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How the Arts Can Help Immigrant Communities Through Sanctuary

Ilana Novick, Hyperallergic, February 19, 2018

The weekend after Donald Trump was elected President, the Queens Museum held its regular family workshops, which, according to then-executive director and president Laura Raicovich, normally attract between 40 and 50 families. That November weekend, only three families showed up.

“People stopped leaving their homes, their lives had been disrupted,” Raicovich told a packed audience Thursday night at “Toward Sanctuary Summits,” a panel discussion convened by the New School’s Vera List Center for Arts and Politics on the role of cultural institutions as both figurative and actual sanctuaries for immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants, in the age of President Trump. Raicovich was joined by Tom Finkelpearl, the Commissioner of New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) — an early architect of IDNYC, the New York City identification card that serves as a form of identification for any New Yorker, regardless or their immigration status — and artist Jeanne van Heeswijk, one of the initiators of Philadelphia Assembled, an exhibition and series of public events that took place at the Philadelphia Museum of Art last fall.

The discussion’s co-moderator Carin Kuoni, the director and chief curator of the Vera List Center, began the conversation by emphasizing that “we are all newcomers, immigrants, we arrived here on land that belonged to someone else.” Fellow moderator Alexandra Délano Alonso, Associate Professor and Chair of Global Studies at the New School, discussed the history of the sanctuary movement in the context of the rights of undocumented immigrants. It was churches that first agreed to house undocumented immigrants, particularly those from Central America, in the 1970s and 1980s, not allowing immigration police to enter without a warrant, and declining to disclose any identifying information.