UpFall Art Station

The day President Trump announced the Muslim ban, I was screen printing. It wasn't difficult for me to channel my reaction into a print. I hand-cut tracing paper stencils, and whipped out my reaction like a six-shooter in the westerns my grandpa used to watch. Several hours later, I had a stack of finished, but wildly unpolished works, that contained more anger than meaning. Our lady liberty, a symbol of welcome to all, now seemed to me a rage-filled protestor, standing in front of the President's city, holding her torch aloft as if to say "I still welcome them."

 

A week later, I revisited the prints, inverting the statue to be correctly viewed on the screen, and while I was working, I remembered an article I'd read in the Smithsonian in 2015, where it made the point that the original sketches for Lady Liberty were of a northern African Egyptian woman. A muslim woman. This resonated with me, and I envisioned the Statue of Liberty with a headscarf superimposed on the surface.

 

At that point, I approached the Muslim Student Association at SXU and presented the work I had completed to date. I opened it up to criticism, as I don't want to speak for a group of people, certainly not without their feedback.

 

The feedback sessions went really well, and I incorporated the elements discussed into the third and final design. One of the key changes was the addition of a photo emulsion layer, modeled by Hiba, one of my friends from SXU. I named the piece #muslimban Liberty.

 

Since debuting the poster, I've been asked to share the process at several mosques in Chicagoland, and I plan to add two additional prints to the series, #muslimban Life and #muslimban The Pursuit of Happiness.