"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.
Magical Garden Series
Magical Gardens Tapestry Series
Magical Gardens is a project developed in Teotitlan Del Valles in Oaxaca, Mexico in collaboration with a group of artisans. Teotitlan is a town on the outskirts of Oaxaca and is known for its woven tapestry work. This tapestry series initiates an aesthetic dialogue wherein different materials and techniques are used for different characteristics of magical imagery and the symbols of an inviolate eden, the magical garden of an early 17th century Florida: a rabbit rooted and growing from a tree trunk in conversation with a smooth-talking trickster pulling something out of his hat, preparing to appropriate this garden from the native people for himself. The garden is a magical garden that tells the story of the once mythical Florida of flowering paw paw and pink bindweed, the garden as metaphor for the once natural abundance of this peninsula, the rabbit smiling at the trickster, naive and unaware of his intentions.
Process
Mythical Sunshiness Garden Series.
Wool natural dyes
284 in x 154 in
2015
Made in teotitlan del valle oaxaca in collaboration with artisians
(Bw) Oscar perez
(Colored) Enedina bazan
Art in the Natural World and Cultured Settings Art Wynwood
Join me next week at Art Wynwood, Booth SP3, for my new exhibition Art in the Natural World and Cultured Settings Curated by Bernice Steinbaum
FEATURING: Troy Abbott | Jennifer Ann Basile​ | Carola Bravo​ | Vivian Carbonell | Enrique Gomez de Molina | Jonathan Gonzalez | April Hartley | Lucinda Linderman​ | Aurora Molina​ | Carol Prusa​ | Colin Sherrell​ | Carrie Sieh​ | Yomarie Silva | Carol Todaro​
Art in the Natural World and Cultured Settings: Artists erase the line between art and design. Breaking new ground at the 2015 Wynwood Art Fair, the artists deal with the phenomenon of working as designers.
The sixteen artists in the exhibition were invited to create a room setting as well as a fresh interpretation of nature using traditional methods of assemblage,bronze, wood, metal, light sculpture, video, photography, textiles, 3D-printing, taxidermy and printmaking. The ideological collaboration of artists reappraising their ideas and systems of classification forces the artist and viewer to consider the following question: Can something that is functional still be called fine art?
Each of the artists, like the interior designer, had to balance the layout of the room with work that supports the other objects around them. Although all of the work is contemporary the look of the room is timeless.
Magical Garden Series
19" x 40"
Thread drawing on linen
2015
Magical Garden series
36" x 36"
Thread drawing on canvas, silk color thread.