The Art of Migration exhibition open

The library’s Janice Hardison Faulkner Gallery is currently hosting The Art of Migration, featuring the photography of Sally Jacobs and video performance installations by Susan Harbage Page, as well as video drone footage by Jason De’ Leon, that show belongings left behind by migrants while crossing the Sonoran Desert at the Arizona–Mexico border.

Jacobs’ series of close-up photographs of migrant farmworkers was taken within a 50-mile radius of Greenville, NC. Each portrait gives the viewer a sense of the pride, commitment, hard work and risk that comes with farm labor that provides us all with food on our tables. Migrant farm labor involves relinquishing part of one’s individual identity to become a member of a cohesive identity: farmworker. Although the workers identify as “farmworkers,” their identity with place, family connection and community support is sacrificed while they live in isolation in labor camps.

Susan Harbage Page explores immigration through video performance artworks entitled Sewn Borders and Erasing Borders. Page literally sews politics into geography in her performance. She animates, humanizes and makes physical the ever-evolving spaces of international borders through the labor-based action of sewing. In addition, Erasing Borders asks audiences to consider how territories are made and divided through bordering practices put in place by state powers, colonialism and citizenship.

This is exhibit is in conjunction with the Hostile Terrain 94 exhibition that is on view on the first floor of the library.

For more information, contact Charlotte Fitz Daniels at Fitzdanielsc16@ecu.edu