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28 City Tech Immigrant Students Mount Tenement Museum Exhibition
One of the City Tech ESOL student collages
A new Lower East Side Tenement Museum exhibition titled “Coming Home” has given 28 New York City College of Technology immigrant students an opportunity to create and display art that reflects their immigrant experience.
The exhibition, part of the museum's Shared Journeys program, was conceived by Lower East Side artist and More Gardens! Coalition co-founder Aresh Javadi. The museum worked with City Tech Adult Learning Center English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) instructors Jay Klokker and Doug Montgomery to enlist the assistance of a group of their students in mounting the exhibit. The students created collages that featured photographs of and hand-written narratives about objects and people that were especially precious to them and that had helped bridge the gap between their new home and those they left behind.
“The resulting work fills four street-side windows, featuring objects, maps, flags and stories from countries including Mexico, Haiti and Vietnam,” writes Laura Silver in the January 3, 2006, edition of City Limits. “Two bicycle wheels joined by a strip of latex form an oval-shaped frame that functions like a rotating clothesline for posters and foot-high pictures of the students who created them.”
According to Klokker and Montgomery, creating the collages and staging the exhibition helped their students enhance their English language skills as well as their self-confidence. Yet, some of the students, who range in age from 21 to 70, were reluctant to participate at first. “They mainly saw themselves as newcomers to a new land,” says Klokker, “struggling to master a new language and adjust to a new culture. They did not see themselves as artists or as deserving of having their work displayed in a museum.”
The participating City Tech ESOL students
To reassure the hesitant students, their instructors repeatedly reminded them that the exhibit was not about art or artistic talent. It was about sharing memories of the deeply meaningful aspects of a journey that had taken them from one land to another in search of new horizons. It was a chance to help enrich the understanding of others who had never made such a journey.
But one student from Japan, 30-year-old Kota, who currently lives in Fort Greene/ Brooklyn, had no problem participating. “The project was a very exciting thing for me because I have never had art experience. I went to the welding place and helped Aresh Javadi and the welder put together the structure that displays the collages. The experience was a lot of fun.”
Rosa, a 41-year-old resident of Coney Island who hails from Ecuador, was also pleased to take part in the project, but for an entirely different reason. “Sometimes I prefer not to remember the past, but when I worked on the project, I felt happy because I liked remembering my early years and my aunt who shared a lot of time with me.”
For Woodhaven/Queens resident Leocadio, a 36-yearold student from the Dominican Republic, “Working on the project was wonderful. It brought me memories about my mother, my country, my neighborhood, family and friends.”
A fourth student named Juan, a 45-year-old resident of Bedford-Stuyvesant/Brooklyn from Mexico, found the project especially rewarding because it enabled him to “learn about the Tenement Museum and how people lived 100 years ago when life was more difficult.”
The street-windows exhibit is on display at 97 Orchard Street in Manhattan through June 14 and can be viewed even when the Tenement Museum is closed. The Tenement Museum is routinely visited by City Tech ESOL students as part of their larger learning experience, and future collaborations between the College and the museum's Education Department are anticipated.
02/24/06
Photos by Michele Forsten
