"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.
Miami is Sinking (Th)
Natural disasters have always been part of the artist’s repertoire from neo-romanticism to the dialect of nature and modernity, to the point of great obsession with modernity and postmodern life where climate change in an orderly chaos is a word without dirt or a perfect world, at least that is what 96% of Floridians think when it comes to water sea level rise and the exponential development of areas that enjoy the front row in the water line, where mangrove use to protect us from the sea, creating a barricade, now the wall is pure concrete and is high in the horizon. Miami is (Th) Sinking deals the cards of the current situation and through the use of the silky beautiful thread attempts to make the audience understand that the sea that once was quite and calm is starting to gain its territory. The scenes are from with the area the is map in the backdrop, from downtown miami the epicenter of developing agencies to the inner city that is being pushed and gentrified. Miami beach is in the midst of fleeing all the birds and different species.
Climate-change images have never been able to convey our full planetary volatility till now. The four-punch sequence of recent hurricanes and earthquakes destroyed the lives of millions of people, obliterated their homes and raised doubts of reconstructing these geographies altogether. It is quickly becoming more difficult for global warming deniers to defend their position.
Yes, we have squandered opportunities, but we can avoid total disaster and execute a modest new beginning for our species. Artists are ahead-of-the-game when calling attention to important issues, Bernice Steinbaum Gallery’s Booth at Art Miami 2017, entitled, Fragile Ecologies II, is an altercation through video, sculpture, fiber, dioramas, paintings and furniture design.
Artist Included, Troy Abbott, Pavel Acosta, Carola Bravo, Chiachio & Giannone, Augusto Esquivel, Patrick Jacobs, Nick Gilmore, Enrique Gomez de Molina, Aurora Molina, Sophia Narrett, Carrie Sieh, and Deborah Simon.