The Institute for Diversity in the Arts is proud and honored to welcome Visiting Artist Favianna Rodriguez to teach "Show Me Your Papers: Immigration, Youth, Printmaking & Storytelling For Social Justice" in the spring quarter of 2012. Her course will explore how socially-engaged printmaking and poster art can help expand the immigration debate. In particular, Favianna will be working with Stanford IDA students and DREAM Act students to create art that captures the richness and humanity of young immigrant stories. She plans to exhibit the art that is created around the Bay Area with public panel discussions after the class is complete.

Favianna says, "I believe strongly that cultural change leads to political change. Through this work, I want to ignite conversations around the human side of the immigration debate and the potential long-term psychological and economic costs to the state and the nation of an undereducated, alienated generation."

She adds, "The high toll on Latino and Asian communities in particular has inspired a new movement of community and cultural organizers - undocumented youth known as DREAMers who declare that they are 'Undocumented and Unafraid,' and who courageously are taking on the term 'illegal.'  Poster art, printmaking, and theater via online videos, has been central in moving public opinion."

The class will be held on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 1:05pm at the Art Studio. While she is here, she will be hosting a number of public events with artists such as Arizona filmmaker Jason Aragón, whose film "Under Arpaio" and his documentation of the student movement to save Tucson's Mexican American has been seen throughout the nation; famed printmaker and historian Lincoln Cushing; the Oakland printmaking collective Dignidad Rebelde; artist Martin Mizzoura of Cannonball Press; and others.

She will be giving a public talk on May 10th and curating an exhibition of Occupy posters at the Harmony House that will open on May 21st. 

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