For both of my visits, I decided to focus on the artist Yehimi Cambron. Yehimi Cambrón’s art is very significant to many immigrant communities since she uses her murals to tell the stories of many immigrants in a very impactful way. This year she did something very different; she decided to display her artwork in a museum, very different from her usual way of presenting her art, which is by painting in public murals. I was fortunate to see her artwork that was part of the temporary exhibit called “Of Origins and Belonging, Drawn From Atlanta” in the High Museum. Seeing her family in portraits, seeing how they fight for their rights is admirable and pushes me to fight for the rights of all who suffer from inhuman laws, especially my mother, who was deported this summer.
The pieces of art are not just portraits of people, but relatives of Yehimi (and Yehimi herself) who came to the United States to seek a better life. When you see the pictures, one notices that the portrait of the individuals are composed of a unified line that mimics a fingerprint, something unique to each person that cannot be taken from anyone.
What makes these pieces essential and impressive is in the way they are created. The pieces I saw at the High Museum in Atlanta are planned to the last detail; as in the paper she used to make it semi-transparent and to the documents that she put in the background of her family’s portraits, which are their citizenship letters, birth certificates and personal letters that will make you cry when you read them. Because the portraits are made with personal documents, it attracts the viewer to pay attention to the topic of immigration and the deportation crisis in the United States, which is something that affects them personally. The documents that are part of the artwork allow us to see these drawings as real people, as what they are but what social networks fail to teach us when we talk about immigration and the people that are affected by it.