This project focuses on undocumented Mexican immigrant women who came to New York decades ago in search of opportunity for their families. Overtime, they built their lives here and have become elders of their communities: the abuelas. Many have children and grandchildren living on either side of the borders. Yet 20 and 30 years later, they still remain invisible and undocumented.
I made portraits of these women in the intimacy of their own homes, seeking to convey the women’s relationship to place, and the shaping and appropriation of their environment. In these photographs, home decorations become part of the women’s wider symbolic recreation of culture, memory and ownership beyond borders.
I photograph these environmental portraits in a participatory manner. I ask the women, “How do you like to be seen or represented through photography?” They choose how and where they want to be seen in their homes and what outfits they want to wear. The series seeks to offer them the opportunity to face the camera and be depicted in a way that reflects their own sense of identity.
Artist Bios
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Cinthya Santos Briones
Cinthya Santos Briones is a visual artist and educator with Nahua roots based in New York. She grew up in Tulancingo, a town nestled among mountains and valleys surrounded by Nahua, Otomi, and Tepehua Indigenous communities in Mexico. She studied Ethnohistory and Anthropology, and for ten years, she conducted research on Indigenous migration, codices, textiles, and traditional medicine at the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico.
As an artist, her work focuses on a multidisciplinary social practice that combines participatory art and the construction of collective narratives. Through various non-linear narrative media, she juxtaposes photography with historical archives, writing, ethnography, drawings, collage, embroidery, and popular education and activism. She holds an MFA focus in Creative Writing and Photography from Ithaca-Cornell University, as well as a certificate in Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism from the International Center of Photography (ICP). She is currently an adjunct professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.
She has received fellowships and grants from the Magnum Foundation, En Foco, National Geographic Research and Exploration, We Woman, City Artist Corps, Wave Hill House Winter Residency, and BricLab Contemporary Art, among others, and was a Mellon Artist Fellow at the Hemispheric Institute at NYU. Her work has been published in The New York Times, California Sunday Magazine, Vogue, Open Society Foundations, Buzzfeed, The Intercept, The New Yorker, and Hyperallergic, among others.
Organizations
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United Photo Industries (UPI)
United Photo Industries (UPI) is a New York based nonprofit organization that works to promote a wider understanding of, and increased access to, the art of photography.
Since its founding in 2011, UPI has rapidly solidified its position in the public art landscape by continuing to showcase thought-provoking, challenging, and exceptional photography from across the globe. In its first seven years, UPI has presented the work of more than 2,500 visual artists in gallery exhibitions and public art installations worldwide.
Abuelas: Portraits of The Invisible Grandmothers
Featuring: Cinthya Santos Briones
Curated by: James Estrin David Gonzalez
Locations
View Location Details Download a detailed map of this location Brooklyn Bridge Park – Emily Warren Roebling Plaza1 Water St
Brooklyn, NY 11201
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