"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.
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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.
Exile, Rather than hoping for a wand-waving savior
The old woman’s face is the face of someone who is just plain tired and has lost all hope. Even her pink jacket can’t mitigate her hopelessness. The mother & the children-terrified.This new series intends to awaken the fragility of the human experienced. The representation of memory and the luggage we all carried is imply in the sad gestures of the face, the lack of vibrancy in the color palette and the repetition of the color red in the bags, almost as i heart palpitating the bags are full of those experiences or dreams. These figures hold as a remanence of an immigrant DNA human hair from real cases of immigrants collected in hair salons. The intersectionality, the crossroads of one's social and political identities are questionable, like a wonderers these people are moving. Although not geographically precisely, their experiences as immigrants are associated with a degraded place of origin.
Thread on raw canvas, Human Hair, Linen, Yute hardened textiles 2019
6ft x 5ft x 3ft
