This little phrase of solidarity permeates a new exhibition that is the latest collaboration between Latino advocacy group OLA and the North Fork Arts Center in Greenport.
When this little village was shocked by a series of back-to-back weekend raids by immigration officers this past summer, artist and curator Kelynn Z. Alder got together with OLA Executive Director Minerva Perez to talk about “what we can do as artists — what can we say? We’re not politicians. We don’t make the rules,” said Ms. Alder at the opening Saturday evening of “The Worker” at NFAC.
Pictured Above (l-r): Curator Kelynn Z. Alder, OLA Executive Director Minerva Perez and OLA Community Advocate Alma Tovar at the opening Oct. 18.
Ms. Perez had seen artist Aurelio Torres’s oil painting “Marco, 2023,” a dignified portrait of a man holding a leaf blower, at a 2023 show Ms. Alder had curated in Stony Brook, “Somos (We Are).”
It reminded her of OLA’s recent work advocating for landscapers after East Hampton Village proposed code penalizing the workers who use gas-powered landscaping equipment.
We wanted to “stop the demonization of landscapers, as if they were truly holding the wands of power and not a leaf blower,” said Ms. Perez. “Compliance with noise laws can be achieved by allowing all parties to hold accountability and not simply targeting the workers — not the companies and homeowners. Giving workers no option but attending court in front of a judge, risking further legal action for what should be a simple fine, is not a just way to achieve compliance, if compliance is truly what you’re seeking.”
Ms. Perez said the painting, which Mr. Torres agreed to show and use in the informational campaign for “The Worker,” “definitely depicts respect and appreciation. That was really important for us. You don’t have to love a leaf blower to respect it as a tool a person is using to feed their family.”
Ms. Alder, who is of Mexican American heritage, said she wanted in this show “to give a human face to the people that keep our country going.”
“We do have a voice. We can say something about things we disagree with, when we see our friends, families and neighbors terrorized,” she said. “As a community, we can do something.”
“I want to thank the North Fork Arts Center for having courage,” she added. “A lot of institutions these days are censoring what they put on walls and what they say.”
The works on view are for sale, with proceeds to be split between the artists, OLA and the North Fork Arts Center, which has also partnered with OLA on its Latino Film Festival in September, and on a series of Spanish-language films last fall.
The day of the second summer ICE raid in Greenport, Aug. 3, residents of the village got word that agents were interrogating Latino residents in the downtown laundromat, at one point separating a man who was doing his laundry from his twin 10-year-old sons. Greenport community activists have said the man had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, with no warrants, and is now facing regular check-ins at federal immigration court.
Photographer Jeremy Garretson, whose series “Faces of Greenport” documents the people who call this tiny village home, began driving through Greenport that morning after hearing a tip that something was going on.
He didn’t have to drive far before running across an officer whose vest simply read “POLICE Federal Agent” interrogating a man leaning on a pickup truck on Fourth Street.
A still from his video documentation of the scene is included in the show.
“It was so intimidating. I heard the message they were in Greenport and I immediately came. It was dumb luck,” he said. “He started videoing me, I guess scanning my face and seeing if I’m coming up in some kind of database. I asked for his ID, his badge number, agency and he wouldn’t tell me anything.”
Mr. Garretson said he attempted to file a Freedom of Information request for access to the officer’s body cam footage of him, but without knowing basic facts like the officer’s name and agency, he hit a brick wall.
Greenport Mayor Kevin Stuessi said he was standing on the sidewalk next to Mr. Garretson as he was filming.
“It was about 30 minutes after the incident at the laundromat,” he said. “That was, by far, my hardest day in this job as mayor, to watch this man being taken away from his two children.”
It’s “so powerful to have Minerva and OLA working together with the North Fork Arts Center, showcasing workers who make things happen throughout the North Fork,” he added.
Greenport resident Dinni Gordon, a retired political science professor at CUNY and author of “Village of Immigrants: Latinos in an Emerging America,” about the role the Latino community had played in revitalizing this working class fishing village, said she hopes her friends and neighbors come see the show.
“It highlights the fact that we have so many people who serve us all the time and who are at risk all the time,” she said. “We have to support them, but it’s unclear how we can do that in a really effective way. I don’t feel as though I have any solutions for how we can protect them.”
“I don’t know whether it will get worse,” she added. “Maybe this type of oppression is something we will have to live with, with more frequent intrusions.”
“I don’t think people are complacent,” she said, adding that if ICE were come back to Greenport “we would get a kind of local activism.”
“People got informed about this, but it didn’t seem terribly real,” she said of the raids in August. “The general threat didn’t seem real until that moment.”
East Hampton-based artist Gabrielle Raacke’s “I Built Your House,” a tender acrylic on glass portrait of a young carpenter in a hard hat and safety vest with the tools of his trade hanging on the wall behind him, has been part of the public relations campaign for the show.
“It’s horrible how people here are treated,” said Ms. Raacke, who was born in Germany. “I’m an immigrant but it’s so much harder for people of different races. I see how nobody treats this guy well. He builds the house and he is treated really badly and not paid well, and struggling to have a house of his own.”
Ms. Perez said she had been alone in the Arts Center’s gallery just after the show was hung, and “felt the subjects of the pieces reaching out of their frames, to commend, commiserate, to share outrage, to console, to marvel out loud, to pledge their respect, and overall to see and be seen in their full humanity and dignity. If you’re able to give yourself a quiet moment alone with these subjects, they will speak to you as well.”
“With difficult or contentious conversations, we go to the artists — to the musicians, the actor, the poet, to help navigate the missing piece of our humanity,” she added. Who is The Worker to you? What a collection of stories we have on these walls.”
Throughout the show, the artists contributed heartfelt statements about the symbolism in their work.
Shinnecock artist Jeremy Dennis’s “Untitled (from Sacredness of Hills series)” depicting a woman sitting in the bucket of a bulldozer honors “Shinnecock tribal members who defend ancestral burial sites in Shinnecock Hills against ongoing desecration by real estate development.”
Sandra Mack-Valencia’s “The Retirement Party” depicts a celebration graced by Colombian empanadas and Mexican guacamole.
“Every dish is not just food but the work of countless hands, each carrying stories, traditions and dignity,” she writes.
Lori Horowitz’s “Native Maize,” of torched copper mesh, depicts a street vendor selling corn, “a symbol of belonging, survival and the complexities within diverse communities.”
Kara Hoblin’s “Quality Friends” gives life to the monsters, embodiments of emotions that health care workers live with after facing the frightening and uncertain nature of their work.
“This piece reflects the idea that we must care for our own inner demons before we can truly care for others,” she writes.
Josh Gosfield’s digital work “Amazon Exodus” was created for the Amazon Labor Union. It depicts “Jeff Bezos as a fat cat Pharaoh with the Amazon workers as his personal slaves — but with a twist — the workers are not faceless drones but unique individuals, rising up 1 million strong.”
Madeline Daversa’s watercolors of farm workers picking crops depict people “whose hard work, care for the land and water, and deep passion for what they do truly embody the spirit of the East End.”
These are just a few of the works from 26 accomplished artists on view in “The Worker.”
Ms. Perez urged Latino residents of Greenport, who may not have been comfortable coming out for the opening, to take the time to see the show.
“It’s still been difficult to have people feel truly safe, and this show is very much for them,” she said. “I hope they do find a way to come.”
The show is on view through Nov. 13. The North Fork Arts Center is open daily, from 5 to 10 p.m. on weekdays and 2 to 10 p.m. on weekends.
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