#VenusOrbitsForJustice

Articles and interviews about art and social justice || #ArtForSocialJustice ||

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Dedicated artist from Venezuela finds 'American Dream' in Miami

Artist Marco Caridad moved to Miami in 2011 "in search of 'The American Dream,' and to build a better future for myself. In my suitcase, I brought some clothes, family photos, personal documents and a few art books."

I moved from Venezuela to Miami in 2011 in search of "The American Dream," and to build a better future for myself. In my suitcase, I brought some clothes, family photos, personal documents and a few art books.

Being an immigrant is anything but simple. At first, friends gave me lodging while I found a place to live and I spent part of my savings on hiring an immigration paralegal and buying a small car to get around. I looked for a job, but I couldn't speak a single word of English. I discovered very quickly it was a problem, so I enrolled in free English classes at Coral Gables Senior High School.

After a few months, I looked for the most economical accommodations I could find: a small room in between Little River and Little Haiti. This "efficiency" was depressing because it was dirty, small, and the area was a bit dangerous. It was rough living in such a small place with dirt floors for the entrance, and in between stray chickens, cats and dogs. After paying the required three months’ rent and buying a few necessities at the Little River's Family Dollar store, I had $25 left in my wallet.

I'll never forget when I went to my first formal job interview, at the 111 building in Brickell. To all the questions they asked me, I replied using the only word I knew by then which was "Yes," and I filled out the applications using my cellphone to translate. As I left the building to get my car in the parking lot, the attendant in the parking lot said to me: "Mijo, it is $25.” Then with tears in my eyes, I replied (in Spanish): "It cannot be possible, please check my ticket, it was only an hour or less." But the attendant made it clear to me that it was a flat fee of $25. So I gave her the last $25 I had in my possession.

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This artist wants to make you smile

Bren Bataclan is a Filipino American artist who first came to the US when he was 12 years old. Now, he's a professional artist who shares his immigrant experience through his paintings. He also gives his paintings away to make people smile.

Bataclan was born in the Philippines and moved to the United States with his family in 1981. He was 12 years old when they arrived, and together they all settled in Daly City. That's a section of San Francisco with a large Filipino population. The excitement of their arrival is depicted in Bataclan's painting "Daly City, Our New Home."

Through the exhibt, which is called "Kulap: New Works by Bren Bataclan," the artist portrays and shares his immigrant experience.

Kulap means "fog" in Bataclan's native Tagalog. And as the exhibit states: The "fog encompasses the literal fog of the coastal hills, the cultural fog of a new immigrant's surroundings, and the fog of confusion and anxiety prompted by recent anti-immigrant rhetoric ..."

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DACA recipient paints to tell his story for those who can't

Roberto believes his story will allow those who view DACA as politics to step back and understand its people. He believes his story will evoke empathy, even though he arrived illegally.

In the shadow of the city on its most diverse stretch stands so many products with one brush.

Roberto Hernandez is six feet tall and painting a mural 20 yards wide.

“You have to step back and look at it from a distance,” Roberto told 11Alive’s Matt Pearl.

His challenge is perspective.

“From up close, everything may seem fine,” he said. “If you don’t step back from it, that may change the entire image.”

Roberto said many things happened to allow him to be the artist he is today.

“One is DACA, And the other is living in Atlanta,” he said.

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Refugees and immigrants find voice through art at Cincinnati's Welcome Project - Cincinnati Business Courier

The Welcome Project provides female refugees and immigrants from countries such as Syria, Guatemala, Iran, Iraq and Sudan the opportunity to work with professionals to create art, hone job skills, build confidence and develop friendships along the way.

Welcome to the Welcome Project, a one-year-old gathering place in Camp Washington where female immigrants and refugees from far-flung countries such as Syria, Guatemala, Iran, Iraq and Sudan get the opportunity to work with professionals to create art, hone job skills, build confidence and develop friendships along the way.

The goal is to empower these female immigrants and refugees with knowledge to break down employment and housing barriers, said Sheryl Rajbhandari, Welcome Project co-founder and executive director of Heartfelt Tidbits, a volunteer-based organization that provides services to refugees during and after resettlement.

“The biggest impact has been on their language skills,” Rajbhandari said. “Many have been in ESL (English as a Second Language) for one to three years and still struggled to feel confident enough to speak. Due to the various languages spoken within the group, English is the only universal one, so they strive to speak more here so they can share their stories.”

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Homeless youth hope to turn creativity into cash at weekend art show

As the Los Angeles region grapples with an ongoing homeless crisis many residents are looking for ways to make a difference and Safe Place For Youth (SPY) is providing a personal opportunity for anyone to connect with homeless youth while supporting their creative endeavors at their second annual art show this weekend.

The organization is one of the only youth-focused providers of homeless services in the area and they will open their doors for a free community art show “Magical Mystery Tour Through Spirituality” this Saturday from 3 – 6 p.m. Homeless youth, volunteers and staff have donated art work for the show that is part fundraiser, part awareness campaign and part entertainment.

Healing arts manager Sarah Boehmke said the shows began last year when a group of youths requested a place to show their work. That year was only a display but this weekend, they have partnered with Artwalk Inc. to facilitate the sale of youth art and the sales are being used to help the youth develop financial skills.

“This year we do have the ability to sell which is super exciting,” said Boehmke.

Each artist is taking a fiscal management class and they will receive 70 percent of the total sale price. SPY will receive about 23 percent to help fund the arts programs and the other seven will cover costs associated with the sale.

“Our intention is to set real world expectations,” she said. “It also helps show how the business side of the arts works,” she said. “How you can make money in art, what kind of art sells, the cost of supplies.”

SPY client Artemio said the food, clothing and financial resources are of course vital but perhaps more valuable to homeless youth is the acknowledgement of their humanity they receive from organizations like SPY.

“It’s the support,” he said. “For a lot of youth, they don’t get love or caring at home. If you’re a homeless youth, people don’t talk to you, they look down on you.”

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North city youth aims to end gun violence through creative art

According to Every Town Research, more than 100,000 people die each year due to gun violence.

Gun violence and art are not two topics usually discussed together. But, a group of teens in north St. Louis is using the two hoping to stop violence in St. Louis communities.

According to Everytown Research, more than 100,000 people die each year due to gun violence.

That's why a group of kids is using various forms of art to educate other teens about gun violence and hopefully change how it’s affecting the community.

By writing poetry, music, dancing and using other forms of creative and literary art, kids in north St. Louis are trying to empower others to help build their communities. They're trying to pick the city up by showcasing their talents and by bringing these forms of art into their neighborhoods, hoping it can help others understand some of their challenges.

Susan Colangelo is one of the founders of “Story Stitchers,” and she said a new art exhibit at the Sheldon is helping youth tell their stories of what it means to be a black teenager living in a community where violence is common.

"It's shocking to some people to see young black teenagers showing without any qualms at all that they care about their city and they want to pick it up. They want to stop the violence and they want other kids to put down guns," Colangelo said.

If you would like to learn more, Story Stitchers Art Collective has an exhibit at the Sheldon museum to showcase the work they've been doing around the city, it will remain on display until April 21.

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Seeing the Lives of Immigrants in Objects and Images of Home

Testimony, an exhibition about the lives of Bay Area immigrants, chooses to focus less on trauma and displacement than on the everyday meanings of home.

One of the objects on display is a two-inch plastic figurine that belongs to Alma, a San Francisco resident and recipient of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). “This homie reminds me of my Uncle Germán,” Alma explains, in an exhibition handout. “He was my last uncle killed in Mexico before my mom decided to come to the United States.”

The exhibition, created by the social practice artist, photographer, and San Francisco native Eliza Gregory, grew out of a three-year collaboration with the museum’s Artists Drawing Club. Gregory conducted interviews and collected objects, ephemera, and family photos to create testimonies, or formal accounts, of immigration to the San Francisco Bay Area. “Each testimony offers counterpoints to the contemporary and deeply troubled dialogue around immigration,” she told me. “Someone who has been through a terrible thing isn’t worth more or less than someone who hasn’t,” she said. “Someone who contributes at one kind of job, versus contributing at another kind of job, isn’t more or less valuable.”

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Green Bay inmate uses art and writing to help youth make better choices

Inmate DarRen Morris uses his free time to inspire youth going down the wrong path to make better choices through his art and writing

DarRen Morris is serving a life sentence at the Green Bay Correctional Institution. Morris now uses his free time to inspire youth going down the wrong path to make better choices through his art and writing.

n 1994 DarRen Morris was convicted of being a party to first degree intentional homicide at the age of 17. To tell his story, Morris wrote a book called ‘In Warm Blood,’ with his co-author Judith Adrian.

“To me he stands as a metaphor for the 2.5 million people we have locked up in this country, so it's telling one person's story who's inside and helping us better understand that there are human people inside, and they may be behind us in the line at the grocery store tomorrow,” said Adrian.

A once former hustler and gang member, Morris now uses his time in prison to paint. Morris says when he's immersed in his paintings, “his cellmate doesn't exist” and “he's not in prison.” Painting is a method of therapy for Morris.

"Just like writing, I think you can actually not be surrounded by cell walls when you're in the creative act," said Karon Winzenz, artist and event organizer.

DarRen Morris donates his works of art because he cannot sell them, he gives them out to prison projects to help youth and returning prisoners from making bad choices.

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Politicians in Washington D.C.— including the president—spend a lot of time discussing illegal immigration through the US-Mexico border. Now they have the opportunity to get really up close to the …

Politicians in Washington D.C.— including the president—spend a lot of time discussing illegal immigration through the US-Mexico border.

Now they have the opportunity to get really up close to the issue through a virtual reality installation dubbed Carne y Arena, which opened Monday in the US capital. The piece, created by Oscar-winning Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu, puts participants in the sandy, desolate places where the US Border Patrol carries out federal immigration policies. Spoiler alert: it’s a far cry from the sheltered congressional chambers where those policies are made.

The goal of the project was to convey the despair that drives immigrants to come to the US and the dangers they face trying to get there, González Iñárritu said in an interview with Mexico’s Milenio Televisión. Many border crossers these days are fleeing gruesome violence in their home countries, not chasing jobs.

“There’s a geographic distance; there’s a lack of understanding of the problem,” he said. The vast majority of people who decide immigration issues rarely have face-to-face encounters with immigrants, he added.

González Iñárritu interviewed dozens of Central Americans and Mexicans to distill their experiences crossing the border illegally. He worked with Mexican cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki to recreate it, down to the sand that immigrants say takes over their shoes. (Arena means sand in Spanish; carne means flesh.)

The result, which lasts about six minutes, is “highly immersive and can feel extremely realistic including experiences with firearms,” the exhibit’s organizers warn. Participants have to sign a waiver and release form.

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Thursday's sidewalk chalk art aimed at deterring youth tobacco, e-cigarette use

At 4 p.m. Thursday, March 22, members of the Weber-Morgan Governing Youth Council will take to the sidewalks near the corner of 25th Street and Washington Boulevard in downtown Ogden to chalk...

What do electronic cigarettes and chalk art have in common? It seems both can be appealing to teens.

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The Visible Invisible to empower homeless youth in latest art show

Art is a powerful medium, and the Visible Invisible is using it to challenge perceptions of youth homelessness through its fourth-annual show Saturday. The Visible Invisible is a student organization aimed to raise awareness and empower homeless youth through the arts and friendships.

“The Art Show by All, for All” will have art pieces from homeless young adults from the Columbus area.

“We hope to not only spread awareness about homelessness in the youth population but to provide an opportunity and space for their work to be shown,” said Jillian Davis, a member of the Visible Invisible and a second-year in art history.

This student organization works in collaboration with Star House, a drop-in center to help the youth experiencing homelessness. Twice a week the Visible Invisible visit the Star House to get supplies and facilitate creativity through art.

Juli Sasaki, the president and founder of the Visible Invisible, has been working with Star House since her second year at Ohio State.

“The summer after my freshman year I went into the Star House, which at that time was just a college house and you couldn’t even tell it was a center,” said Sasaki, a fourth-year in arts management.

“It’s really easy to think of [youth experiencing homelessness] as students if you’re not talking to them, if you’re not finding out about what’s happening in their life. This disconnect is what inspired me to learn more.”

The art show is held in Knowlton Hall, and this year’s theme is identity.

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‘It's pretty cool.’ Parents of juvenile offenders see their kids' art in the courthouse

Art made by juvenile offenders living in the Sacramento Youth Detention Facility (YDF) now fills display cases in the Sacramento County Juvenile Court. The cases were formerly filled with dusty old art from high school kids a decade ago.

There are two large, glass display cases to the right when you walk through the Sacramento County Juvenile Court. One features a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. constructed from colorful, handmade paper squares. The other has woodwork pieces, including two birdhouses, a small Christmas tree, and a snowman painted white sporting a top hat and red bow tie.

In between the display cases a sign reads "Art by local High Schools," but as of January the artwork on the shelves has been created exclusively by kids living in the Sacramento Youth Detention Facility (YDF), housed just steps away from the front doors of the courthouse.

This new initiative is called Fresh Start Art.

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They’re Working to Reform Juvenile Justice With an ‘Art Attack’ - Youth Today

The pianist jammed on the Steinway with such force, he stood up to play it. The rest of the orchestra swayed with the Songs of Solomon and Wadleigh High School choirs onstage at Carnegie Hall, singing a student composition about outcasts seeking change and second chances.

But “A Time Like This: Music for Change” wasn’t just a concert Sunday. It honored the creative input of justice-impacted youth, on stage and behind the scenes, as New Yorkers of all ages performed civil rights-inspired songs alongside established artists.

“This is ground zero for the next biggest reform for our justice system,” said Create Justice participant Hasan Davis. “It’s going to be an art attack.”

Create Justice, a national initiative to advance juvenile justice reform through the arts, is a collaboration between Los Angeles-based Arts for Incarcerated Youth Network (AIYN) and Carnegie Hall. It hosts a forum, its third and final one, today and Tuesday.

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These photos show a decade of the immigration debate from every angle

Few photographers have been as well-positioned to document nearly every aspect of the debate as John Moore.

“I hope that through my work and other journalists’ work, that we can get beyond seeing undocumented immigration in terms of statistics; we hear figures like 11 million [the estimated number of undocumented immigrants living in the US], we hear yearly numbers of apprehensions and deportations,” he said. “What I think its important to remember is that everyone involved is a human being.”

“If we see everyone as human, then its possible to find humane solutions.”

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Sobia Ahmad has built a wall, not a border wall, but an artistic one that highlights the faces, fears and faith of America's Muslim immigrants.

US President Donald Trump's hardline immigration policies have been at the centre of debate not only in the United States, but worldwide.

And one artist in Washington has built her own wall - to highlight the faces, fears and faith of America's Muslim immigrants.

Artist Sobia Ahmad transferred ink from Muslim American immigrants' ID photos onto ceramic tiles for her wall installation.

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Artists and activists: Role of art is to create discourse and change

The panelists spoke about how their experiences and narratives of immigration have influenced their work.

Artists and activists in Central Texas have been using different forms of art not only to tell the stories of those affected by anti-immigration rhetoric, but to motivate people into action, according to speakers on a cultural panel at Casa México during South by Southwest Interactive.

“Theater is no longer about entertaining and teaching a lesson, now it’s about being a part of a bigger discourse”, said Roberto Prestigiacomo, the artistic director of the theater company AtticRep. “The conversation that artists have with the community, hopefully will change community itself.”

The art and migration panelists — Prestigiacomo, Mexican artist Betsabeé Romero, illustrator Yocelyn Riojas, and DACA recipient Edgar Navarrete — spoke about how their own experiences and different narratives of immigration have influenced their work. They also discussed the role artists and cultural institutions have in serving as a space for discourse.

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Volta artists tackle environmentalism, immigration and US policy

Politics top of mind at the Armory Show's sister fair on Pier 90

Thorny questions of who benefits from immigration to the US are tackled at Pan American Projects of Miami, showing a series of carved wooden sculptures by the Cuban artist Abel Barroso. Works like Embassy Game (2017), on offer for $3,500, highlight the “power play” of successful immigrant communities. Included in collections like the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Whitney Museum of American Art, Barroso’s “works are personal but translate globally, especially to current Cuban and American audiences”, says the dealer Alejandro Machado.

Garis and Hahn, of Los Angeles, is offering a series of three recent large-scale digital prints by the Brooklyn-based photographer Felix R. Cid that, at first glance, appear to be a single aerial photograph but actually comprise several amalgamated images that inflate the scale of recent demonstrations (the 2017 Women’s March, protests on Donald Trump’s immigration ban, a gay pride parade) and gatherings in the US. The works, ranging from $18,500 to $20,000, critique the age of “alternative facts” and social media, which has the power to distort truth.

The curated section of the fair, called The Aesthetics of Matter, organised by the artists Mickalene Thomas and Racquel Chevremont, also features works with a strong sociopolitical bent. Mixed-media works made of juxtaposing industrial pieces by the artist Christie Neptune, presented by Rubber Factory of New York, comment on white supremacy and racial difference, while an entire wall of tear-off flyers, by the Brooklyn-based artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed, represented by the Newark-based non-profit Project for an Empty Space, read “Selling My Black Rage to the Highest Bidder”.