I first encountered discarded leather at the warehouse where my family builds custom commercial furniture in Atlanta. Left over from a project, I found it stashed within plastic shopping bags, collecting sawdust in a corner where they had set it aside for me. The scraps revealed evidence of my family’s touch coming together with the animal: black sharpie marks and straight sliced edges cut for upholstery patterns combined with the organic curves of the hide. This set of uniquely disfigured shapes were the discarded remains of luxury—odd shapes of skin deemed useless for their commercial purpose. They speak of my family’s artistry and labor, of undocumentedness, and of the animalization that sets the stage for this country to criminalize, invisibilize, and disappear undocumented people for their profit.

For hide to become leather, the skin must be removed from the animal and defleshed. Once the surface is clean and white, a tanning process permanently alters the protein structure of the skin to make it more durable. The materiality of this leather and its process of becoming resonated with me as an extension of my family’s and my own experience with undocumentedness and the violent systems intended to break us, forcing the formation of our very own thick, durable skin.

I wanted to mend the skin, to envelop it with softness. I began crocheting around its edges and invited my mother to help me make the discarded leather precious again. The meditative aspect of counting interlocking loops to weave an extensive collection of patterns became an act of healing. Embracing the discarded leather with a network of care echoed the power of individual actions that build collective movements. I adopted a ritual of crocheting around leather while listening to Angela Davis’ Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. I was stunned as she outlined the connections between the apartheid wall in Palestine, the Mexico-US border wall, and the profit-driven imprisonment of undocumented people in the US. This realization enraged me, and I cemented that rage into crocheted text embedded in the porous border of FUCK YOUR WALLS, marking the first site in my work where my undocumentedness is the thread that intertwines my struggle with other movements for liberation.

Yehimi Cambrón is a multidisciplinary artist, activist, and public speaker born in Michoacán, México. She immigrated to Georgia at age seven, grew up undocumented in Atlanta, and has been a DACA recipient since 2013.

Cambrón’s work explores the multiplicity of the undocumented experience and its thread in the movement toward collective liberation. Through public art, she has served as a monument-maker asserting the humanity of immigrants in Atlanta, claiming barren walls to paint landmarks that belong to undocumented people. Her work institutes a space for immigrants within the South’s dominant racial binary. From her first mural on Buford Hwy to her mural at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium, she confronts the idea of who is worthy of public celebration in the home of the largest Confederate monument in the nation. She has worked to complicate the immigrant narrative through her solo exhibitions at the University of South Carolina’s Upstate Art Gallery (2022) and Oglethorpe University Museum of Art (2023), and has exhibited at MOCA GA, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, and Agnes Scott College’s Dalton Gallery.

Cambrón received a B.A. in Studio Art from Agnes Scott College (2014), fully funded by the Goizueta Foundation. In 2015, she became an educator and one of the first Teach for America DACAmented Corps Members placed in Georgia. Two years later, she returned to Cross Keys High School, her alma mater, to teach art. In 2019, Cambrón left the classroom to pursue art full-time. She is completing her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a recipient of the 2023 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.

Yehimi Cambrón is a DACAmented artist, activist, public speaker and entrepreneur born in San Antonio Villalongín, a small town in Michoacán, México. She became undocumented at seven years old when she immigrated to Atlanta, where she was raised. Cambrón’s work elevates the stories of immigrants, celebrates their humanity, and has a special focus on the experiences of Undocumented Americans. She has painted landmark murals in Atlanta that unapologetically assert the presence of immigrants, depict the intersectionality, diversity, and complexity of their stories, and challenge the white male-centered history of who is worthy of a public, monumental celebration. She is currently partnering with El Refugio to shed light on the stories of those who are being harmed by the Stewart Detention Center, a for-profit immigration detention center located in Lumpkin, Georgia. This public art project will educate and call the public to action to advocate for the closing of the immigration detention centers in Georgia.

As a daughter of a Srilankan Tamil refugee, I have not experienced the horrors of displacement and assimilation through direct means but through the way I was raised. This trauma being passed onto me through internalized means has left my body dually facing present Western ideology and past colonial terror’s subjugating efforts. Both push the notion of my body being an object, a vessel, only fit for labor. Playing on this notion of the vessel, I practice the craft of Palmyra basketry frequented by Tamil farmers and integrate leather sourced from Cambrón Álvarez’s family with jute to place a functional object into dysfunction.

Anika Jeyaranjan (b. 2001) is an Indian-Srilankan artist born in New Jersey and based in Chicago, IL. She incorporates fiber techniques into her multimedia sculptures and installations. Inspired by how her body has reacted to its held generational trauma, Jeyaranjan creates artwork focused on bodily agency. She questions pre-existing western notions of bodily boundaries through distorting objects and environments that have been in contact with her own body. Jeyaranjan earned her BFA at the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) where she also received the Honors Tuition scholarship. She has been featured in exhibitions at SAIC, Probe Gallery, Parlour and Ramp, Rostrum 13, and more.

Doykeit, a Yiddish word that translates to “hereness,” is a political concept referencing diasporism and the call for Jews to fight for collective liberation wherever they are. The term comes from the Jewish Labor Bund, a Socialist organization founded in Vilna, Poland at the turn of the 20th century, in part known for their opposition to nationalism and the burgeoning Zionist movement. Doykeit resonates today for many Ashkenazi Jews in the diaspora looking to contextualize their activism within a larger history of solidarity politics.

This textile tells a material story of doykeit, of interconnectedness and repair. The weft is made of 2-ply handspun yarn constructed of raw wool from a friend of a friend’s farm in my home state of California twisted with raw wool from a friend of a friend’s farm in the Palestinian city of Tubas in the West Bank. And this wool is integrated with discarded upholstery leather from the family of a friend in Atlanta. These materials are woven together as a physical testament to how our strength in the struggle for freedom is reinforced by honoring the reality of our interconnectedness.

Based in Chicago, Adrienne Weiss (she/they) b. 1983 is a multidisciplinary fiber artist and educator whose practice is rooted in the understanding that corporeal awareness, research, ritual, dreams, activism, and art-making are interdependent phenomena that work together in service of personal and collective liberation. After many years as a self taught artist, Adrienne is now an M.F.A. candidate in Fiber and Material Studies and a recipient of the Pritzker Fellowship at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She got her B.A. in Art History and American Studies at UC Berkeley in 2005 and was a Bay Area public school educator for 15 years.

In 2022 she had a solo exhibition at Applied Contemporary Craft Gallery in Oakland, CA, the gallery of her mentor, Mary Catherine Bassett. She has also participated in a handful of group and juried shows including ARC Gallery and Women Made Gallery in Chicago.

Adrienne’s work is a sensual and earth-facing exploration of the ecological realities of identity, embodiment, and direct experience. She works primarily with filamentous materials and weaving techniques. She is interested in the life of intersecting lines, the metaphors they conjure, and finding a balance between manipulating them and letting them move in their own mystical ways. Adrienne utilizes the visual language of dreams, visions, lineage, and symbols to create a woven world of talismanic art.

“Hand and Labour” portrays a cross-stitched, photorealistic image of my father’s hand, each stitch a tribute to his brown skin tone, interwoven with the rich colors and textures of leather. As these threads suture the leather pieces together, their scent stirs deep memories within me.

I was born in León, Guanajuato, Mexico—the world’s shoe capital. One of my earliest memories is of my mother, grandmother, two older brothers, and three cousins sitting in a circle, laboring over leather pieces, with black trash bags filled with well-crafted shoes ready to take back to the factory. I would plead to join them, but they said I was “too small to work.” It was through their hands, alongside my father’s work in the United States, that we continued forward, holding onto the hope of one day being reunited.

Gloria Martinez-Granados is a Phoenix, Arizona-based artist. Born in Guanajuato, Mexico, she migrated to the United States of America with her family at 8 years old. Gloria is an interdisciplinary artist creating with indigenous practices, adding a contemporary approach by including printmaking, assemblage, installation and performance to the more traditional arts of beadwork and weaving. Through this process, she develops themes around identity, dreams, place, home, and land. This merges with her experience growing up undocumented in the United States and the legal limbo she lives day to day as a DACAmented person.

She is a former member of the all-women artist collective The Phoenix Fridas. In 2019 she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Printmaking from Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. In 2022 Gloria received the Sally and Richard Lehmann Emerging Artists Awards, and her work is currently exhibited at Phoenix Art Museum as part of “The Collection: 1960 - Now.”

My applied creative practice has been intuitively rooted in an exploration of collective memory and identity with a curiosity for how the histories of the Black Diaspora are preserved and reproduced. I use pattern-making as a metaphor for the repetition of knowledge and traditions continually passed down through generations. Through themes of transformation, authenticity, and cultural identity, I conceptualize safe spaces as a necessary strategy for passing on intergenerational imagery, narratives, and traditions for a people whose histories are constantly erased, misrepresented, and misinterpreted.

Through the reinterpretation of family archives as well as references to Black popular culture archives, my work aims to subvert westernized notions around cultural and material value. I transform and reconstruct both found and passed down familial objects and textiles into contemporary cultural artifacts that serve as vessels chronicling personal or collective experiences. Working across sculpture, installation, performance, and fiber practices, my work builds a visual language through iterations of historically significant symbols and motifs found across the Diaspora and personal family textiles.

At its core, my practice is a collaboration with both past and future generations, it is the blending of the ancestral with the contemporary and the spiritual with the physical.

Merryn Omotayo Alaka (b. 1997, Indianapolis, Indiana) is a Nigerian and American artist who holds a BFA in printmaking from Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ. Alaka’s work spans from sculptural works, textiles, to jewelry design and explores realities and identities across the Black Diaspora and the Black female body. Her works often draw references from West African textiles, Yoruba beaded sculptures and forms of adornment. She uses culturally and historically significant materials such as hair, jewelry, beads, and textiles to do so. Alaka uses this range of materials to address subjective cultural and racial perspectives.

Omotayo Alaka has exhibited at institutions including the Tucson Museum of Art, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and Mesa Contemporary Arts Center. Omotayo Alaka is the recipient of the 2022 Lehman Emerging Artist Grant from the Phoenix Art Museum. Merryn Omotayo Alaka currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois pursuing her MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work is represented by Lisa Sette Gallery, in Phoenix Arizona.

“Cárgame en tu Espalda” was created through the idea of honoring and adorning our bodies. Having been directly impacted by the effects of displacement, assimilation, immigration, racism, and more informs my immigrant perspective. When my mom, brother, and I crossed the border into Arizona, I was reminded of the immigrants who helped carry me when my 4-year-old legs could not keep up.

Growing up, I remember hearing numerous racial stereotypes about Mexicans – a lot of people seemed to believe that being Mexican makes you hardworking. While I do not disagree that Mexican immigrants are hardworking, I also do not disagree that this country and many others were built on the backs of immigrants.

“Cárgame en tu Espalda” (‘Carry me on your back’ in English) is a homage to the weight immigrants carry for simply existing. This textile was created through the process of breaking down the anatomy of a human spine. The leather piece stitched along the beadwork is 26” long – the average length of a human spine. The beadwork pattern was inspired by my observations of the molecular structure of two main components found in blood: Hemoglobin and Oxygen. I wanted to honor and adorn our spines, which carry so much weight and endure so much hardship. Regardless of race, ethnicity, immigration status, socioeconomic status, or anything else in between, we all bleed the same.

Beadwork has become an intentional act of resistance for me, and the process has been far more rewarding than I could have ever imagined. The magic of this indigenous practice has allowed me to reconnect with parts of me that I thought I had lost, and other parts which I never knew existed. Beadwork is an act of resistance.

Lucero “Pato” Muñoz Vázquez (She/her) (b. 1998) is an indigenous Mexican artist nomadically based in the USA and born in Progreso de Obregon, Hidalgo, Mexico. At the age of 4, she became an undocumented immigrant along with her mother, father, and older brother. They immigrated to the Deep South.

Pato’s work explores the nuances of being a queer DACAmented immigrant, having grown up in Gwinnett County, Georgia (aka the deep south). With her most recent work, after having a pivotal homecoming to her hometown in Mexico, she began exploring beadwork through a fusion of indigenous and contemporary practices. Through different techniques her work represents resistance towards the violent lingering effects of colonialism. She challenges the conventional notions of assimilation by disrupting the norm she was taught to follow out of fear of being undocumented, immigrant, and brown. Pato has explored the creation process through acrylic painting, mosaic making, muralism/street art, beading, digital illustration, and mixed media work. She enjoys exploring themes centered around mental health, the human form, and cultural fusion. She values art as a means to connect with people and build community while encouraging safe spaces of open dialogues through artistic experience.

Growing up I would attend powwows with my sister and grandma. We would walk around shopping for new jewelry, eat fry bread and watch the dancers. Back then, I found myself drawn to the highly embellished outfits that these powwow dancers would wear. This interest and fascination has continued to this day. These dancers, specifically the fancy shawl, have highly influenced my art practice and how I think about making. Using beads, canvas, fringe and other forms of decoration I create textile work that celebrates these memories with my grandmother as well as my rich cultural heritage.

Chelsea Bighorn (b.1989) was born and raised in Tempe, Arizona, and is Lakota, Dakota and Shoshone -Paiute. Bighorn’s work is the result of her combining traditional Native American design with elements from her Irish American heritage. Using this process, she tells her personal history through her art. Bighorn has shown her work at the Museum of Contemporary Native Art, SITE Santa Fe, Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, and The Center for Native Futures in Chicago, IL. She graduated from The Institute of American Indian Arts in 2021 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Arts. Bighorn received her Master of Fine Arts in Fiber and Material Studies from School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 2024. She currently resides in Chicago, IL where she is an artist in residence with Chicago Artist Coalition.

A selection of poems by Refaat Alareer and Khaliifa ibn Raymond Daniel AKA Marcellus Williams is a soft book of etched leather pages I made with the aid of a laser cutter, and adorned with Palestinian tatreez. Inspired continually by the print ephemera that has arisen out of this moment, I came across Alareer’s words, as a famous Palestinian poet, around the time of his devastating murder in December of 2023; his poem is often excerpted by the intifada in times of hardship: If I must die, you must live to tell my story.

Then, in September of this year- a very difficult newsweek highlighted the entanglement between Israel-U.S. fascism, both in the Palestinian genocide and stateside: the pager and walkie-talkie explosions in Lebanon, the $2.90 NY subway shooting, Matt Nelson’s self-immolation, and the wrongful execution of Marcellus “Khaliifa” Williams by the state of Missouri. In Brother Khaliifa’s time as a wrongly incarcerated individual for 24 years, he began following Islam, became an imam, and served as a mentor for his peers; he also wrote poems, having written The perplexing smiles of the children of Palestine, highlighting their plight, while in his own situation. His last poem while on death row, At last, another’s heartbeat, and his last written words, “All praise be to Allah in every situation!!!” marks his detachment from and empathy to this dunya - mortal life, and this ummah - Muslims in the world.

I regard all of this stimulus and response as “imperial debris.” How much more violence can and will occur before we understand that we are not only approaching the downfall but are deep in it? There is no doubt that the forced, non-consensual activities within an inescapable imperialist, capitalist system - policing, censorship, state-sponsored violence - make us feel hopeless, directionless, and angry without accessible, meaningful reprieve. My goals for this poem book and in my practice revolve around this question: How might I be able to spiritually engage an audience, to create self awareness and consideration amongst severely fractured communities, big and small?

Saba Maheen (b.1997 Lawrenceville, GA) is a female, queer, Muslim, Bengali-American, multimodal maker and thinker working with image, reproduction, and participation. Utilizing multi-medic forms, there is a porosity in the goals of her work: In the wake of the viral-ized Palestinian genocide, Maheen urges her audience to return to a radical, collective humanity for one another, and to understand “here and there-ness” of inter solidarity liberation. More specifically, analyzing the diminishing rate of attention in response to short-form media, she believes it is imperative to combat the flattening, desensitizing effect that social media has beyond the screen. She considers portals that break down the dichotomy between print-digital, time-space, and human-computer. Her work tends toward repetition, multiples, editions, versions, iterations, units, modules, and collections, and is fabricated often through the most accessible and efficient means. What objects and systems can we influence to prevent a speculatively dark future?

Saba Maheen received a B.A. in Studio Art, Human Centered Design and Arabic Language from Dartmouth College (2020). Shooting internationally as a film photographer in the years following the pandemic, she is now completing her MFA in Design at Mason Gross School of Art at Rutgers University.