Artists Explore Borders, Identity, Immigration & Memory in New Art Exhibition

WHITE PLAINS, NEW YORK (Oct. 10, 2023) – ArtsWestchester will exhibit the work of 15 regional artists in “Crossing Borders: Revisited,” a new exhibition supported by the National Endowment for the Arts that opens in White Plains on Sat., October 14. Through sculpture, site-responsive installations, video, photography, and two-dimensional mixed-media works, ArtsWestchester explores the ways in which geographic and cultural borders have come to define individual and group identities. Featured artists question the meaning of borders while investigating the experience of immigrating and the act of remembering.  Many of the featured artists seek to connect to their heritage, and uses art as a way of keeping family legacy relevant as they make their own way in a contemporary time and place. “Crossing Borders: Revisited” looks at the myriad of ways that we’ve come to this country, some calling it home and some continuously travelling between places.

The exhibition reexamines themes presented in ArtsWestchester’s 2015 exhibition of a similar title also supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. Nearly a decade later, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, a worsening climate crisis, and the start of the war in the Ukraine, global migration continues to be central in conversations across subject areas. Participating artist, Edwige Charlot, says about artwork and migration, “We’ve shifted our understanding of migration as a dynamic process and life cycle to discourse about social constructs – particularly the concept of borders. Exploring migration in an art context gives me an opportunity to interact with the inherent fluidity of movement, adaption, and imagination.”

“Crossing Borders” features a roster of artists not previously exhibited by ArtsWestchester, and three new works by Siona Benjamin, Anina Major, and Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong, each commissioned for the exhibition.

Anina Major (she/her) is a visual artist from the Bahamas and faculty at Bennington College who engages with ceramic materials as a tool to investigate notions of place and self, and to map migrations of traditions and identity. “Ostracons of the Atlantic” is a 25-foot-long installation that will occupy ArtsWestchester’s main floor and evoke the ocean’s floor. Accumulated pottery shards, racially charged ceramic souvenirs, and fragments of the artist’s woven work is a poetic expression of the fragmented histories inherited across the Black diaspora and embraces ruins as a signifier that time is not linear, but rather a space of continuous overlapping. The scale of the artwork in ArtsWestchester’s Grant Banking Room will create an unconventional monument that memorializes the fragility of the Black Experience.

Comprised of red Good Luck candies, Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong’s (she/her) Lucky Illumination chandelier references dim sum parlors and banquet halls that are slowly disappearing across post-pandemic Chinatowns. As an artist and a trained architect, Wing-Zi Wong’s practice explores how spaces are shared and how they change over time. As a self-identified transcultural artist, Siona Benjamin (she/her) creates painting and sculpture, often using blue-skinned characters to depict social issues including immigration. For “Crossing Borders,” Benjamin will create Parachute Lillith, a sculptural installation that reflects her background as being raised Jewish in India, which is a predominately Hindu and Muslim. The piece features a female figure referencing the Jewish Midrashic legend of Lilith, or the “First Eve” that appears to be parachuting into the gallery. Video projections and the parachute itself become symbols of her story of travel and mythology.

ArtsWestchester’s Chief Operating Officer, Kathleen Reckling says about Crossing Borders “While each artist in the exhibition has their own unique story, the themes expressed through their work transcend the individual and speak to a universal experience of remembering where we came from while navigating new territory and customs. Taken together, these works are a reminder that tradition and culture are not static. Rather they are ever evolving and ever adapting.”

Adam Chau, ArtsWestchester Exhibition Manager and Crossing Borders curator says: “The invention of the border has caused so much public discourse that we are in need of artists to shed light on how our borders drastically influence culture and livelihood. Crossing Borders is a beacon to showcase the complexities of 21^st Century migration through identity, memory, and place-making”

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS

Anina Major, Kiani Ferris, Natalia Arbelaez, Romina Gonzales, Siona Benjamin, Tomoko Abe, Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong, Miguel Braceli, Sin-Ying Ho, Edwige Charlot, Baseera Khan (courtesy Wave Pool Gallery), Salvador Jiménez-Flores, Simone Couto, Linda Sok, Andrew Kung.

Crossing Borders is on view at the ArtsWestchester Gallery at 31 Mamaroneck Ave., White Plains, NY from Oct. 14, 2023 – Jan 14, 2024. The public is invited to an Opening Reception on Sat., October 14, 6-8pm. Gallery hours: Wed.-Fri., 12-5pm; Sat, 12-6pm; Sun, 12-5pm.

Photos of artwork in the exhibit can be found here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1zsFU0MRL3wxcmems98CswfkYEpt1tFKA?usp=drive_link