2018 Real People. Real Lives. exhibit opens at Queens Museum
Words and photos by Anna Tyor
On February 17 at Queens Museum, New Women New Yorkers launched the second iteration of its Real People. Real Lives: Women Immigrants of New York photo exhibit. It was a crowded scene, as intrigued New Yorkers from around the city packed into the second-floor gallery space to see the work of photographer-filmmaker Dru Blumensheid in collaboration with NWNY.
Featuring 16 immigrant women who’ve moved to New York from around the world, the series was shot by Blumensheid last summer in eight locations around the city. In the photos, women strike defiant poses under the Brooklyn Bridge in Dumbo or with street art in Chinatown and the Lower East Side. Each portrait depicts a fierce confidence in tandem with an honest vulnerability that comes with uprooting your life and moving to a new country.
Visitors at the exhibit were offered a delicious light meal of mixed Iraqi and Nepali flavors from Eat Offbeat, prepared by refugees recently resettled in New York. A high point of the day came when two women featured in the exhibit, Montserrat, from Chile, and Sandra, from Colombia, as well as NWNY founder and director Arielle Kandel gave powerful speeches about the experience and what it has meant to them, leaving some people in the crowd wiping away tears.
The guests were also dazzled by the large-scale interactive mural in the back of the exhibit. They were given pens to write messages of hope, frustration, or whatever they felt directly on the mural. Some of the notes such as “uplift each other always” and “we support you” seemed inspired by the political implications of the subject of immigration.
Many of the guests heard about the exhibit through friends or online, and made the journey to Queens in support of immigrants around the country. When asked why it is important to support immigrant women, one visitor, Bernard from Brazil, said that the “status of the immigrant has been challenged” by the current political climate in the United States.
The women featured in the photographs were thrilled by the support at the museum and felt that the photo shoot experience had been extremely empowering. Gladys, who is from Indonesia and is featured in the exhibit, smiled from ear to ear as she helped run the pop-up shop. She learned about the NWNY LEAD program a couple years ago through a flyer at the library. After taking the six-week leadership and employment training course, not only did she feel better equipped to enter the job market, but she had also met new friends and a strong network of female immigrants, she said.
Arielle Kandel founded NWNY because, “each immigrant story is a combination of determination, hope, and challenges. It is more important than ever to share our stories; our stories as immigrants, our stories as women, stories through which we can understand better, and celebrate the diversity and commonality of human experience.”
NWNY empowers young immigrant women in New York to contribute to the city, offering a safe space and learning environment so that they can flourish. In turn, the photographs in Real People. Real Lives. aim to tell the unique stories of these women as they work to lay roots and grow in New York.
Real People. Real Lives. Women Immigrants of New York will be on display at Queens Museum until March 18, 2018. Click here for more information.
