My migrant blanket piece “bodies, borders, cages” was recently included in the juried exhibition Turmoil and Transformation at Hera Gallery in Wakefield, RI. Hera Gallery was founded in 1974 as one of the earliest women’s cooperative galleries in the US. I spoke about the process and inspiration behind my piece at the artist talk, which you can view here (minutes 11:43 - 15:27):
This piece is called “bodies, borders, cages.” I made this piece because I was furious about the human rights violations perpetrated against migrants by the US government. To make it, I collected photos of the children detained in McAllen, TX that US Customs and Border Protection provided to the press in 2018 and I burned the photos onto a silkscreen using a photo-emulsion process that resulted in these abstracted shapes, which I then printed onto a thermal blanket like the ones used in these camps.
I was really influenced by Andy Warhol’s Death and Disaster series which similarly uses photo-silkscreen and repetition in a way that reflects the saturation of these images in the news-media and our resulting desensitization to seeing that cruelty. I was really thinking about Thomas Crowe’s essay about Warhol’s paintings of death and violence, where he says “We cannot penetrate beneath the image to touch true pain and grief, but the reality of suffering is sufficiently indicated in the photographs to draw attention to one’s own limited ability to find an appropriate response.”
As I was making this piece I was thinking about how the only images we have of the inside of these facilities are the ones that that CBP provide – so essentially, how the institution that’s committing this violence is also in control of how we see it - and how most of the photos released showed boys, boys of color, who according to the American Psychological Association are more likely to be perceived as guilty and face police violence when accused of a crime.
I wanted to use those images but strip them of attributes like skin color or gender, so you need to really look closely to recognize a human figure in the piece, but when you do you see them and recognize their surroundings – the chain link cages, but you also see your image reflected in the thermal blanket, placing you in that situation, asking you to consider what that experience is like. And in that empathetic practice to then question What kind of protection do we owe each other as human beings? And to imagine alternatives to detention that honor human dignity.
The process of making this was a way of channeling my grief and my feelings of powerlessness to change a situation that is perpetrated by my government in my name. Art can’t change the world, but I truly believe that collectively, people can. So I want to highlight the work of organizations like RAICES Texas and Project Amplify, who advocate for migrants at the border, and close to home there’s Never Again Action RI and the FANG Collective who are doing great work to cancel ICE contracts with the state and shut down the Wyatt Detention Center in Central Falls. So if you are moved by this piece please check them out and support their work.