Lewis Wickes Hine

As a rancorous and divisive political debate around immigration policy rages across our country, many seem to forget that the huge waves of people who came here from Eastern Europe, Italy, and Ireland around the turn of the twentieth century – for many of us, our grandparents or great-grandparents – went through a strikingly parallel experience to that of recent immigrants from Latin America. Both groups experienced exceptional fear tempered by exceptional hope for the future, dehumanization at the hands of the bureaucracies set up to deal with their arrival, and the sometimes violent ambivalence of their new neighbors and co-workers.

This piece is an attempt to dramatize these parallel experiences, each as crystalized by a photograph – the first taken at Ellis Island in 1905, the second in San Diego in 1989. These images were assigned to two acclaimed playwrights, who each imagined the experience of his photograph’s subjects. The Electromagnetic Theater, a contemporary radio drama company, produced the resulting plays for this installation.

The two plays and their corresponding images run on a continuous loop of approximately twenty minutes.

Lost and Found

Featuring: Various Artists

Locations

• #Collaboration
• #Family
• #Immigrant Stories