Art Build for the Movement for Immigrant Justice and an End to ICE Violence – Karen Hu, MFA Printmaking ’27

For the past weeks, I have been working with Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistance (AMOR), an organization located in Providence, Rhode Island. AMOR’s mission is to root out state violence, empowering people impacted by detention, deportation, police violence, and state sponsored abuse. AMOR is a community organization that advocates for the targeted members of our communities and creates safe, healing, accessible, and empowering community spaces. Working closely with Cata, the Executive Director at AMOR, I had been working on developing an art build and making print materials that could support AMOR’s future art builds and movement. 

The intention of the art build was to create a space for making our shared vision together through an evening making art with neighbors, volunteers, and friends in the movement for immigrant justice and freedom from state violence. We created a banner and prints that would be shared to strengthen the voice of our movement in protests, actions, and events. The banner was a large banner, and many hands made it possible to paint within a couple hours!

Before the event, I drew out the banner and mixed the inks. It was really important to honor the previous banner which had been lost due to all the times it switched hands between rallies, events, and more. Organizers at AMOR and I had many conversations about the colors, font sizes, and the details of the figures that made the most sense for the intention that the banner would be used for. It was both challenging and insightful to find the balance in approachable aesthetic and principled design choices to further the movement.

This experience so far has really imbued in me a respect for the long-term planning and vision of organizations fighting for immigrants justice. The planning of an event does not occur just for the single event, as folks are always considering how the event might also speak to the larger movement nationally/internationally or contribute to the movement in the coming months and years. The experience learning from AMOR has given me clarity on the fact that systematic social change does not happen without systematically building capacity for the ongoing movement.