My name is María Canela and I’m a proud New New Yorker! This is something I like to say whenever I have the chance. It’s a term I learned at QMA and I’m very comfortable with it because it describes my situation very well.

I remember when I took my first web design class with Sandra Dávila at the New New Yorkers Program at QMA those were the first words we typed into our first page: “Hello World!” Later I learned that these were the first words that Dennis Ritchie displayed on his computer screen after developing C language in 1973. The words were a predictor of what was to come. Out of C grew a plethora of other Object Oriented Programming languages and everything we know about computers today was made possible. Windows, Apple, Java, JavaScript, Flash, PHP, WordPress, iOS, Android, etc. the list has no end. If our world runs on computers, then computers run on C. Ritchie never asked for a dime for his efforts and he was way ahead of his time on things like crowd sourcing and collaboration. Today I understand how appropriate it was for us to start our programming lessons with that simple phrase. The class was opening to us a world of professional and personal opportunities and possibilities for us.

So here I am now World! At the Queens Museum of Art opening this blog created to aggregate all the different initiatives that QMA does in their simple, “open source” style that we’ve come to love. We all arrive at QMA for different reasons, but we all stay for the seame reasons: to grow, learn, develop, and expand our minds and our artistic interests. We know we belong to something big without feeling small. We learn to look deep inside and change things from within, little by little. With every visit, every event, every class we learn new things about ourselves and the world we live in.

It gives me pause to think how sometimes we don’t know what we’re capable of until someone shows us. We sign up for a class, not sure if it’s for us, but we know there’s something there. In the end it turns out we loved it! We always discover something new and exciting every time we come here. I always look at our museum, and specially QMA’s Education Department, as a great universe with thousands of possibilities to explore, and it moves me to think that there are people in those offices thinking of what might interest me. I feel truly honored.

This blog has that same global embrace to it. It will contain all sorts of content that we may not even know we needed to be aware of. And with this simple words I hereby declare the QueensMuse open, and likewise, I share my muse with you:

—Hello World. Here I Am!

Test translation by José E. Rodríguez