On Thursdays, YI Artists worked with 2022 Whitney Biennial artist Jonathan Berger. We were encouraged to interview the most important person in our life. We then created an original alphabet that served collectively as an abstract portrait of this person. Using the letters, we produced original text-based artworks drawing on excerpts from our interviews, the fonts we created, and class discussions exploring the project’s themes.
The Moon
This piece represents the hardships an illegal immigrant has to overcome to reach their dream in America. I felt the urge to sympathize with him in some way since the first time I heard his story about how his family had to risk everything to move to America, from his relationships with his closest friends and family to his sister’s life. I longed to capture the complexity of the burdensome emotions he conveyed to me through an acrylic painting of a landscape in Albania and the phrase “Maybe it is not a dream.”
