US: IMMIGRATION AND DIASPORA IN AMERICA, AS SEEN AND FELT BY ITS ARTISTS

 

We are a nation of nations. Native Americans may have “sprung from the land” (only to be forced time and again from it); but the rest of us have been removed, or removed ourselves, from what we consider(ed) our mother soil, to wind up here. Our hyphenated ethnicities and nationalities do not maintain a fifth column within our borders, but neither do they allow us to melt into a sea of common DNA. We rejoice in our differences, or should; we suffer from our conformities; and we impoverish ourselves and one another with our absurdly cultivated xenophobia.

 

Artists are by nature expansive and accepting, as all Americans should by logic be. Artists don’t like barriers. They don’t value homogeneity. They do like motion and formation and change and the poetry of variation. Artists distinguish themselves from their more conventional fellow citizens (or fellow humans) not simply by accepting their own (and others’) unconventionality, but by prizing and cultivating it. Artists thrive on the diversity of experience. They need to draw such flavor from the world precisely in order to make their art of it.

 

The forces of conformity and censure are out in force as they haven’t been in a century. Democracy and independence struggle to maintain their sway over a civilization that needs them more now than ever. Identity and solidarity strain to hold back the forces of corrupt and illegitimate authority. The course of human events now calls upon our species to renew its vows of justice, charity, and social equity. These, of course, are ideals towards which artists in particular strive. Artists profess the unity of humankind not least because they need such unity to nurture their own creative impulse.

 

“Us” brings together over 100 artworks meant not just to advocate the free movement of people, but to declare the cultivation of their makers’ own distinction. While many of the artworks here decry the forces of division currently rampant, many other works admit their exotic and exoteric backgrounds. Today’s wars hang here next to conjurations of our grandparents’ conflicts. Globe-girdling diasporic currents, which made it possible for so many of us, and our forebears, to grow up American, continue unabated.

 

As the anti-democrats seek to stanch the rising and falling tides of immigration, the United States re-enacts its own history of prejudice and fear, going to extreme lengths to “close its borders” (largely against permanent and temporary migrants whose skills our industries in fact desperately need). The exercise is irrational, not to say immoral, serving only to translate vacuous bigotry into state policy. “Us” does not simply invite artists to decry and demonstrate against our country’s counter-productive, historically discredited treatment of those who would join us here. It demonstrates that artists have, dependably and forcefully, manifested their protestations and posted their declarations of interdependence. They remind us, as ever, that good neighbors make low fences.

 

Peter Frank

Los Angeles     

June 2026