WHEN: Opening Event Saturday, December 14, 2024 Opening from 6 - 10 p.m. Free and Open to the Public
WHERE: ArteFuturo Productions Torres-Tama Studio 1329 Saint Roch Avenue
Artist’s Talk @ 8pm On Saturday, December 14, 2024, the artist will offer a talk on the series that has been in development for ten years from 2010 to 2019.
Wine will be served to the public in attendance.
Award-winning interdisciplinary artist José Torres-Tama is exhibiting a new series of Photos & Photo Assemblages / Retablos titled Immigrants & Post-Katrina Rebirth @ 20, in conjunction with PhotoNOLA 2024.
For a decade from 2010 to 2019, I have focused my digital lens on “documenting the undocumented” Latin American immigrants and their families, who have made vital contributions to the epic rebirth of New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina (2005) & post-Ida (2021).
My aim is to chronicle the lives of immigrants and raise them to heroic heights for the city’s rebirth. The photos I have captured have also inspired a variety of large works-on-paper. --JTT
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina (2005) and recent Hurricane Ida (2001), it was Latin American immigrant workers, who were on construction sites and rooftops across New Orleans repairing the many damaged churches, schools, houses, and official buildings. As an Ecuadorian-born immigrant himself, Torres-Tama has been documenting their heroic rebuilding efforts and chronicling the public protests of the many “undocumented" immigrants facing labor abuses, wage theft, and brutal deportations because of the tenuous status of many.
Torres-Tama is opening his home art studio to exhibit a selection of this series and the large works-on-paper that these many photos have inspired.
ArteFuturo Productions Torres-Tama Studio 1329 Saint Roch Avenue, (three blocks off St. Claude in the heart of the alternative arts district).
Exhibit opens on Sat, Deecember 14, 2024 from 6-10pm. Other times by appointment only, call 504.232.2968.
Immigrant workers have given their blood, labor, and love to the resurrection of this port city, and this photo documentation series captures their "live art" street protests and collective acts of civil disobedience to expose rampant human rights violations by NOPD, wage theft by ruthless contractors, and brutal deportations by local ICE Agents.
Some images are developed into mixed media Photo Assemblages or Retablos created from re-purposed wooden drawers found on the streets after Hurricane Katrina.
The artist has created these mini altars or "retablos" with these photo assemblages to honor the valiant and heroic work of the Latin American immigrant reconstruction workers and their US-born children, who have been witnesses to the persecution of their undocumented parents.
A moving second-hand clock is placed at various points of each photo image, representing the beating heart of immigrants woorking in the shadows.
Latin American immigrants in New Orleans face a clear and present danger with a new administration that has called for mass deportations. For years, they have experienced untold traumas with a hostile White House administration that has again declared them "criminals of the state."