Program Description
Event Details
Everyone is invited to this gallery reception hosted by the Folklife Center at Crandall Public Library for the exhibition, Painting the Border: A Child's Voice, on view on the second floor between the Teen Center and the Friends Gallery through December 31, 2024.
This exhibition began as a project to offer a day of fun in a safe space to the youngest MPP recipients in Ciudad Juarez. The project was a collaboration effort initiated by Diana Barnes, Skidmore College Senior Teaching Professor, and organized in Juarez by World Organization for Peace representative and children's author Lucero de Alva. El Paso muralist Cimi Alvarado worked with the young painters as well, teaching them about storytelling through art, and guiding themn to paint their own stories.
The day of fun was held on August 21, 2019, months after the MPP was initiated, and less than three weeks after a gunman opened fire in an El Paso Walmart, targeting Mexican shoppers and killing 23 people, including children. Some of the Juarez migrant children were aware of the deadly attack when they painted their fears of the violence that surrounded them.
The young artists, ages 4 to 18, were among the more thanb 71,000 asylum seekers stranded in Mexico border cities between January 2019 and January 2021, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. They were mainly from Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.