It was a sunny Saturday afternoon in May at Naval Cemetery Landscape. Almost twenty of us gathered under the shade where we began the Phytogram workshop. We came from different ages, nationalities, and professions. Let’s relive this afternoon through photos! The Head of Horticulture at NCL, Avvah, gave us a brief introduction of this land’s …
Founded by artists Annette Weisser and Mitchell Cope. The Detroit Tree of Heaven Woodshop reimagines the invasive tree of heaven—once imported from China with migrant workers and botanists—as both material and metaphor for resilience in post-industrial Detroit. Known for thriving in contaminated soil, drought, and abandonment, the tree mirrors the survival and ingenuity of Detroit’s …
“Golden Snail Opera” Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 31 No. 4 (2016) Tsai, Carbonell, Chevrier, and Tsing’s contribution to Cultural Anthropology‘s experimental “Sound + Vision” section performs what it argues: that multispecies entanglement requires multispecies form. The golden apple snail (Pomacea canaliculata) was imported to Taiwan from Argentina in 1979 for an imagined escargot industry, declared invasive …
Karel Doing’s article proposes the phytogram — an image made by combining the internal chemistry of plants directly with photographic emulsion — as both a technical practice and a theoretical provocation. Drawing on structural/materialist film theory, biosemiotics, and perspectivism, Doing argues that conventional cinema is fundamentally a human-centred apparatus: its lens, frame ratio, and projection …
Site-specific Installations by Maria Thereza Alves Seeds of Change: Marseille 1999-2000 Seeds of Change: Reposaari 2001 Seeds of Change: Liverpool 2004 Seeds of Change: Exeter and Topsham 2004 Seeds of Change: Dunkirk 2005 Seeds of Change: Bristol 2007 Seeds of Change: Antwerp 2009/2019 Seeds of Change: New York City 2017 Maria Thereza Alves is a …
An Asian Ghost Story is a film and installation piece by artist Bo Wang. It is a meditation on the spectral traces of Asia’s late-20th-century modernization, told through the unlikely medium of wigs and the global hair trade. Beginning with the 1965 U.S. embargo on “Asiatic hair”— later rebranded as “communist hair”— the film exposes …
Portrait of Catlett with Glasses, ca. 1955-65, Bernice Kolko The Brooklyn Museum, in partnership with the National Gallery of Art, showcased the work and life of artist and activist Elizabeth Catlett in “A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies: Elizabeth Catlett / Una artista negra revolucionaria con todo lo que ello implica: Elizabeth …
“Migrating Architectures” art and research project analyses the process of space formation as a transformation of spatial conceptions from both the countries of origin and destination. Read More…
Art doesn’t just reflect the world — it engages with it. Some 10 million to 15 million undocumented immigrants currently live in the United States, and their presence is the subject of fierce debate. So for the second installment of our series T Agitprop, we asked 13contemporary artists — Alfredo Jaar, Raúl de Nieves and …
Explore the lasting cultural, political, and societal impact of the Great Migration through the life and work of artist Jacob Lawrence. Browse all 60 panels from The Migration Series and delve into Jacob Lawrence’s art and life through photographs, poetry, music, and the artist’s own first hand accounts. Hear stories that show the Great Migration’s …
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 …
At a time when the borders between lands are continually being disputed, what does it mean to move across countries, to change nationalities and to settle in a new place? Some of us migrate by choice, others are forced to flee for our own safety. Visitors from across the world come to Tate Modern to …
Engaging audiences in questions of identity, belonging and sharing our world, A British Museum Spotlight Loan Crossings: community and refuge will tour the Lampedusa cross together with poignant boat artwork around the UK for the first time. Made from the remnants of a refugee boat wrecked near the Italian island of Lampedusa, the cross …
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 …
Migration—the movement of people and cultures—is a story of who we are and how we got here over time. Millions of people move for myriad reasons, from fleeing war and religious persecution to seeking better education or financial security. The United Nations estimates that one out of every seven people in the world is an …
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 …
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 …
Public Secret Society of Conceptual Migrants is an intervention project created by artist Patty Ortiz as part of her continuing performance series Work Won’t Kill You. PSSCM was built around the word migrant, its specific definition and common assumptions. Ortiz proposed to take the historical concept of a secret society and turn it inside out, …
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 …
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 …
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, …
— 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 …
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 …
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. …
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 …
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, …
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is featuring an exhibit on mass migration by Richard Mosse, a documentary photographer from Ireland. The exhibit runs from October 26, 2019 – Feb. 17, 2020. More from the SFMOMA: From 2014 to 2016, artist Richard Mosse documented the mass migration and displacement of people unfolding across Europe, …
by Elvira Blanco By mid-2019, the number of Venezuelans to migrate since the beginning of the Chavista regime in 1999 has reached four million. The phenomenon increased dramatically over the past 4 years, with people fleeing food and healthcare shortages, violence, skyrocketing inflation, and abysmally low wages. The consequences are felt across Latin America, as …
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 …
Strong political art is tough to make. So, when it turns up, it’s worth a look. In an era of “great, great walls” and “bad hombres”, an exhibition called “State of Exception/Estado de Excepcion” at Parsons School of Design. Click here to read more.
Bringing together projects by architects, designers, and artists, working in a range of mediums and scales, that respond to the complex circumstances brought about by forced displacement, the exhibition focuses on conditions that disrupt conventional images of the built environment. This exhibition is part of Citizens and Borders, a series of discrete projects at MoMA related …
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 …
“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: …
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 …
More than 75 years ago, a young artist named Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000) set to work on an ambitious 60-panel series portraying the Great Migration, the movement between the World Wars of over a million African Americans from the rural South to the industrial North in search of a better life. Today, the exhibition organized by …
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 …
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, …
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 …
Author/illustrator Erik Thurman is an award-nominated creator who specializes in long-form comics journalism and nonfiction comics about current events. On August 1st, 2016, the political comics/cartoons website The Nib published his comic on the Myanmar Rohingya refugee crisis, which can be read in full here.
“The history of departures from the Polish lands is hundreds of years old. People traveled to different parts of the world for sustenance, in search of freedom, or for a different life. After Poland regained its independence, this situation remained unchanged. The journey was tackled on foot, by rail, aboard ships or – later – …
“The artist Francis Alÿs is exploring the idea of a film about children playing in the refugee camps he visited in northern Iraq at the end of February. The Belgian-born, Mexico City-based artist was on his first research trip to the region, where he filmed and took photographs of children playing games such as marbles …
On the last day of New York Comic Con, Sana Amanat begins the annual Women of Marvel panel with what is now a yearly tradition. “How many of you want to make comics? Women, men, everybody — stand up right now,” she says. Young girls dressed as superheroes — there’s Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel, Thor, and …
From an article by Lauren Said-Moorhouse for CNN Style: “Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has covered a Berlin landmark with thousands of refugee life jackets for his latest installation. The striking display is the activist’s latest attempt to highlight the scale of migrants taking to the seas every day. Ai’s team began wrapping 14,000 discarded life …
It was hard for Ingrid Butler not to feel helpless whenever she heard or read about the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing Syria, trying to make their way across the Mediterranean Sea to hoped-for safety. Butler lived along the Amalfi coast decades ago; she still feels a deep connection to the area. “It got …
“Banksy has revealed a new artwork, sprayed on a wall in the Calais refugee camp called “the Jungle,” intended to address negative attitudes towards the thousands of people living there. […] In a rare state accompanyting the work, Banksy said:“We’re often led to believe migration is a drain on the country’s resources, but Steve Jobs …
“Migrating Lives/Vidas Migratorias features handmade books filled with personal stories of migration, many of them by unaccompanied minors who have arrived in the United States over the past 18 months from Central America. The books were created by students from Sherwood High School in collaboration with Beatriz del Olmo Fiddleman, the museum’s Community Artist in …
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 …
Objects left behind by undocumented migrants on their journey into the United States, including backpacks, water bottles, and border restrains, form the basis of this exhibition looking at the human experience of crossing the U.S./Mexico border. Viewers are asked to consider the complexities of the found objects through video and images created on location along …
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 …
“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 …
“Oakland is a city in flux. As people from San Francisco and elsewhere migrate to Oakland in hordes, the physical and social architecture seems to be reconfiguring in real time. Amid such a transformation, divisive questions of ownership, authenticity, and belonging are at the fore of community conversation.” “Artist Favianna Rodriguez, who is known for …
Written by David Lamb, directed by Summer Hill Seven and currently staged by Doni Comas, Platanos Y Collard Greens debuted to sold-out audiences on June 27th, 2003 at a small theater on Manhattan’s west side. That fall Platanos also began its collegiate tour, opening October 8th 2003 to a standing room only crowd at the …
Detail from “And The Earth Did Not Swallow Them,” mural (2015). CUNY Graduate Center: ‘The title is lifted from Tomas Rivera’s book entitled Ey No Se Lo Trago La Tierra”. The book tells the tale of an immigrant farm working family in the 1950’s United States.’ Fred Alvarado, Suaro Cervantes, Marina Perez- Wong, Max Allbee. …
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. …
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, …
