In September of 2024, eight current and former students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) visited the Newberry to see and learn about the items on display in Making an Impression: Immigrant Printing in Chicago. In response, each student created their own broadside designs to share with exhibition visitors. The artist's statement below accompanies their finished broadside and explains the artist's style, approach, and intentions.
As a Mexican-American woman, the intersectionality of my identity plants an inherent sense of self that helps me navigate all of my environments. It empathetically drives my perceptions and conversations, and I’ve come to learn that not everyone has or cares to listen to their intersectional voice. As immigrant families, we have to carve out our own place within new environments. To that, there’s humor and an inherent sense of self. There are traits and concepts we must observe, absorb, and critique. They let us pick apart even the smallest of our environments and our relationship to them. It’s confusing, ambiguous, clarifying, and interesting all at once. With my project, I aim to place emphasis on the complexity of it all by visualizing the process of analyzing and realizing the relationship between us and our environment.