Ideas please

As readers of my journal know, my friend Aimee Sitarz created the Bronze Shoes Installation as a way to draw people’s hearts and minds to the issue of immigrant children in the USA being traumatized, stripped from their parents and incarcerated in cages and camps. 

She has made shoes, cages, and images of water bottles (because some activists have been criminally prosecuted for leaving bottles of water in the desert for people who are migrating). She has hung shoes, mailed shoes to others for hanging, built cages used in political protests, and made cyanotypes. In order to have enough money to buy shoes, paint, and art materials, she has tried to raise a little money from crowd funding. On the few occasions when she has raised more than she needed, she donated it to RAICES, an organization that provides legal representation for immigrants in Texas.

Aimee has a part-time job (so that she can make art); she lives in a tiny room in a shared house (so that she can make art); and since the current administration’s family separation policy began, all her art has been devoted to the conditions of migrating children.

Lately some activists have been critical of Aimee for raising money to make art about the children. They feel that she, as a white woman, should only raise funds for direct services to immigrant and refugee families, if she is going to raise funds at all. There have been rants on Facebook, mean talk, accusations hurled by people who, like Aimee, are poor and care passionately about the abuse of immigrants. They have not, however, studied art history. They have no respect for the use of art to serve political change.

I want to write something about the way art can educate and can attract and hold the attention of people who might otherwise forget, ignore, or minimize the suffering of others. I have examples in mind, but I’m wondering if the Blip community might like to help me out by naming some artists who have served justice through their art; perhaps even artists who had to to raise money for materials to make art. If you don’t have any examples you want to suggest, feel free to just enjoy the view from one of the medical offices I visited this morning. If Mondrian had come to Portland….