Undocumented immigrants. These are the people who are blamed for the American Dream fading away, for the shrinking middle class and job loss, for the rise of violence, crime and disease, shrinking resources and for endless war.
A two-year-old Honduran asylum seeker cries as her mother is searched and detained near the U.S.-Mexico border on June 12, 2018 in McAllen, Texas. (Photo: John Moore, Getty Images)
Since Trump’s campaign promise to build a wall, we have gone beyond what many Americans would have previously imagined to divide people, to separate families, and chose to see people as merely fact patterns instead of humans. In the process, we forgot to be humans, and forgot to treat others as human beings. We have all become dangerously close to being nothing more than data, numbers, scapegoats for fascist plans and a means for private prisons to profit.
What does it mean to be a human? What evidence can you supply to convey that you are a human? How can you prove that you qualify to be a “documented human?”
For this curated exhibition, you may submit a painting, a drawing, a sculpture, a photograph, a video, a sound bite, a story, artifacts, your philosophy on anything at all, … you may propose a performance, or show us what it means to be human through a documented or recorded action. Anything and everything goes just so you can prove to us that you are worthy of being a documented human and therefore entitled to all inalienable rights and dignities due a human being. Make us laugh, make us think, break our hearts, make us feel… human.
On display in Gallery 724, a pop up gallery space inside an immigration lawyer’s office in Old Town, Alexandria, Virginia. The show will run one day only as an “art happening”.
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