SUNNY GARDEN IN BLUE: STORIES FROM THE CARIBBEAN TO BROOKLYN
Sunny Garden in Blue: Stories from the Caribbean to Brooklyn (Installation View of 6 stories from the total of 26 stories), Ongoing, Archival digital and cyanotype versions. Book Size: 2 pages per story, 14 1/4 x 20 inches (each page). Image courtesy of Wave Hill. Photo by Stefan Hagen.
Sunny Garden in Blue: Stories from the Caribbean to Brooklyn (Jose A Felix Story, Page 1), Ongoing, Archival digital and cyanotype versions. Book Size: 2 pages per story, 14 1/4 x 20 inches (each page).
Sunny Garden in Blue: Stories from the Caribbean to Brooklyn (Jose A Felix Story, Page 2), Ongoing, Archival digital and cyanotype versions. Book Size: 2 pages per story, 14 1/4 x 20 inches (each page).
Sunny Garden in Blue: Stories from the Caribbean to Brooklyn (Aida Ramos Story, Page 1), Ongoing, Archival digital and cyanotype versions. Book Size: 2 pages per story, 14 1/4 x 20 inches (each page).
Sunny Garden in Blue: Stories from the Caribbean to Brooklyn (Aida Ramos Story, Page 2), Ongoing, Archival digital and cyanotype versions. Book Size: 2 pages per story, 14 1/4 x 20 inches (each page).
Sunny Garden in Blue: Stories from the Caribbean to Brooklyn builds upon a workshop inviting senior Brownsville residents to create personal cyanotype ‘gardens.’ In developing relationships with participants, I discovered many of them are immigrants from Caribbean countries. This inspired me to collect stories of their journeys to the US. Represented in digital and cyanotype versions as an artist’s book, the project pairs select plant cultivars and their scientific details alongside drawn portraits of the participants with personal stories of immigration, transition, and colonization.
Sunny Garden in Blue was inspired by Anna Atkins’ first photographic book, which made use of cyanotype, a simple photographic printing method invented in 1842 which creates blue pictures when light-sensitized paper is exposed to sunlight. Atkins taxonomy placed dried specimens with handwritten text descriptions as scientific illustrations. My version of the cyanotype book creates dialogues with Atkins’ original cyanotype book. By pairing the immigrants’ stories with images of plants that are significant to their personal histories, I have added a human immigration element that was absent in Atkins’ original work.
SUNNY GARDEN IN BLUE: SENIOR ART WORKSHOP AND EXHIBITION
Sunny Garden in Blue: Stories from the Caribbean to Brooklyn is one of the three artworks of History in Blue.
With History in Blue, I aim to conceptually construct my own “blue period,” reflecting on both my direct experience of immigration and its history. This artwork combines historical media art techniques of blue (blue and white porcelain, blue cyanotypes) and their contexts to explore the history of immigration through three interconnected projects that consider real and imagined landscapes. The three artworks of History in Blue are 1) Sunny Garden in Blue: Stories from the Caribbean to Brooklyn, 2) Returning Dialogue: Fragments of Blue and White Porcelain, and 3) Crossing the Border: Beneath the Blue Sky.
