Community exhibit presents diversity of experience in WNC
ASHEVILLE — For Carolina McCready, art, the language of the human spirit, teaches people how to feel about complex issues, cutting through the static of biased politics and hate.
That theory is the organizing principle behind The Artery’s new exhibit about immigration, “Nuestras Historias, Nuestras Voces” (Our Stories, Our Voices). The community art project is sponsored in part by Latino Advocacy Coalition, where McCready is co-director. The exhibit reception is 7-9 p.m. today.
“Art talks to people’s hearts — people can learn much more through art and the way that it speaks to you,” McCready said. “Since immigration is such a polarized and complicated topic, we hope to speak to people’s hearts and not their minds.
“The effects of local immigration enforcement efforts on our communities are large, and the general public needs to feel these stories.”
The pieces in the multimedia exhibit — which includes works from seven artists with roots in Texas, Mexico, Romania and elsewhere — are inspired by The 100 Stories Project, a documentation project focusing on human rights abuses, and designed as a tool for organizing in immigrant communities, McCready said.
“The stories project started in 2008 spearheaded by five grassroots groups in Henderson and Buncombe counties,” she said. “Immigrants living in Western North Carolina have faced dramatic discrimination and abuse in recent years.”
Those abuses, she said, include workplace raids, such as the 2008 raid at Mills Manufacturing in Asheville and this week’s raid at Shogun Buffet and Hibachi Grill, as well as denial of driver’s licenses for undocumented residents, limited access to higher education and constant use of discriminatory license checkpoints.
“The local deportation programs had devastating effects on immigrants in Western North Carolina,” McCready said.
Those effects prompted the groups to start documenting these stories and have been used in theater pieces, art exhibitions, meetings with elected officials, and in protests and marches.
These stories inspired artist Martha Skinner to create a “10 X 10” table and performance. The project involves a collective drawing by 10 local immigrants to the stop-and-go rhythm of music created by another 10 local immigrants, she said in an email.
She envisions the piece to represent “the many faces of immigration and the transformation that takes place when one merges the stories of two cultures.”
Curator Victor Palomino conceived the exhibit to demonstrate this community’s diversity of experience and emotion.
“As artists, we hope to create dialogue and include the voices of those living in the shadows,” Palomino said. “This exhibition conveys the moments of resilience and celebration, as well as episodes of discrimination and fear experienced in a diverse range of ways.”
Organizers plan to take the exhibit to UNC Asheville and Warren Wilson College. “We would love to see the exhibit travel to other community locations and centers,” McCready said.
“By presenting the stories of Latino experiences in WNC and sharing them widely, we can take a first step in creating an environment in which cross-cultural dialogue might begin,” McCready said.
Also contributing to the 100 Stories Project are the Center for Participatory Change, WNC Workers Center and Nuestro Centro Coalition of Latin American Organizations.
In addition to Skinner, a Colombian designer and educator, the multimedia exhibit at The Artery features Sandra Garcia, a visual artist of Colombian descent; DeWayne Barton, a sculptor, poet, and African American organizer; Adrianna Vasiut, a Romanian painter; Kenna Sommer, a local visual artist and teacher; Chris Corral, a Texas native of Mexican descent who is a figurative painter; Oscar Santana, local Latin music DJ from Mexico.
Saturday, December 3, 2011
New Asheville exhibit presents diversity of immigrant experience in WNC
5:44 PM
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