This is the 2nd annual HCA Curator Fellowship Program exhibition. Through an application and juried selection process, Flor Delgadillo was selected as the 2022 guest curator. She gathered six artists to join her with a goal to raise awareness about what goes on beyond our borders, the gentrification and the erasure of community. The group of artists come from different parts of the world all sharing the lived experience of constant migration.
Flor Delgadillo
Delgadillo, a Mexican artist, educator and curator, drew inspiration for a number of her pieces from the meat bones that are part of a family recipe for birria. She began collecting the bones after her aunt was diagnosed with MS. In Mexican culture, they pass their recipes down orally. Birria Bones communicates a connection between all bodies.
Rebecca Wakim is a Lebanese interdisciplinary visual artist, with her main focus on the unjust political system in Lebanon and the repercussions it has had on its people. Her work switches between ceramics, photography, and sculpture as she is constantly in between Lebanon and Boston navigating the different ways to bring forth these issues.
Iartiza Menjivar series entitled, “First Generation” documents through photography the daily life of three generations of her immigrant family: her parents who arrived from Guatemala and El Salvador, and the generations that followed, born in the U.S.
Nikki Silva provides a mixed media flipbook piece that guests to the gallery are invited to touch as they view the many changes to her grandfather’s store as a jewelry maker. A classic Italian American immigrant family tale of being a skilled trades workers who toiled hard to make it seem like their family was better off than they were.
Ravjot Mehek Singh’s is an Indian American award-winning film and television director. Singh has two installations, including a piece that includes a spoken word poem that gallery visitors can listen to through headphones. The artist uses satire to depict negative stereotypical narratives assigned to South Asian immigrants.
Also included in the media piece is a blurb of an in-progress documentary titled, Afghans of Boston: “Mawloda’s Story” which will be completed in 2023.
Marla McLoed, at the age of 2, was displaced from her home with her Native/European mother and placed into foster care. She was raised until the age of 18 by four different foster homes all with African American mothers. The artist is in the process of engaging and learning more from her Indigenous tribe and her African American and European American genetic families. Her 3-D sculpture mirrors the many cultural influences of her life.
Alonso Nichols
This photography-based sculpture captures his old Kentucky neighborhood that no longer exists due to gentrification. Gentrification is the politics of location, and his piece examines what happens when it invades one’s community.