UTICA, New York — A 2022 New York Times article by Susan Hartman, “How Refugees Transformed a Dying Rust Belt Town,” particulars how Utica, New York, was reinvigorated when it grew to become the brand new residence of refugees escaping battle and persecution in nations together with Bosnia, Myanmar, and Somalia. The US Census Bureau estimates that about 22% of Utica’s 64,000 inhabitants had been born outdoors the US. This vital immigrant inhabitants impressed the exhibition Between Worlds: Stories of Artists and Migrations, on view on the Munson by May 5.
Between Worlds spans a interval from the cusp of World War II to at the moment, and presents works that deal with migration, displacement, residence, and folks’s geographic and metaphoric actions. While items like Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s portray “Empty Town in the Desert” (1943) and Frederick Sommer’s {photograph} “Arizona Landscape” (1945) mirror the strangeness of transferring abroad and encountering the American West for the primary time, different works converse to migrations throughout the United States.
Romare Bearden’s lithograph “Before the Whistle” (1973) depicts an African American couple readying for work, exemplifying those that moved from the Jim Crow-era South to the industrialized North through the Great Migration. Phil Young’s large-scale acrylic and sand portray “Glen Canyon Desecrations No. 3” (1990) protests the event affecting Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, which crosses the Arizona-Utah border — an space historically inhabited by and necessary to many Indigenous Americans. Shaunté Gates’ dynamic mixed-media composition “There’s No Place Like Home” (2021) displays ambivalent reminiscences of friendships and trauma skilled within the neighborhood the place the artist grew up.
Supplementing the artworks, a QR code within the gallery leads guests to an internet site that hosts audio tales of journey, survival, adaptation, and id by folks at the moment residing in Central New York whose households had been displaced, together with members of the Haudenosaunee Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy.
Several big-name European-born modernists like Louise Bourgeois, Marcel Duchamp, and Willem de Kooning are additionally included within the exhibition. In a time when the phrase “immigrant” is commonly used as a slur in sociopolitical discourse to describe folks of shade from the Global South in search of sanctuary in North America and Western Europe, these White 20th century artists’ experiences could seem irrelevant to present occasions — and a few of their works on this present do ostensibly have little to do with its theme. It’s necessary, nevertheless, to recall the worldwide turbulence of the early to mid-twentieth century, a interval marked by the unfold of Naziism throughout Europe, the Armenian Genocide, and the rise of strongman dictators like Mussolini, Franco, and Stalin. Many of those artists’ tales and works stay as related at the moment as they had been almost a century in the past.
Between Worlds: Stories of Artists and Migration is on view on the Munson Museum (310 Genesee Street, Utica) by May 5. The exhibition was curated by Mary Murray and was created by a multi-year collaboration between the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, Connecticut; and the Munson, Utica, New York.
