I started working with the program.”

“Space Messengers” is one of the ongoing art projects Chavez created with the help of her students. The immersive, mixed-reality installation incorporates many of the concepts Chavez teaches about how STEM, art and even AI can be grounded in a community-minded ethos.

The piece has been a returning attraction at The PASEO, a street art festival in Taos that Chavez helped found in 2014.

“It’s not just hard STEM,” Chavez said, “like, ‘Oh, let’s build a robot, or let’s just learn how to code.’ Students really apply those STEM and digital art skills to communicate to the public a greater purpose, a greater concept about the world, our place in it or how to make the world a better place. There’s the humanitarian side of it.”

Following PASEO this fall, Chavez hosted a roundtable discussion, “A.I. in Action: Community Voices for Social Good.” The forum showcased community projects that demonstrated how AI can be used to positively serve communities, such as through modeling how environmental disasters might play out using Google Street View.

“AI, for me, is like any other technology,” Chavez said. “I’m always interested in emerging technologies, and technology just means wherever humanity is at right now. It’s a manifestation of the next step in our evolution.”

But beyond the tech, Flores said STEMarts Lab surprised her for its dual emphasis on developing students’ “soft skills,” such as interviewing and presenting concepts to the public.

“What I’ve really learned is the value of communication, the value of learning to not only speak to people, but to teach,” she said. “It really helped me learn how to interact with people in general, especially having gone through covid through a lot of my childhood. I was able to push myself out of my comfort zone.”

Flores is now an ambassador for the program and is about to begin an internship with the nonprofit.

STEMarts Lab is currently recruiting for its 2026 STEAM Teams. The deadline to apply for the girls apprenticeship program is Nov. 15.

Ivan Rodriguez, a graduate of the program who Chavez eventually hired as a video editor on her social media team, said STEMarts Lab offered him a pathway that changed his career trajectory for the better.

“These kinds of opportunities are rare in New Mexico,” he said. “There’s a lack of resources here and a lack of knowledge of what’s available for students to expand their career or get into a new one. Everything I’ve learned here has been essential for making a leap from mathematics into a video editing career.”