'We cannot let this issue go': the artists taking a stand against child separation

In June last year, a group of volunteer lawyers, doctors, and mental health experts visited a US Customs and Border Patrol facility in Clint, Texas, which held migrant children separated from their families at the border. Their task was to record the accounts of the unaccompanied minors, some as young as toddlers, in government custody to assure the US was not in violation of the Flores agreement, a 1997 legal settlement that requires the federal government to provide minimum basic levels of care to detained migrants under 18. The conditions the volunteers witnessed there – children sleeping on concrete floors, toddlers in stained clothing denied access to showers, sleeping mats next to filthy open toilets, children chilled to the point of illness – so appalled them that they filed a lawsuit against the federal government, and told their stories publicly.

Their findings, published by Project Amplify, compiled in a 103-page court document of declarations from over 60 physicians, attorneys and detained children, are by turns heart-wrenching (“I have not been told how long I have to stay here,” says a five-year-old from Honduras. “I am frightened, scared, and sad”) and chillingly detached (“There are many sick children here. They take them away. We do not know where the sick children go.”) They ignited a fresh round of national outrage over the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy designed to create a backlog and drive political support for the president’s hardline policies, leading to what experts have called a manufactured crisis at the border. The Flores accounts also inspired an art project and call to action that seeks to direct attention, harness financial resources, and connect art institutions and activist groups to address the injustice.

The project, DYKWTCA (Do You Know Where The Children Are?), brings together over 100 works from over 100 artists based on the Flores accounts from June 2019. The collection will be displayed as the exhibition When We First Arrived … at The Corner at Whitman-Walker in Washington until March, at which point the project morphs from political art to direct fundraising. Each work will be sold anonymously and randomly for $500; the proceeds and matching donations from partner organizations will go to organizations working on the front lines of the border crisis: Safe Passage Project with Terra Firma, Innovation Law Lab, and Team Brownsville.

The multi-pronged call to action – part collaborative art project, part fundraising effort, part preserver of the historical record of America’s treatment of its most vulnerable – is the brainchild of New York-based artists and activitsts Mary Ellen Carroll and Lucas Michael. Both were activated by the news this summer of the deplorable conditions at the border. “It was illegal, it was inhumane, and it’s ongoing,” Carroll told the Guardian. She felt agitated, with an acute sense of urgency. The time to act is now, she thought. Michael remembered Carroll telling him: “If you can do something, you have to do something.” But what, as artists, could they do? How could they raise awareness and make a direct impact?

They turned to their wide network of colleagues and friends from the art world, and to the words of the children themselves. Carroll and Michael transcribed all 60-plus accounts into a Google spreadsheet shared with 100-plus artists, whose assignment was to create a work of art inspired by a word, a sentence, a testimony, or the whole collection. The works, whose only specifications were a size requirement (in order to fit in their “shipping and processing” center, AKA Carroll’s Manhattan apartment), help to “create a material history for this moment,” said Carroll. The goal is to preserve the injustice’s memory in the country’s art history. “We cannot let this issue go, to let it get swept under the rug,” said Michael.

The resulting pieces take a variety of forms: there’s Spencer Ostrander’s stark photo of the Clint detention center, all beige right angles and a barbed-wire fence and Ricci Albenda’s painted meditation of one of the most common words from the recollections: “Cold.” Jack Early’s amalgamation warps the faces of popular children’s mascots – the Kool-Aid man, Yogi Bear, Tony Tiger – into grotesque frowns. Mary Lum’s work splinters the words of one account – “one of the guards came in yesterday afternoon and asked how many stripes were on the flag of the United States. We tried to guess but when we we were wrong he slammed the door” – into mangled, disorienting stripes. And a lice comb by Molly Gochman is branded on one side with a chilling memory: “He said we had 10 minutes to look for the combs, and if we could not find them, we were going to be without beds and without covers. He gave us 10 minutes. All of us were panicked looking for the combs.” The other side has just one word: “Complexion.”

Central to the project, according to Carroll and Michael, is not to aestheticize the atrocities but instead create a physical record which generates direct change through financial support. “We wanted that call to action to really have a direct impact on the children,” said Carroll. “The discussion we go back to is: how is it going to have the most impact on the kids?” Each work is thus attached to one account, which is registered publicly through the digital art registry Artory, in collaboration with the Winston Art Group. The linking of accounts with artwork is, according to Michael, “a way of amplifying the children’s voices and to make them present, not just an abstract.” The proceeds from the initial sales return to organizations working in detention facilities along the border. If the works are sold for a higher price within five years, the proceeds will be split equally between the seller, the artist, and one of the partner organizations.

The exhibition at The Corner in Washington marks the third arm of the project: awareness and discussion; the show is accompanied by events such as a panel on the Flores regulations with leading immigration, medical and mental health experts and a talk on the economics of immigration. “There’s a long history of the question of can art be political?” said Ruth Noack, the exhibition’s curator. That conversation is long – as old as modernism, at least – and historically fraught, but “generally, I would say that art cannot be directly political,” said Noack. “It can only be indirectly political, in the way that it would be hubris to claim that an artwork can change the world.”

She went on: “However, I think in cases such as this, all this doesn’t matter. The art discourse doesn’t matter. What matters is that many of the works are quite effective in transporting a message that is really necessary to be heard.”

The collaborative, financial value-capped project is ultimately “not very art world-like,” said Noack. “It’s not about narcissism, it’s not about showing how political you are, it’s really about doing something that can make a little bit of a change, and maybe that’s all we can do. But it’s also what we must do.”