Category: Art

Maggi Hambling (2016)

Entitled 2016, the year it was made, this painting depicts a golden boat sinking below the surface of the ocean. The composition’s central subject is a chaotic tumble of black, white, gold and flesh-toned colours, suggesting the boat’s inhabitants are spilling over its edges into the water. To create the effect of submersion, the artist …

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Crossing Lines, Constructing Home: Displacement and Belonging in Contemporary Art | Harvard Art Museums (2020)

What does it mean to be displaced from culture and home? What are the historical contexts for understanding our contemporary moment? How does an artist’s work and process embody and engage the narratives of displacement and belonging? Crossing Lines, Constructing Home investigates two parallel ideas: national, political, and cultural conceptions of boundaries and borders; and …

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Worlds without Ends: Stories around Borders

WWE opens a visual dialogue on the impact of borders on individuals and communities.  The twelve participating artists are drawn from different regional traditions and challenge our perceptions of national identities, envisioning utopian possibilities for understanding the place of borders, their proliferation and seeming obsolescence, in contemporary society. The exhibiting artists reveal their deep interest …

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Near Strangers San Antonio 300

An installation by Proyecto Diáspora. Considering San Antonio’s Tricentennial and Luminaria Contemporary Arts Festival as SA’s cultural connector between artists, audiences and the world, Near Strangers San Antonio 300 proposes a site-specific light installation made from copper maps and portraits of San Antonio’s inhabitants. The installation is in fact an electrical circuit that reacts to touch and lights …

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From the Other Side

A 3/9 – channel video installation by Argentinian artist Gabriela Golder. The video installation focuses on the topical issue of migration, zooming in on migrants’ real-life situation and experience of uprootedness. Asked about their stories, they cite political and economic reasons for emigrating to Argentina. Their narratives bring out the underlying processes of cultural transformation …

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Immigrant Art: A new perspective on the U.S. melting pot

By Guillermina Zabala Guillermina Zabala is a multidisciplinary artist and educator whose art examines the intersection between the individual and their social-political-cultural environment. Her works have been exhibited in museums and art galleries in Los Angeles, New York, Texas, Miami, and San Francisco; and internationally in Germany, Latin America and Spain. She is a second …

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The Power of Cartoons in Global Education: An Interview with Christian Clark

Conducted by Sumita S. Chakravarty  A former cartoonist and two-time Emmy-award winning writer for the Children’s Television Workshop flagship show, Sesame Street, Christian Clark works for the United Nations where he has more than 25 years of experience in communications, advocacy and public information, leading campaigns for the BBC and the UN in North America, …

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Mapping Art in Times of Protest

— by Pamela Vasquez Torres Pamela Vazquez Torres is a Mexican art historian living in the Twin Cities since 2017. She is driven by the potential of art for political action and social change. Most of the store fronts that were boarded up during the Minneapolis uprising are still up and continue to appear in …

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Notes about Home… in Minnesota

by Pamela Vázquez Torres          The dignity of a safe home shouldn’t be determined by color of skin or country of birth. The ongoing social movement in Minneapolis, now spread out nationally and internationally, is a reclamation of home. Opposed to corporate media coverage of events, reactions by local artists to the killing of George Floyd …

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Artwork: Artist Cosimo Cavallaro Builds a Wall of Cotija Cheese at the Mexican Border (2020)

From ARTNET.com: Artist Cosimo Cavallaro is helping President Donald Trump build his controversial border wall between the US and Mexico—but his barrier is constructed not from steel and concrete, but from blocks of cotija cheese. “I don’t like walls,” said the immigrant artist in a video promoting the project. “This is a wall that I’m willing to live with. …

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Artwork: Rael San Fratello, Teeter-Totter Wall (2019)

From ARTNET.com: “The art project, which has been a media sensation, is the work of architecture studio Rael San Fratello, a partnership between San Jose State interior design faculty member Virginia San Fratello and UC Berkeley architecture professor Ronald Rael, author of the 2017 book Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.-Mexico Boundary. Ten years in the making—the duo drew up …

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Database/Community: Syria Cultural Index

Berlin based non-profit CoCulture is working with the Syrian diaspora artistic community to build connections and cohesions to provide creative outlets and structure to a traumatized community in search of social stability in unfamiliar places. More from CoCulture: CoCulture e.V. is a Berlin-based non-profit organization founded by artist and cultural activist Khaled Barakeh in 2017, …

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Art in the UAE: the exhibitions and installations to look out for in 2018

This solo show by Venezuelan artist Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck takes up the question of refugees, arguing that human rights NGOs and charities have developed into a full-blown industry, with their own marketing and propaganda techniques. Working as an artist and a researcher, Balteo- Yazbeck proposes that governments and NGOs use human tragedies, such as the migration …

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Ankledeep by Lubaina Himid

Ankledeep was completed in 1991 in Preston, where Himid lives and works. It is part of a series entitled Revenge: A Masque in Five Tableaux that the artist finished in 1992 and first exhibited that same year at Rochdale Art Gallery. The series comprises twelve works (ten paintings, an installation and a drawing on paper) that include figurative …

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Culture Strike: Art in Trump’s America

“Migration is beautiful.” These three words give dual meaning to Oakland artist Favianna Rodriguez’s daffodil-colored print of a stained-glass-esque butterfly, the wings of which are appropriately filled with human likenesses. The pro-migration butterfly is just one of the many distinctive images used throughout the artist’s transformational body of politically and socially entwined works. FIND MORE: …

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New artistic collaboration reflects history of migration

Culture and community combined this past week for a unique artist-in-residence program that brought a renowned Mexican artist to downtown Phoenix. Betsabeé Romero, a contemporary artist from Mexico City, collaborated with other artists from throughout the Valley during her stay in downtown Phoenix. Together, they used their cultural experiences as inspiration for a temporary public …

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Transborder Immigrant Tool: Transition

Almost five years ago, Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab released the first iteration of the Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT), a mobile-phone technology that provides poetry to immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border while leading them to water caches in the Southern California desert. Creative writer Leila Nadir discusses the role of art and activism with Ricardo …

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Jesse Chun’s ‘On Paper’

On Paper: Visual Artist Jesse Chun explores visual rhetoric involved in identity and mobility through an appropriation and transformation of the familiar marks contained in immigration documents. On Paper was shown from July until October 2016 at the Spencer Brownstone Gallery in New York City. Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist Jesse Chun explores interdependencies between aspects of identity, …

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But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise: Contemporary Art of the Middle East and North Africa

But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise gathers artwork from different contemporary artists such as Nadia Kaabi-Linke and Kader Attia who aim to explore issues of moving and migration in the Middle East and North Africa.   Exhibition on view at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City running until October 5th, 2016   Find the Exhibition Overview …

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On Migration, Identity, and Borders

Gerald Machona is a Zimbabwean born visual artist, whose work engages with issues of migration, deeply investigating the social terrains where identity, space, social hierarchies and memory are constantly being re-constructed and negotiated. Ndiri Barman. “In my work, I have appropriated this masquerade performance strategies, one of which is masking, to negotiate my personal experience …

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Lampedusa Review

a brave excursion into the dark waters of mass migration  Anders Lustgarten’s drama boldly contrasts the lives of a fisherman retrieving the bodies of refugees drowned at sea and a Chinese-British woman who collects debts for a payday loan company British theatre is full of plays about domestic politics. What makes Anders Lustgarten exceptional is …

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No Human Being is Illegal

“Give me your tired, your poor; Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . . The enormous disparity between the eloquent promise of the Statue of Liberty and the ongoing attacks against immigrants is enormous.  Immigration to the United States varies broadly—who comes, why, from where, and when is emphasized in posters that speak …

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Undocumented Apparel Series

Julio Salgado’s ‘Undocu-Queers’ poster series provides the name, face, and story of a person at the intersection of two much-commoditized demographics, that of queer and undocumented.  The series, which has shown at galleries across the country, is a way for disenfranchised people to tell their own stories before someone else, ally or otherwise, co-opts them. …

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Barbed Wire Stories

 Inside Witness is a comic drawn and narrated by Stephen and Clio Reese Sady. The setting is a family detention center in Artesia, New Mexico, a place where migrant families are housed while awaiting approval for humanitarian relief claims. The comics combine an eyewitness perspective of a courtroom with the voices of the families. Many families, …

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