"Art can impact the social context of family dislocations and can serve as a powerful tool in encouraging an open national dialogue about Zero Tolerance in our country"
So (sew) America Cares is a participatory social art project with a commitment to raise awareness about the lives of the children separated from their parents at the border. All the faces stitched together strengthen the very fabric of our own society.
In 2018 a Zero Tolerance immigration policy was announced, requiring that all families who cross the border shall not only be separated but also charged in federal court with the misdemeanor crime of illegal entry.
This Project’s mission is to advocate for these children and to extend an invitation to anyone who would like to participate. Thread by thread, fiber by fiber, a participating community will increase its understanding of the circumstances of these children who never asked to be illegal aliens. The project consists of 10 different faces that will be repeated 100 times each to add 1000 faces. The faces had been laser etched on raw canvas to allow the participant to use any kind of thread, yarn, wool, fabric, paint etc. So (sew) America Cares has a plan: to "sew" them back, to never allow these children to be lost again, to create a quilt of 1000 faces representing a portion of these children.
We cannot allow these traumatized children to disappear and in time, be forgotten.People are encouraged to stitch, sew, knit, knot, crochet, embroider, or braid these drawings so as to symbolically recover these children’s faces and lives again.
​
So (sew) America Cares is an international call for people to participate and raise awareness as to the consequences of this immigration policy and its devastating effect on children. As citizen, artist, mother and a child that suffered being separated from my family for eight years, I am concerned about the hundreds of separated children across our country.
Candidates and the President
This series of work incorporates the strategy of theater, a performance piece that mimics the surreal absurdity of automatonic politicians in a media-driven society.
“The Candidates and the President” - a mocking representation of the 2016 presidential campaign - reveals the candidates as circus caricatures, each racing in bigtop circles driven by ego and ambition and fueled by the power of Super Pacs. Each marionette hangs haphazardly from strings just as each candidate hangs from the strings of special interests, movements chaotic and surprising to a flabbergasted electorate. All 11 of the marionette candidates plus the president are installed with a robotic mechanism that includes motion sensors that activate movement, unchoreographed and unscripted, movements similar to the cartoonish flip-flopping of our clowns as they bow and scrape before the crowds. The marionettes perform in a theater box as did the outrageous Punch and Judy show in the American colonies when even George Washington bought tickets for the show. Punch was gleeful and self-satisfied as he systematically destroyed his enemies, not too unlike our own self-centered and ruthless candidates.
The faceless “Descarados” dressed like the candidates are like voodoo dolls designed to protect us from politicians. They are utilized as quasi political symbols, gift dolls for the voting public.
The “Punchinellos” are full of “passionate intensity” and no heads. They are the raucous crowds that cheer and clap and boo with delight and know not why. They are the puppets of populism and anarchy.
