June 13 to August 30, 2015
41 Franklin Street
Stamford, CT, 203 595 5211

Over the last few years, Connecticut has passed progressive policies regarding in-state tuition for undocumented students, drive-only permits for undocumented residents, and protections for domestic workers. Franklin Street Works, located in Stamford, one of the state’s most immigrant-heavy cities, is currently exhibiting “Acting on Dreams: The State of Immigrant Rights, Conditions, and Advocacy in the United States.” This group show is curated by Yaelle S. Amir and tackles immigration issues through a variety of political and visual tactics, creating an engaging and moving viewer experience.

The Index of the Disappeared: 34,000 Beds (2015) is a multimedia installation by Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani that features a poignant and expansive archive of immigrants who have disappeared since the attacks of September 11, 2001. In shelved binders that viewers are encouraged to flip through, the archive materializes both the scope and the invisibility of the disappearances. The binders’ official documents, secondary literature, and personal narratives highlight systems of deportation, as well as the nature of the language and protocols used. Selected passages are collaged in an accompanying light box, as well as in take-away postcards. Around the shelves are 34,000 silkscreened beds, representing the detention bed quota required by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The prints recall Warhol’s Death and Disaster series, which depicts car crashes, electric chairs, and other disasters in similar, brutal repetition.

A few weeks before the show’s opening, the Connecticut legislature passed the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights. Marisa Morán Jahn’s (Studio REV-) project CareForce: Nannies, Housekeepers, Caregivers, Families and Allies United for Sustainable Care Solutions (in collaboration with the National Domestic Worker’s Alliance and Caring Across Generations) utilizes tactics of empowerment, advocacy, and education. The display features an informational video, pocket resources (including Rights and Responsibilities Under the Massachusetts Domestic Bill of Rights & Other Laws, 2015), as well as a photo corner where participants are encouraged to take pictures of themselves as superheroes. Brightness and effectiveness coexist in Jahn’s display. Imagining domestic workers as superheroes and asking viewers to don masks for a photo booth is as playful as it is political. Considering that only seven states have enacted the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights since the first, in Massachusetts in 2004, and even the limited scope of what recently passed in Connecticut, the CareForce remains relevant and timely.

Through photographs, paintings, and souvenirs, Jenny Polak’s work depicts activist efforts against a for-profit detention center in Crete, Illinois. A background in urban planning gave Polak a particular entry point to a case where the decision about the detention center came down to the city’s planning committee. Her multi-media paintings capture city’s mobilization and the hearings (Under-painting for a History: Citizens and Immigrants Converge on the For-Profit Detention Center Site, 2015 and Under-painting for a History: The Village Council Discusses the For-Profit Detention Center Plan, 2015); photographs capture the activists and their allies ((n)IMBY, 2012); and 3D-printed souvenirs ((n)IMBY—Souvenirs, 2012; (n)IMBY—Souvenirs at Home, 2013) capture an effort to historicize the successful campaign. As with the ongoing work of CareForce, keeping for-profit detention centers out of communities across the country continues to be an important endeavor.

Queerocracy’s 2011 Columbus Day action (in collaboration with Carlos Motta) sought to publicly vocalize a timeline the queer migrations, spanning from 1492 to 2013. Newsprint copies of the timeline piled alongside the projection of the action (A New Discovery: Queer Immigration in Perspective) served as a gesture of connection and physicality. The timeline’s extensive historical, policy, and organizing milestones communicate how the vulnerabilities of queerness and immigration have constantly intertwined. The piece’s audio — the voices of the action’s participants dictating the events on the timeline — echoes powerfully through the gallery.

Another collective in the show is CultureStrike, co-founded by Favianna Rodriguez, whose Migration is Beautiful monarch butterfly icon has become ubiquitous with immigrant rights. The show includes Migration Now!, a diverse and stirring portfolio of posters by CultureStrike and JustSeeds with messages such as “Dignity Not Detention,” “Deporting and Detaining Parents Shatters Families,” and “Stop the Raids,” as well as a station encouraging the coloring-in of one’s own wings (Migration is Beautiful Coloring Activity, 2013) .

“Acting On Dreams” is insistently interactive. It asks the viewer to not just to look, but to take — to flip through binders, to color, even. Through takeaways like the CareForce resource cards, the Migration is Beautiful monarch, and the queer migrations timeline by Queerocracy, the viewer becomes the recipient of a reminder — of evidence that makes the issues expressed difficult to ignore. The show demonstrates an understanding of mass — mass migration, mass organizing efforts, mass deportations — and couples it with an understanding of individual agency and experience. Although diverse in its media, tones, and approaches, the show retains cohesion.

Perhaps most striking are the ways in which “Acting on Dreams” consistently encourages personal connections to issues that are too often abstracted and made impersonal. It respects and successfully highlights the visual and textual language of activism and couples systemic analysis with individual expression. As Connecticut and the nation continue to address complex immigration issues, the perspectives offered by the works in the show are bound to remain pertinent.

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March 8 to 11, 2012
548 West 22nd Street, between 1oth and 11th avenues
New York City – Sunday hours: 11am to 4pm

Strolling through Independent with its open, airy installation one feels something akin to calm – an emotional state alien to the usual art fair experience of cluttered booths and madding crowds. Architect Christian Wassmann designed the layout,  in the former Dia Center for the Arts building along with a “site-specific environment” on the roof intended, in the words of the press release. to “align with the true North-South axis of the earth.” Whether or not visitors buy into this ambitious concept – or even notice it – the fair is a delight.  There are few dividing walls, allowing one gallery area to flow seamlessly into the next, a joyful antidote to ubiquitous, claustrophobic cubicles.

On each of Independent’s three floors there are moments of surprise and aesthetic reward.  At The Approach on the second floor, three achingly beautiful white-on-white works by Sam Windett represent the best paintings in a fair diversely populated by installation, sculpture, work on paper, photography, and film.  Daria Martin’s 16mm film projection, Closeup Gallery, at Maureen Paley is a mesmerizing depiction of smiling performers shuffling multicolored decks of cards as they slowly twirl on a kaleidoscopic table.  The colors are bright and nostalgic – the palette of a children’s TV show in the 1980s – though the film’s content is determinedly inscrutable.  It is 10 minutes long, and looped, and it is nearly impossible to walk away.  Mac Adams’s sinister 1976 installation at gb agency, Black Mail consists of a half-eaten meal on a table in disarray, an overturned chair, and dripping candles burned down to their nubs.  An act of violence has taken place, and the title hints at the cause, but with no victim or suspect, we are left to make up our own narrative: a do-it-yourself murder mystery.

On the third floor at Andrew Kreps Gallery, Andrea Bowers’ Tree sits – Canopy Camping, earth First! Direct Action Manual with Dream Platform, an ode to environmentalist civil disobedience, presents a fully functional tree sitter’s platform complete with instructions for residence (dedicating one side as kitchen, the other as bathroom because one “wouldn’t want to do both in the same area”).   Bowers has explored many activist tropes (Feminism, Immigration reform) but her gallerist explained to me that while the work is about activism, it is not actual activism.  This neat semantic hat trick in no way detracts from the sincerity and idealistic appeal of the work.  In fact, given Dia’s treacherously steep staircases, the ropes and carabiners might prove extremely useful to fairgoers.  Other works not to miss on the third floor are Moyra Davey’s grainy close ups of the back of a ten dollar bill from 1989 at Murray Guy and Michel François’s exuberant bronze splatter evoking Jackson Pollock at Bortolami.

Rob Pruitt’s silver-tape covered chairs, The Congregation (2010-12) at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise almost steal the show on the fourth floor, but it is well worth lingering around the corner at Creative Growth Art Center where Dan Miller has created spellbinding odes to the power of language in pen, paint, and typewritten words on paper.  The works are both confounding and compelling – alluring, indefinably sad, and creepy.  Their poignancy is almost overwhelming when one learns that the artist has Autism, and can hardly speak at all.  His words are all in his art.

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