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Articles & Reviews

A Story of Immigration, Heritage, and Identity: Invisible Bodies on View at Pennsylvania State University

Installation view, Invisible Bodies, at Penn State University (HUB-Robeson Galleries), 2023. Images courtesy of The Border Gallery and HUB-Robeson Galleries

As one approaches “Art Alley,” part of the Hub-Robeson Galleries at Pennsylvania State University, it is the vibrant green walls that first draw one’s attention. Painted green for the “support for an open immigration system, allowing immigrants to contribute to the nation’s labor force, Invisible Bodies: An Exploration of Migrant Labor Through an Artistic Lens, curated by The Border Gallery and Emireth Herrera Valdes, brings together fifteen artists from diverse backgrounds to contemplate labor, immigration, and identity in the United States.

The Immigrant Artist Biennial – In Dialogue

Reproducing as an Im/migrant: Young Joo Lee, Maria Kulikovska, and Coralina Rodriguez Meyer

During a talk at NYU, feminist post-Marxist scholar and author Silvia Federici said: “The image of the worker is not the image of the person at the assembly line; it’s the immigrant.” With this statement, she is referring to vulnerable migrants whose movements are fueled by the climate crisis, corporate control of natural resources, and economics. With her social practice project Mama Spa Botanica, Coralina Rodriguez Meyer attempts to recreate the bond between nature and the female body to enhance healthcare for black and brown pregnant women, empowering them to advocate for themselves and their communities within an inadequate maternal healthcare system. In her book, Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism, to explain the link between migrants and reproduction, Federici cites “the war on human reproduction” which encapsulates the separation of people from land, soil, sea, and independent means of reproduction acted out by corporate interests. This is a separation that Rodriguez Meyer both highlights and resists in her work.

The Immigrant Artist Biennial Names 48 Artists and Art Spiel as Media Partner for their 2nd Edition

The second edition of The Immigrant Artist Biennial, titled “Contact Zone”, will showcase the work of 48 artists at seven locations across New York and New Jersey from September to December 2023. The curatorial trio adopted the biennial’s theme from a term coined in 1991 by linguist and critical theorist Mary Louise Pratt, which she used to describe “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations.” Katherine Adams, co-curator and an affiliate of EMPAC, explains in a statement how this concept guided their curatorial research: “It allowed us to work with a productively fractured relationship to place. It also encapsulates our attempt to find an organizational concept for artistic infrastructures that are diasporic in form and not only content—that can deal with effects of situations such as exile, alienation, or simply the elusive concept of home.”