Arts, Immigration, and Mentorship
Huáscar Robles, 2023 GIA Conference Blog
The Arts, Immigration and Mentorship lecture was a heartwarming, lesson-rich session with examples of how art can lead the way to inclusion for immigrants entering a society they don’t understand but desperately want to.
The main objective of the policy written to help immigrants is to grant them access: access to the art world, of course, but access to healthcare, transportation, shelter, and overall quality of life. And that is what the organizations that met at Caribe Hilton’s Tropical Room traveled to Puerto Rico for.
Brigid McAuliffe began the discussion using her aptly named organization as a model for how arts can fuel belonging. Picture Me Here does precisely that. Through several levels of art programs, Picture Me Here allows immigrants to place themselves in their new American landscapes. The programs encourage participants to use photography, video, and stop animation to share their narrative arc from their homelands to their new homes. “Damak to Denver,” “New American Voices,” and “Culture Dish” are a few of the programs whose common denominator is documenting immigrants’ journeys, creating tangible art objects (books, animation), and coordinating exhibits.
“I saw photography and art, especially this participatory process, as this bridge to connect people and the camera as an excuse for people to come together from different backgrounds,” McAuliffe said with a beaming smile.
If Picture Me Here fills the void of how art can serve immigrants, PlatteForum fills the void of mentorship to immigrants who are artists. Executive Director, former board member, and a former Artist-in-Residence of the organization, Michael Gadlin, tested the idea of mentoring artists who were immigrants or of immigrant parents in the Denver area. The pilot program gave artists access to the art world they knew nothing about. He shared the story of his mentee Rosario Weston, a Colombian immigrant with great expressive eyes and flair for larger-than-life portraits of Latine women.
“The idea that I gave her [Rosario] was art can be anywhere; it doesn’t have this traditional path… and she found a business that let her do a mural on a truck,” Gadlin recalls. The truck mural exhibited Rosario’s art to several constituencies, and it also became a pop-up space for community events that eventually led to a gallery show.
The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) became an intermediary on behalf of the pilot. CEO Michael Royce recalled reading a New York Times story in 2007 that stated 60 % of people who lived in New York City were either from another country or were the firstborn from another country.
“How does NYFA respond to that?” he asked himself.
Royce’s question was not entirely rhetorical. Since 2007, NYFA and their partners have begun building the infrastructure to support artists within that sprawling percentage of immigrants. Royce, at times emotional for the support they’ve garnered, reported that the mentorship program has enlisted over 545 mentors, engaged 50+ partners, and sponsored more than 560 mentees from 75 different countries. “If you get a mentor who is already established… it saves them approximately 20 years of figuring out the system on their own… because someone says ‘this is how you do it,’” Royce added.
Royce explains that an NYC-based resource center now exists with plans to expand nationally to serve artists’ other important needs: health, transportation, and affordable housing, among others. This year alone, over 100,000 immigrants traveled to New York to build a home. NYFA’s model may play an even more important role than they had envisioned when they began their dream in 2007.
The very important question of how undocumented immigrants are paid during these processes was posited by a participant to which panelists shared different answers. Gadlin stated this was an evolving process, yet McAuliffe said that gift cards were used in her program.
The most important takeaway is whether organizations are using art to sustain immigrants’ new lives or mentoring immigrant artists across the country; both approaches achieve one very important goal: connecting immigrants to their new cities. This is what we call access – and that is the one giant leap a person needs to make it in a new world.
