UNIVERSITY CITY (KYW Newsradio) — Hailing from Puerto Rico, artist José Ortiz-Pagán’s latest art installation, “De Tierra a Estrellas” (“From Soil to Stars”) is partly an exploration of his own story of migration from the island to the mainland U.S. alongside the migration stories of many others he came across through research or in his own life.
It’s all come together in a complex, constellation-esque piece that now hangs in Penn’s McNeil Building. The centerpiece is a nest-like spaceship made of textile weave, three others of smaller size surround the larger one, and encircling all four is a woodcut circle with squares showcasing a different migration story.
“While you’re going across this, you know, beautiful structure, you’re also transgressing across the history and story of many people,” said Ortiz-Pagán.
There’s the Arab mystic from the 1100s navigating a divided Muslim and Christian Iberian Peninsula he found in an old manuscript, and stories of those among Philadelphia’s immigrant communities of South Philadelphia from his time at the Fleisher Art Memorial, to name a few.
“I decided to go with this topic because there are so many assumptions about where do we come from and how do we end up here?” he said. “It’s really easy to taint that moment, to taint that narrative.”
Tainting and weaponization of that narrative are two of the ways Ortiz-Pagán said the current Trump administration is attacking migration. Of the flurry of executive orders President Donald Trump has issued since taking office in January, immigration has been top of the list. He’s attacked birthright citizenship, repealed protections for migrants seeking asylum from countries like Venezuela and Haiti, and ICE has ramped up raids and arrests nationwide, including in the Philadelphia region.
Amid the panic and chaos created nationally, Ortiz-Pagán hopes his piece can be a counterpoint of discussion.
“I think it is a time, especially as an artist, to counter-impose a narrative that questions and challenges the status quo of the conversations around migration with the current government,” he said. “This land has been the land of migration even before Europeans arrived. This is a land of migration all along.”
The first chance for those discussions to happen was on Friday, March 21, as an opening party was held to officially unveil the piece. It was made possible through a grant from Penn’s Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, and Ortiz-Pagán also worked with students from CCATE — a program to prepare Latino students in Philadelphia for college — to complete the installation.
“Migrants are not there to be exploited when we need them,” he said. “These are human beings that deserve to have a life, that deserve to actually be in collaboration with and consultation with all along.”