A visual collaboration with a letter written by a Honduran mother who is being kept at Karnes County Detention Center with her younger son after attempting to cross the border to be re-united with her family. Despite the traumatic and abusive conditions she faces at Karnes, she and her younger son reach across the US/Mexico Border to join hands with her older son who made it to Los Angeles. Their bodies are preserved with the light of a million stars, representing the millions of mothers, fathers, and children throughout history who attempt to cross the border into the US. Migrants risk enormous loss in the optimism of securing family and community in a new country. For as long as she lives, the Honduran mother, and millions others, reach for each other and form constellations in the night despite the borders, detainments, and abuse of the US. This image is a tribute to their undefeatable optimism and resilience. Read the original letter here. 

Commissioned for Culture Strike's Visions From The Inside Project

More from Jess X Chen: IG @jessxchen and www.jessxchen.com

Artists Against Police Violence is proud to present our first exhibit in collaboration with EMW Bookstore. In October of 2014, we launched a national call for submissions calling all artists to rise up against anti-Black police violence as an urgent response to the numerous protests erupting in Ferguson and across America. The pieces gathered from this call became ArtistsAgainstPoliceViolence.com – a diverse online resource featuring paintings, posters, zines, and various print and moving media collected to be used on the streets, the internet and beyond. Here is a collection of work that remembers, mourns, and celebrates Black people who were killed by police, and honors the trauma and resistance that follow.

The exhibit strives to recenter the political intentions behind #BlackLivesMatter - which recognizes that anti-Black state violence encompasses much more than police murders of Black men, but also poverty, incarceration, ableism, and gender oppression -- as well as all the Black women and gender non-conforming people who have always led the movement in Ferguson, in Baltimore, and throughout history. Here is a constellation work by primarily Black artists, artists of color, and queer and trans artists visualizing the movement today.

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A red-crowned crane representing East Asia, a kingfisher representing South Asia and a white-tailed tropic bird representing the Pacific Islands. Patterning their wings is a motif taken from signs that riddle highways along the US/Mexico Border, signifying the crossing of undocumented immigrants. The birds are soaring through a wire border strung with bodies that never made the journey to the other side. The crossing of every border, be it a body of water between America and Asia, or the fence that lines USA and Mexico, is a kind of transformation. This transformation comes at an incredible cost of leaving behind a homelands' languages, heritages and communities, often at the risk of life itself. Immigration is driven by an undefeatable optimism for better life – mother and child become a migratory bird as they triumph enormous struggles and distances to reclaim life and community in a new country. This installation is dedicated to Americas' invisibilized immigrant communities as their spirits continue to soar.

More from Jess X Chen: IG @jessxchen and www.jessxchen.com

[SEE FULL GALLERY]