We know that one way an ethnic group holds onto its heritage is to preserve its art, even as it transforms itself in a new place. Looking at and rethinking the role of art made by recent immigrants can give us insights into ourselves as well the as newcomers in our midst.
Immigrant art includes many things; it is not a unified movement; it is as varied as the artists themselves. What it does share is its source: it is the art of new Americans, re-working their own threads and drawing on their own image banks. It is often the work of those less interested in assimilating than in telling, preserving, and saving their history. It is the art of the transplanted soul, seeking new roots, not rejecting old ones. It often merges memory, history, custom and traditions as the artist bearing witness. Often it is celebratory, even when framed in the sadness or loss.
The contribution of America’s immigrants, both in the distant and recent past is intimately interwoven into the fabric of our culture. It is who we have become. We are told over and over again that we are a nation of immigrants – colonizers who pushed the native population aside as it strode across the vast continent, carelessly destroying multiple cultures in the process; a sad but true legacy. But it is also true that immigrant hegemony built the nation. Later, nineteenth century immigration transformed it. When we look at the art and culture of recent arrivals, we begin to get a sense of what this ongoing transformative process is about: what we gain, and what we lose as the cycle repeats itself and changes both the newcomer and us all.
The voices are all different, and all unique. What they have in common is an artist saying, through their art, is this is what I draw strength from; this is what nourishes me, or even, this is what I had to run away from, and what I do not want to forget. Like all art, it is what makes us whole.
In a recent article in the New York Times, the Director of the Queens Museum in New York City, Tom Finkelpearl, said, “ The future of art in New York City will be driven by immigrants.” Mr. Finkelpearl was thinking about what new forms or movements art collectors should hone in on in their ongoing search for staying ahead of the curve.
But we might think less about collecting than about the works themselves. The tradition of passing on the imagery of one culture to another is alive and well, whether that be reflected in the works of recent Mexican artists, working in an established form such as the retablos (oils on tin and wood that often invoke a saint or holy image. Retablos are a very traditional Mexican art form. A collection of these were on view recently at Princeton’s art gallery, in an exhibition titled Angels on the Border. Or we could think about the cityscape installations and imagined futuristic landscapes of Cuban artist Glexis Novoa, who now works and shows in Miami.
In what might be a landmark exhibition going back to the fall of 1995, San Francisco State University organized a gallery retrospective on the history and material culture of Asian-Americans in California that included art made in the Japanese/American internment camps of America during World War II: a shameful period that until fairly recently has been under-documented. That show, entitled With New Eyes: Toward an Asian American Art History in the West was an early attempt to recover a history that had been swept under the American carpet. When Can We Go Home? is the plaintive title of one of the paintings that was part of the exhibition (Henry Sugimoto, 1943). Home was not Japan. Home was an America that had allowed fear to take the upper hand making it possible for Americans to turn their backs on fellow Americans.
In a recent op-ed piece in The New York Times, Pulitzer prize-winning historian Arthur Schlesinger quotes Oscar Wilde as part of an essay that ruminates on the role of history. “The one duty we have to history,” wrote Wilde and cited by Schlesinger, “is to rewrite it.”
We let immigrants rewrite history when we listen to their stories, look at their art and think about their voices and how they compliment our own.
Long ago the words were carved into the stone book of the lady in New York harbor: “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” There is a connection from this famous old poem to contemporary immigrant art: all these years later, we are still struggling to understand how to keep the golden door open, and how to not be frightened by those who still come, not wanting to forget who they are, but seeking acceptance as they move from the tempests left behind.
