CAW Gives Many Faces To Sanctuary

A piece by Susan Clinard, White Space, White Noise, depicts a scene of a family that takes on nearly religious significance, as if it’s a sculpture that belongs in a church. But the people in the sculpture aren’t icons. They’re people, their humanity affirmed in every gesture, their stories written on their faces.

White Space, White Noise is positioned near the entry to the gallery at Creative Arts Workshop, and it is a fitting introduction to ​“Sanctuary Cities and the Politics of the American Dream,” a sprawling show curated by Luciana Q. McClure running now at CAW on Audubon Street through Nov. 9.

“I think the theme started for us last year,” said Anne Coates, CAW’s executive director, in talking about developing the idea of an exhibit based around the idea of sanctuary cities — of which New Haven has declared itself one, even as advocates push for further legal protections for immigrants. For Coates, the exhibit was a way to have a show that was ​“mindful of the demographics of the city, where one in eight residents was born in another country.”

Creative Arts Workshop issued a call for curators in the spring and narrowed it down to five finalists before picking Luciana Q. McClure. McClure by now has a long list of accomplishments in curating art exhibits in New Haven as part of Nasty Women CT, and has been recognized for it by the Arts Council of Greater New Haven. Plus, said Coates, ​“it was important that the curator have the lived experience” of being an immigrant artist herself.

Having settled on a curator, CAW then put out a national call for submissions, eventually accepting over 120 pieces. ​“There are artists here from all over the country,” said Robin Green, CAW’s programs and gallery manager.

“Lucy is very inclusive,” Green said. ​“Her vision of the curatorial element is about creating conversations.”

Green pointed out one corner of the first floor of the gallery are three pieces — including Lisa D. Archigian’s Spectacle (II) — that together address the violence that some migrants are fleeing in their journeys to the United States, and that other ethnic groups have faced in the past. Archigian’s own work focuses on the horrors of the Armenian genocide, including a startling image that feels sadly, urgently current.

Another set of pieces — like Michal Nachmany’s By Boat and Train, and Full of Promise — share a ​“documentary, archival approach” in showing how the current wave of immigration is just the latest chapter in an old story.

“Every work can be made greater or lesser by its neighbor,” Green said. The more thoughtful the curator, the more the juxtaposition of different pieces can amplify the effect of the show overall.

Setting up the exhibit turned into a group effort, taking about a week. ​“We started placing the larger pieces right away,” Green said. Meanwhile, ​“I just did the lighting before you came.” But Green and McClure were not alone. ​“A lot of the artists who came ended up staying and helping out, asking ​‘what can I do?’”

“For many of the artists,” Coates added, ​“this was the first time they’d been here, and that was a conversation.” The setup of the pieces in the gallery — creating a riot of color and motion that spills out of the gallery space and into the entryway of the building and an adjacent exhibition area that usually is separate from the gallery show — was part of Coates’s idea to ​“activate the street…. Creating a reason for more artists who have never been here, even though they live here, is exciting to me.”

Some of the pieces in the show take on politics directly. But a focus on people over politics emerges as a theme in the exhibit. ​“There are definitely some references to politics, but most of the work is focused on people,” Green said. ​“The lived experience,” Coates agreed.

“I was surprised at how few were overtly confrontational,” Green continued. Instead, many of the pieces try to bring individual stories to the fore as a way of asserting humanity. Sean Gallagher’s portraits were of some of his students at Southern Connecticut State University who had dealt with discrimination because of their ethnic identities. A few, like Tony Falcone’s Sanctuary City, even dared to dream of a future utopia.

“People care about people,” Green said. ​“When you’re talking to a person it’s a natural instinct to care for them.” In so many of the pieces in this moving, the faces and voices of hundreds of people come to life.

“Sanctuary Cities and the Politics of the American Dream” runs at Creative Arts Workshop, 80 Audubon St., through Nov. 9. Admission is free. Visit CAW’s website for more details.