News

May 2024 Research residency at the Camargo Foundation. 23 May from 1400 – 1800 presentation of collaborative project ‘Récuperation’ at Aix-Marseille University’s Saint Charles Faculty building.

November 2023 BRIC TV releases new video about my work in conjunction with ‘Homeward Bound’

October 2023 Solo show ‘Homeward Bound’ at BRIC Project Room

September 2023-April 2024 Studio Residency at Artists Alliance Inc, on the Lower East Side

September 2023 Research Residency at the Camargo Foundation, supported by French social sciences postgraduate school EHESS. Expanding my collaboration with Dread Scott, we have teamed up with political anthropology scholar Clara Lecadet.

January 2023 I’ll have work in ‘For Those Without Choice’, a timely exhibition at Weinberg Newton Gallery in Chicago. My work is a small 2004 poster celebrating the life of Dr. Gunn, a heroic abortion provider who was murdered in 1993. I made it for an ‘Abortion Providers Appreciation Day’ campaign.

November 2022 Together with collaborators Dread Scott and Clara Lecadet, I will return to the Camargo Foundation in 2023 for a residency supported by the EHESS (French graduate school of social sciences) to develop an artwork involving advocates for undocumented workers in France and organizers of people who have been deported by France to Mali.

October 2022 Together with collaborator Dread Scott, we’ve been invited by 5 regional French art schools as visiting artists, to continue to develop our ‘Passes’ project exploring intersections between the legacy of the French slave trade and present-day migration from Africa into Europe. Thanks to funding from the Villa Albertine, the Ford Foundation, ANdEA and to the students and professors at Rouen, Grenoble, Annecy, Lorient, and Valenciennes art schools!

September 2022 For Pennants & Poets third iteration, More Art invited me to install the Pennants on the ornate cages of Fred Wilson’s public artwork ‘Mind Forged Manacles/Manacle Forged Minds’ in Columbus Park in Downtown Brooklyn, in front of the BK Supreme Court House, and the Fortune Society Writers performed their work there along with the wonderful Resistance Revival Chorus! Thanks to More Art!!

June 2022 I have received a BRIClab Residency! This means a free studio in Dumbo for 9 months with additional support!

May 2022 Together with the Fortune Society and great fellow artists Russell Craig and Laura Ceron Melo, we’ve won a Creatives Rebuild New York artist employment award to continue our work with Fortune Society participants for two years with full funding!

October 25 2021 Pennants & Poets second iteration, a new installation of the Pennants at PS1/MoMA in Queens, with the Fortune Society’s Writers’ Group performing their work, Freedom Agenda leaders speaking about the human rights crisis at Rikers Island Jail, and a public hands-on pennant making workshop, in the Plaza in front of the museum entrance.

September 25 2021 The first iteration of Pennants & Poets, a collaboration between me and the Fortune Society Writers’ Group, in DUMBO, Brooklyn. This opportunity to bring the Writers to perform in a spoken word event surrounded by the Pennants we had made during my fellowship at Socrates Sculpture Park, speaking out about the harms of incarceration, was supported by Brooklyn Arts Council and DUMBO Arts, in their Six Foot Platform program.

June 5 2021 Regin Igloria and I were invited to participate in the Walking As A Question biennial conference in Prespa, northern Greece. For our remote contribution, Regin live-zoomed a walk from the Compound Yellow residency in Oak Park, Chicago, to the Broadview Prison ICE Deportation Processing Hub, while I from my quarantine in London, talked with him about our 3 Days, 42 Miles Chicago to Gary Walk and my recent ‘Walk to the Paris Detention Centre (CRA) With Ladder.’

June 2021 I made a new ‘art-walk-to-a-site-of-deportation’ in Paris: ‘Walk to the Paris Detention Centre (CRA) With Ladder.’ I walked 13km carrying a skeletal ladder, from Montmartre to the Centre de Retention Administrative on the edge of the Bois de Vincennes.

May-June 2021 Kadist Foundation granted a residency in Paris to Dread Scott and me, to develop new research and ideas for our collaborative project Passes. We had a wonderful and productive time there.

February 2021 My proposal for a “Monument to the Unknown Cleaner” is included in an online show just launched at El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires, Curated by Luis Camnitzer after he solicited proposals for monuments to unknown heroines and heros. Camnitzer realizó un llamado abierto en el que propuso homenajear a héroes y heroínas desconocidos de la sociedad poniendo en entredicho el proceso habitual de la elección, financiación y construcción de los monumentos oficiales.

February 1 2021 I am grateful to Art At A Time Like This for including my recent insurrection drawing in the online show “First Responders”

January 27 2021 6pm Socrates Sculpture Park hosts Online conversation with me and two other fellowship artists, Aya Rodriguez-Izumi and Patrick Costello, about our ‘Monuments Now! projects. Watch the click here to watch a recording of the session.

October 10 – March 15 2021 Monuments Now! Call and Response is open at Socrates Sculpture Park – my fellowship project ‘Offshore’ is part of this great show of public art in the storied waterfront park in Long Island City, Queens.

July 7 – 24 2020 Desire Lines – a show that was due to happen at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn – will be online at the Artfare platform thanks to curator Melissa Joseph. It includes the ICE Escape Sign I am making for the Textile Arts Center, and some of my ink drawings. Desire Lines was selected by arts organization Assembly Room for their series Unrealized Exhibitions X Artfare, to support the work of independent curators.

July 6 2020 Super excited to participate in In Plain Sight multi-state prison abolition Skytyping intervention, with my message in the skies over New Jersey in support of the #Free EDC – coalition working to close Elizabeth Detention Center: Part of In Plain Sight, a coalition of 80 artists fighting immigrant detention and the culture of incarceration conceived by Cassils and rafa esparza

June 4 2020 Happy to have three of my recent projects included in an online exhibition launched today. The three-artist show, “Borders”  at Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery, was curated by artist Marc Lepson.

March 11 2020 I’m delighted and honoured to be one of the awardees of Socrates Sculpture Park’s  2020 Annual Fellowship on the theme of “Monuments Now: Call and Response.” My fellowship project, “Offshore,” will be built and installed on site along with the other fellowship projects in late summer 2020, Covid-19 permitting.

January – April 2020 at Tufts University Art Galleries, the show Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the Justice System, originally curated by Risa Puleo for the CAM Houston, is now on view at Tufts University near Boston. My ICE Escape Signs project is included, with a selection of the signs from 2006 to the present, and two signs commissioned for sites within Tufts, one of which remains installed in the lobby of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

January 19 – February 16, 2020 Two prints from the series Passes, my current collaboration with Dread Scott, are on view in First, Second and Third Person a group show at Pierogi Gallery in NYC, at 155 Suffolk St.

January – October 2020 I’m excited to have a public art project about migration into and out of Ireland, included in Galway 2020, the programme for Galway’s year as European Capital of Culture. More details to come.

September 20 – November 2, 2019 Opening reception Friday Sept. 20 6-8pm. In/Flux exhibition at the Pelham Art Center includes my interactive sculpture Design for the Alien Within: The Media Center, one of my domestic hiding place pieces, with for the first time, my audio piece Host playing inside it. It is haunting to revisit the  2007 work in which a courageous resident of Worthington, MN describes how she hid 25 people from ICE during the massive raids on the Swift meatpacking factory. I hope you’ll make it up to Pelham and experience it for yourself along with the rich collection of art addressing migration that the show brings together.

August 2019 – May 2020 TuftsPUBLIC Excited to be invited to make a cross-campus public installation for Tufts University and its art extension the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The new signs are now installed. This iteration of my long-term ICE Escape Sign project is based on discussions with students members of Tufts United for Immigrant Justice. A group of earlier ICE Escape signs dating back to 2006 is now on view at Tufts Aidekman Gallery

June 1 – 23 2019 I’m happy to be participating in No Longer Empty’s site responsive exhibition, (After)care organized by the NLE Curatorial Lab for emerging curators. Part of a partnership with Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, where the show will be installed, the show Opens Saturday, June 1, 12 – 5 pm  Hours: Wednesday – Sunday, 12 – 7 pm.

May 13 2019 In collaboration with Regin Igloria, as part of the ongoing project Mobile Speakers’ Podium for Citizens and Noncitizens, we will be holding a zine-making workshop and a student speak-out on climate change at Steel City Academy, Gary, IN, in their high school Environmental Justice classes.

February 13, 2019 1:30 pm. I will give a talk about my work at Stony Brook University.

February 12, 2019 11:30 am. I’ll be joining Dread Scott, Stephanie Dinkins and American Artist, for a conversation at the Zuccaire Gallery at the Stony Brook campus on Long Island, NY, about race, borders, identity and technology.

February – April 2019 Dread Scott and I are Visiting Artists at Stony Brook University in Long Island, NY. We will be continuing our collaborative project ‘Passes,’ begun during an earlier residency at the Camargo Foundation in France. The research-based project explores connections between the forced migrations of the French Slave Trade and present-day migrations from Africa to Europe and the Americas.

October 6 – October 11, 2018. ‘Mobile Speakers’ Podium for Citizens and Noncitizens Chicago to Gary Walk’ with Regin Igloria. Three Days, 42 Miles, to Highlight the Traffic of People from the Midwest to the Gary Airport Deportation Hub for Forced Removal.
Kickoff Parade: part of Spin City Mobile Art Parade and North River Commission Public Arts Festival.
Staging at: Comfort Station, Logan Square; Cook County Jail; Hyde Park Arts Center; Sidecar Gallery, Hammond, IN; and Gary Airport with Art and Activism Class from Steel City Academy led by Sam Love. With support from Bikes ‘N Roses, North Branch Projects and the Calumet Artist Residency. Upcoming programming at Steel City Academy, Gary, IN, info to come.

August 30 – September 9, 2018. Aug 30th 6-8pm – Opening of ‘Due Process’ at the MINI/Goethe-Institut space at 38 Ludlow Street, Lower East side. My latest site-specific ICE Escape Sign is included.

August 25 2018 – January 5 2019 – “Walls Turned Sideways – Artists Confront the Justice System” at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, TX. Excited for this show which will include a selection of the ICE Escape Sign project, as well as a new site specific ICE Escape Sign for the Museum. The curator is Risa Puleo.

February 3 – March 3, 2018 – ‘I’m Afraid of Americans’, a two-person show curated by Risa Puleo, with work by me and Dread Scott and some of our occasional collaborative work opened at Fiendish Plots in Lincoln, NE, an art space run by Nancy Friedemann and Charley Friedman. It was given a great write-up by L Kent Wolgamott in the Lincoln Journal-Star: ‘I’m Afraid of Americans’ is a Provocative Exhibit. Dread and I went out to Lincoln and gave a Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist lecture at UNL – we had a great discussion with students and met a welcoming community of artists and professors there.

November 13, 2017 – Extended to May 2, 2018 – ‘Hold These Truths’ Opening Reception: Monday, November 13, 6pm-8pm RSVP required exhibits@nathancummings.org
Part of my Design for the Alien Within project is included in this No Longer Empty group exhibition at the Nathan Cummings Foundation, as well as the latest version of my site specific ICE Escape Sign project.
To view the exhibition by appointment Monday – Friday 10-4 please contact the Nathan Cummings Foundation at exhibits@nathancummings.org

October 13 – 15 2017 – Art in Odd Places, the public art festival along 14th street in Manhattan, will include my new “7th Sense: Sanctuary” project, initiated in conjunction with the NY New Sanctuary Coalition. I have designed a poster and street sign to distribute along the 14th street corridor, that indicates on a diagrammatic map a number of specific locations where people will stand up for vulnerable immigrants who work, visit, study, exercise, socialize or pray there. The project gives institutions a way to expresses solidarity with vulnerable immigrants. It shows a wide variety of types of institutions that are willing to be on the ‘map’ because if needed they will offer safe space to non-citizens. This means different things to different institutions: some will not ask or share people’s immigration status, some will have the courage to refuse to hand people over to ICE, and some may if necessary offer people sanctuary. Together they inspire each other and the public to do more to resist ICE.

August 2017 – I’m delighted to be in a LMCC Process Space Residency on Governors Island till the end of September – with an amazing group of visual artists, performers and writers. The island is open to the public and studio visits are welcome by appointment. On September 23-24 there will be an Open Studio event.

July 2017 – Having had a wonderful month at the Camargo Foundation residency in Cassis, France, working in collaboration with Dread Scott on our forthcoming project Passes, I am now having the perfect waterbound follow-up in the shape of a Process Space residency in the LMCC studios at Governors Island in NY. It’s very peaceful there on weekdays, the views are spectacular and the A/C a bonus. Please visit me during Open Studios on September 23-24.

February 2017 – I’m excited to have been awarded two residencies for this Spring-Summer-Autumn: a Camargo Foundation residency, supported in part by Art Matters/Jerome Foundation, to work in France on a new collaboration with Dread Scott; and a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Process Space Residency on Governors’ Island.

December 2016 – The Mobile Speakers’ Podium for Citizens and Non-Citizens is now in AxisLab’s new Baseline space under the Argyle CTA stop in Uptown, a center of the South East Asian community in Chicago. Led by Patricia Nguyen, the project hosted performances for Baseline’s opening event, with future programs in preparation.

October 2016 – The Mobile Speakers’ Podium for Citizens and Noncitizens will be installed at U Chicago’s Arts Block in Washington Park. The public project will be activated with programming around migration, immigrant detention, mass incarceration and ideas of citizenship (manifestos, poetry, activist speakouts, artist-performers – line-up in formation) on these dates:
Friday, October 14, 6-7pm
Saturday October 22, 1-2pm
Friday, October 28, 6-7pm
Friday, November 4, 6-7pm

Sunday July 24th and July 31st, 2pm – 4pm – Programming for The Mobile Speakers’ Podium for Citizens and Non-Citizens, which remains on the lawn at Comfort Station, Logan Square, Chicago throughout July. Sunday 24th brilliant spoken word poet Luis Tubens AKA Logan Lu will perform, followed by stories of immigration and detention from asylum seeker Eric Carlos and the Logan Square Neighbourhood Association’s Youth Program.

Sunday 17th saw an amazing line-up at the Mobile Speakers’ Podium for Citizens and Non-Citizens, with Damon Locks and Roger Bonair-Agard performing sci-fi letters from prisoners who participated in Damon’s writing class, with Damon on sound system backing their words. Then brilliant Gary activist/environmentalist/historian Sam Love spoke about his work on the recent successful campaigns to derail the for-profit prison companies trying to build the next big detention center, south of Chicago, and Jackie Stevens, who runs the Deportation Research Clinic out of Northwestern, gave a great outline of the history and economics of the current detention boom, as well as her team’s cutting-edge legal challenges to the private prison companies slave labor profiteering.

July 3 2016, 2pm – 4pm – Launching the installation of the Mobile Speakers’ Podium for Citizens and Non-Citizens on the lawn at the amazing Comfort Station in Logan Square, Chicago. During July the Podium will be activated by programs with local artists and activists working at the intersection of building immigrants rights and ending mass incarceration. Please stop by Sunday afternoons in July, 2pm, for manifestos and performances. This is an intervention in progress: check back for more information or email me to get involved!

April 7 – Reception for Agitprop! 3rd Wave, at the Brooklyn Museum. This show continues through August 7 and includes some of my (n)IMBY Hobart-Gary porcelain protest pots along with documentation of the first pot delivered to a Concerned Citizens of Hobart activist’s home in Hobart, IN. This project is helping to build resistance to the for-profit prison industry’s efforts to expand immigrant detention in the Midwest.

March 24 – I participated in a discussion with Human Rights Watch US Program Researcher Clara Long and Diaz Lewis about immigration justice issues, published on the Weinberg-Newton Gallery Tumblr

February 17 – Agitprop! 2nd Wave launches at the Brooklyn Museum. My work with Concerned Citizens of Hobart, IN will be included.

January 22 – March 26: Soul Asylum is on view at the Weinberg Gallery in Chicago, at 300 W. Superior Street, Suite 203: I’m excited to be part of this show, a collaboration of the gallery with Human Rights Watch, highlighting the abusive structure of the US immigrant detention system, and efforts to roll it back. The Mobile Speakers Podium for Citizens and Immigrants is included. After the show it will begin a tour of local communities targeted by the private prison industry as sites for a proposed new for-profit detention center.

January 31 – April 24 2016: Part of my (n)IMBY project will be on view in Residual Lives at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago. I’m excited to have this opportunity to bring the project back to the city where it started as a celebration of the coalition of Chicago immigrant activists and Concerned Citizens of Crete who stopped a for-profit detention center from being built. They led the way for other communities taking a stand against the private prison profiteers. The show is designed to complement the prints and paintings by incarcerated artists on view in Weight of Rage – work that comes out of the amazing Prison and Neighborhood Arts Project at Stateville Prison.

October 16 – 18 2015: Gowanus Open Studios. My studio will be open Saturday and Sunday 1pm – 6pm. Address is 168 7th street, 2nd floor. Saturday Oct. 17 I will discuss  my work with curator Courtney Wendroff as part of the tour she will lead between 12 – 2pm.  Artist-curator Katie Peyton’s tour will also visit my studio – on Sunday at 4pm.

October 14th 7 – 9pm: Art in Odd Places Gallery show and closing party at the Lodge Gallery, 131 Chrystie Street. The show, curated by Sara Reisman and Kendal Henry,  will run though October 28th. I will have painted blackboard signs and a video from my Lengua, Libertad! intervention on view.

October 9 2015: Art in Odd Places: Recall begins! Look for my intervention in Campos Plaza, E14th between Avenue B and C, Saturday and Sunday from 2 – 5pm.

August 20 2015: Art in Odd Places: Recall – this year’s Fall festival on 14th street – is a ten-year anniversary edition, curated by Sara Reisman and Kendall Henry, so I’m honoured that it will include an iteration of Lengua, Libertad! – a performance in which I invite passers by to help me learn Spanish, and give my volunteer teachers certificates. More info to come.

July 11 2015: I participated in a panel discussion about the work on show at Franklin Street Works – it was a great discussion, with a very involved audience – wonderful to hang out with Terri, Yaelle and the other presenters, and the space was packed.

June 29th 2015: Excited to be shortlisted for a Guttenberg Arts residency. Friends have highly recommended this place to me. My fingers are crossed.

June 13 2015 Acting on Dreams opened at Franklin Street Works in Stamford, CT – a very cool alternative space with a cafe and garden out back. I’m excited about this show curated by Yaelle Amir: I’m among a great group of artists, all focusing on immigration issues in different ways. I made two large quilted paintings for the show, with the help of brilliant fabric designer/maker Elodie Blanchard. The show runs through August 30th.

June 1 2015: I am long-listed for a Creative Capital grant! Very excited about the possibilities for this project to map new ground in the ‘socially engaged art’ arena, as well as giving me a chance to develop a ceramic multiple, something I am itching to make.

February 4 2015: Traces in the Dark, the latest iteration of Greg Sholette and Olga Kopenkina’s traveling Imaginary Archive project, opens at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. I made my contribution for the show’s previous iteration in Kyiv, Ukraine: “Propisca No More” is a kind of flip book of cartoon maps laying out successive colonizations of the Crimea, culminating in an imaginary homeland – an intentional ‘Pale of Settlement’ – for Jews and Tatars there.

January 17 2015: Respond opened at Smack Mellon, with people queuing round the block to get in. The show runs through Feb 22: check the site for ongoing performances and programming. Amazing range of works by 201 artists in response to police brutality. My installation “Forest Moving,” a crowd of signs seen in recent protests and remade, is included. There has been quite a bit of coverage, wrestling with the idea of ‘protest art’: Holland Cotter gave the show a powerful review in the NY Times and the review in Bedford and Bowery has a good photo of my project.

October 23 2014, 3pm: Artist Talk at Paul Robeson Galleries, Rutgers, State University of NJ, Newark Campus, as part of the exhibition From There to Here

October 9 – 12 2014: Art in Odd Places  I will participate in this year’s edition of the festival along 14th Street in Manhattan – the theme is Free. My contribution will take place towards the east side of 14th street in Campos Plaza. More details to come.

September 19 – December 14 2014: BRIC Biennial Volume 1; Downtown Edition  at BRIC House – which is close to BAM in Brooklyn. The show includes a new 2-channel projected video, The Great Unconformity made in collaboration with Dread Scott -the result of our residency in the Grand Canyon in April.

September 2 – December 24 2014: From There to Here  show at the Paul Robeson Galleries, Rutgers, State University of NJ, Newark Campus. My (n)IMBY project – a set of large colour photographs of immigrant and citizen activists – and drawings and models from the Podium for Citizens and Non-Citizens project are included.

July 16 2014: Catalogue of Modern Labor Camp Typologies (Captive Workforce Available On Request) published for week 40 of Gulf Labor’s 52 Weeks project, in “Who’s Building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi?”

July 2014: Anne Shea’s interview with me published in n.paradoxa

June 20th 2014: The Wayland Rudd Collection opens at First Floor Gallery, Harare, Zimbabwe

May 23 2014: Imaginary Archive Kyiv opens in Kyiv, Ukraine despite blackouts and barricades.

April 12th 2014: Residency with the National Parks Service at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon begins!

February 6 2014: Wayland Rudd Collection reviewed in NY Times by Holland Cotter

January 17 2014: The Wayland Rudd Collection opens at Winkleman Gallery, New York, NY.

November 27 2013: Juliana Driever’s Profile of me on Bad-at-Sports