Arts + Justice: 2023 Grant Recipients

ArtsJusticeStudentGrantRecipientsHeader22-23

The 2022-23 Arts + Justice Student Grant funded twenty students (four collaborative projects, sixteen individual projects) engaged in creative pursuits around questions of art and justice. This year’s cohort includes both undergraduate and graduate students who work in an array of mediums and forms, including painting, sculpture, creative writing, VR and immersive film, photography, mixed media installation, and textiles. Highlights from this year’s cohort include multi-media installations exploring themes of migration and citizenship, sculptures addressing carceral feminism in South Asian form, a ‘zine to address issues of discrimination in healthcare, an interactive VR and immersive film that allows participants to experience the journey of a honey bee; a collection of 35mm photographs and an auditory installation addressing the effects of the pandemic on Chinese-owned restaurants. Many projects collaborated closely with community partners to embed their work beyond the Stanford ecosphere.

The student cohort also received the support of an expanded workshop program, led by graduate student coordinator Shacon Jones (Ph.D. Candidate in Theater and Performance Studies). The monthly roundtable sessions enabled students to share their projects, provide peer feedback, and build a justice-oriented artistic community. In addition to the roundtable sessions, the grantees participated in a series of cohort activities including an artist statement workshop with artist Erina Alejo and a presentation by Luke Williams, Ph.D. candidate in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University on the intersections of art and justice.

Photo of Douris, a long-haired person in a red vest and scarf

STEELE ALEXANDRA DOURIS | Unreliable Narrator

Bio

Steele Alexandra Douris is an author, artist, and PhD candidate in English literature. As a visual artist, she works both digitally and traditionally, including with watercolor, colored pencils, and ink. Steele’s academic research often explores issues at the intersection of gender and genre; her dissertation examines female characters in three genres of Victorian popular fiction: the gothic novel, sensation fiction, and the detective story. She has written poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction; her first trade-published nonfiction book, Spirits, Seers, and Séances: Victorian Spiritualism, Magic, and the Supernatural, is forthcoming in September 2023. As a recipient of the 2023 SAI Arts + Justice Grant, Steele is working on Unreliable Narrator – a gothic zine that explores discrimination in medical settings through a combination of fiction, poetry, and visual art.

Project Statement

Unreliable Narrator is a gothic zine that highlights the experience of discrimination in healthcare settings. Using illustration, poetry, and fragments of fiction, Unreliable Narrator brings to light how patients with marginalized identities are particularly vulnerable to having their concerns, questions, and symptoms dismissed. Drawing on the gothic genre’s longstanding preoccupation with the latent violence of medical settings, Unreliable Narrator probes the question of which patients are believed – and why – in healthcare settings.

Cover art for Unreliable Narrator: a red snake coiled around a pin, with a Rx bottle on a sickly green background

CONSTANTINOS GALLIS | Weathered Resonances

Bio

Constantinos Gallis is a third-year undergraduate student majoring in Urban Studies and minoring in Art Practice and Architectural Design. As such, his art practice tends to focus on cities and urban distortion. He creates visual and sound art that responds to - and interplays with - different environments. Gallis writes, records and performs under the pseudonym ‘Shrinking Violet’, creating music that is dense, repetitive and dynamic; drenched in reverb and distortion.

Project Statement

‘Weathered Resonances’ is a collection of sound-pieces that engage with the issue of climate justice as it relates to my home country of Greece. By using various sonic degradation techniques, such as recording on heat-damaged cassette tapes and playing on guitar strings that have corroded in the rain, I created pieces of music that accurately represent the imperfect and injured state that Greece finds itself as a result of climate change, by subjecting the tools I used to create music to the elements. The music delicate and fractured, and the lyrics, which are in Greek, speak to the ways in which climate change is harming the environment and our national sense of belonging.

Gallis crouched at a desk, holding a guitar, back turned to the camera

NATASHA PATEL | Feeling, in the Pursuit of Justice

Bio

Project Statement

The piece explores the emotional world of the activist, holding space for both optimism and grief in her fight for justice. Emotions are integral to recognizing when we’ve been hurt. They are also integral to recognizing injustice or unfairness (Traister 2018, Rich 1973, Lorde 1981). Moreover, emotions are essential to generate movements for justice (Carruthers 2018). However, our emotions, urges, and desires can get in the way of living up to our beliefs. In this project, I explore the role emotions play in the activist’s drive to push for a more just world.

The project leverages two of my primary mediums, painting and sculpture. Viewers of the final project would stand between a 40x40 painting, an exploration of colors promoting a sense of feeling settled, and a 3' sculpture, which captures some of the challenging moments activists endure. The viewer would feel the tug back and forth between these emotional states – the same tug those in the movement of justice find themselves embedded in.

The paintings are abstract explorations of color. The sculptures are representations of human figures. The painting process is meditative and each painting can take around 100 hours of observing colors and layering oil paints. Discussions with friends, activists, and community members have brought to mind how color and light can bring equanimity and joy. Just looking at yellows or blues or greens can generate a sense of being settled optimistically once again. These settling moments can bring clarity in one’s struggle for justice. Sculptures include an armature usually consisting of metal wire and wood. The body of the sculpture is made of oil based clay. The sculptural process includes an interactive component in which the model and I work together to work out a gesture that best captures the sentiment we are exploring. Once a pose is decided, I work from there to develop the finished piece using a method influenced by sculptor Alicia Ponzio.

Clay figure sitting on the edge of a table

Clay figure reclining on the edge of a table

JACOB RAMIREZ | Defying Definition

Bio

Jacob Ramirez is a masters student in the International Education Policy Analysis Program at Stanford GSE and a teacher with the Stanford Jail and Prison Education Project (SJPEP). Before coming to Stanford he developed and coordinated education programming in jails and prisons in New York City. He is passionate about expanding access to quality education for marginalized communities in nontraditional learning environments.

Project Statement

Defying Definition is a collaboration between four incarcerated students at San Francisco County Jail #3 in San Bruno and volunteer educators from the Stanford Jail and Prison Education Project (SJPEP). Over the course of an eight-week program, these students participated in an activity-based art curriculum that explored their personal identities and carceral experiences. The first half of the program focused on self-exploration, while the latter half focused on transforming their insights into visual expressions. The students designed clothing and posters that not only showcased their unique identities but also brought their lived experiences to the forefront. Two students designed hoodie and sweat sets for their daughters, while another designed a sweater for his son. The fourth student designed an intricate jacket and pants ensemble for himself, to be given to his girlfriend. Each of these pieces served as a conduit of expression for individuals whose voices are often silenced and identities erased within the carceral system.

JIA LIN | Opportunity: The Stories of Undocumented Chinese Immigrants

Bio

Jia Lin is an 18 year old multi-media artist born in New York City and raised in the Greater Philadelphia Area. They find joy in experimental photography, composing music, film, and sculpture. She’s a first year student at Stanford University, where she is an Art + Justice Grant and Fellowship recipient at the Stanford Arts Institute.

Jia’s recognitions include being a Scholastic Art & Writing Awards National Medalist in photography, a 2022 Congressional Art Competition Award winner, an International Piano Composition Contest winner, an alumna of the Tufts University SFMA Studio Art Intensive, attending as a Scholastic Awards Summer Scholarship recipient, and an alumna of the Sunset Chamberfest Young Composer’s Workshop.

As a descendant of the Fuzhounese diaspora, Jia grew up in a community of Fuzhounese immigrants that live predominantly in New York City; along Little Fuzhou in Manhattan, Flushing in Queens, and Fuzhou Town in Brooklyn. Through oral storytelling, film photography, sound art, Jia’s work focuses on documenting the lived experiences of low-income and undocumented Fuzhounese immigrants that work as under-recognized manual laborers and service workers across the United States.

Project Statement

Fuzhounese Americans are Chinese American people of Fuzhou descent. Fuzhounese American immigration peaked in the 1990s, with around 8,000 Fuzhounese immigrants arriving in the U.S. every month, predominantly concentrated in New York City. Many early Fuzhounese immigrants were originally agricultural workers in rural Fuzhou that relied on gang operated smuggling trades and endured subhuman treatment aboard cargo ships for a chance to immigrate to the United States, and arrived as undocumented immigrants in search of better opportunities. In order to pay off the passage debt, many worked as low wage laborers in the city’s restaurant and garment industry and were left vulnerable to exploitation. Due to lack of resources and fear from their immigration status, Fuzhounese workers were exploited by employers and traveled state to state to work in affiliate restaurants. This desperate financial reliance leads to a cycle of abuse and forced migrant labor. These unique immigration circumstances lead to negative stereotypes and discrimination towards Fuzhounese Americans, leaving them isolated from other Chinese Americans groups. Despite discrimination and harsh living conditions, Fuzhounese immigrants were able to slowly create their own neighborhoods and unofficial Chinatown’s in New York City along East Broadway in Manhattan, Flushing in Queens, and Sunset Park in Brooklyn. Although, these neighborhoods are currently facing housing shortages and are vulnerable to gentrification. Data on the reality of the Fuzhounese community is limited as the population remains largely invisible due to immigration status. My project, Opportunity, focuses on recording the untold stories of these people. As a descendant of the Fuzhounese diaspora, I created this project to record the lived experiences of low-income and undocumented Fuzhounese immigrants that work as under-recognized manual laborers and service workers across the United States. Through oral storytelling, journalism, film photography, and sound art, Opportunity is an ongoing project I plan to use to record the stories of my people.

an aproned man wearing a face mask prepares a take out order at a Chinese restaurant

RAMON SALADO ROMO | The Chicanx Renaissance

Bio

Ramon Salado Romo is an undergraduate student part of the Stanford graduating class of 2026 with a particular academic focus on political science and philosophy. Ramon uses an application of mixed media techniques ranging from graphite, charcoal, and acrylic both on canvas and paper to produce a collection of images representative of his southern California upbringing in the Coachella Valley. Themes found within Ramon’s work are influenced by an exploration of imagery unique to Mexican American audiences, that question identity and self-perception as contextualized by one's positionality within a dominant culture while employing a subversion of classical Americanism.

Project Statement

Demographic changes across the United States have long amounted to questions regarding race, identity, and nationality. With the historic and contemporary influx of Latine individuals to the United States, especially those of Mexican descent migrating to parts of southern California, the legacy of Chicano activism in this region of the U.S. can not be understated. This continual push on behalf of Mexican Americans living in the States to be recognized by the broader American system has been a contentious issue across all sectors of social, political, economic, and cultural relevance. With the substantial boom of the Mexican population in communities like that of the Coachella Valley the romanticized mid-century architecture and old Hollywood sensibilities of cities like Palm Springs find themselves to be at a crossroads with the growing Latine population in the area that was and continues to be excluded from this American-made ideal. Having grown up at the forefront of this cultural shift, my point of view concerning artistic expression finds itself amid an exchange of creative styles and modes of expression influenced by this reliance on both Mexican and American tastes. Through “The Chicanx Renaissance',' I wish to engage populations of Mexican Americans within the greater Palm Springs region in a dialogue concerning Latinidad in the 21st century through the inclusion of elements that retain an air of familiarity to those acquainted with the area while simultaneously subverting the established visual imagery that is quintessential of Palm Springs through the infusion of culturally significant attributes of the Mexican experience. In the process opening up space for conversations encompassing machismo, queerness, intersectionality, and identifiers of the Chicanx struggle in contemporary American society. This project at its core seeks to explore how representation should not be the product of pure assimilation but instead a reinterpretation of what belonging looks like both within the Chicanx community and its interactions with the United States.

PABLO TUT & CACHORRA COLLECTIVE | Cachorra: Organs without body

Bio

Pablo Tut (Campeche, México, 13/09/1992) Is a multidisciplinary artist from the Peninsula of Yucatan. His works spans through multiple media such as drawing, sculpture, installation art, and cultural management. His installation artwork designs spaces that expand the possibilities of perception in public spaces — generating dynamics of spatial and ideological contrast, like oriels or constructions that are dislocated from the place they inhabit, creating new spaces to gather around and watch. The core themes of his work involve the struggles of the working class and counter-responses against the biases of colonial spaces and speeches. The materiality, presentation, and location of his projects conform to a way of involving the spectator in unstable positions— as a way of questioning the biopolitical and neo-colonial structures latent in our lives.

CACHORRA COLLECTIVE

Integrated by Anna Karen Ayuso, César Rendón and Pablo Tut. We have articulated a collective work as a counter-response to the colonial discourses and narratives of our context (Peninsula of Yucatan, MX.), through management that seeks representation, accompaniment, and the generation of space-time in relation to these problems and the lives of young peninsular artists. Our format is cheap, short, and improvised, concentrating our energies on contributing to artistic sovereignty of the type of works that artists can do with Cachorra.

Project Statement

The project faces the destruction of Cachorra (independent cultural space located in Mérida, Yuc.) due to the construction of the La Plancha park megaproject. The proposal is to explore new forms of organization that allow us to overflow the cultural and creative activities of Cachorra beyond its old headquarters/body, in the context of neo-colonization and real estate speculation in Yucatan. In order to achieve this, it is proposed to continue with our approach of collective and site-specific work, generating new "symbolic organs" in public spaces in the center of Mérida. We understand the city as a living entity in which we are all related in its spasms and vitality.

Productions will be managed in pairs of artists, linking the previous experiences of creation in La Plancha with the new challenges of this displacement, seeking to offer creative and critical alternatives to the dominant narratives about the "white city" and its spaces.

A small group of people gathered around aperformance artist on a white hammock

LAURA VILLALOBOS | Living Undocumented

Bio

Laura Villalobos (they/them/she/her) is a Latine undocumented artist from the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles. Using their practice as a painter, sculptor, and ceramicist, Laura seeks to illustrate their lived experience of growing up undocumented in the United States. As an artist and advocate, Laura explores storytelling practices to bring to light the hidden dimension undocumented immigrants are forced to live in. Their work exposes the boundaries and borders created from the illegalization and criminalization of the body, and how these pose great challenges through every aspect of our lives. Laura investigates the contradictory concepts of belonging and rejection, home, illegality, borders, immigration, social exclusion, and identity in their practice. Through art-making, Laura materializes their dream of living without borders as an act of healing, seeking to reclaim our voice and stories through radical vulnerability, unafraid.

Project Statement

“Living Undocumented” features a multimedia collection that seeks to illustrate the realities of what it means to live undocumented in the United States. While only being a social construct, illegality infiltrates the mind and the body, the fear that enforces it pushes us deemed undesirable to internalize external borders in a betrayal of the self. Being an instrument arising from nationalism and colonialism, the illegalization of human beings serves as a violent exclusionary practice at the convenience of the state. Through the vulnerable exploration of in/visibility, “Living Undocumented” seeks to portray the long-term effects of illegalization. Through this project I explore how different sectors of my life have been affected by my undocumented status including my health, my perception of identity and home, and my social interactions. This project was inspired by the desire to empower undocumented individuals to take charge of their own narrative, including myself.

SKY WALKER | decolonizing Black bodies

Bio

Sky Walker (she/her) is a Black American artist from Atlanta, Georgia who primarily focuses on paper collaging. Her artistic journey both critiques the interlocking systems of oppression and centers the visual and conceptual narrative around people of the Black community, including herself. She engages with art to fuse her own experiences of gender, race, beauty, maturation, reflection, and evolution. Her work explores storytelling through the manipulation of magazines, newspapers, maps, and any other paper products she can get her hands on.

Project Statement

“decolonizing Black bodies” artistically brings together the digital and physical, and conceptually brings together sexuality, gender, and desire. A series of five multi-colored risograph prints of hand-cut paper collages highlight the hyper-sexualization of the Black community and how it manifests when engaging with intersecting identities. It derives from a place of feeling constantly observed, perceived, and judged…of always being “ready for display.”

Risograph Collage in red with text "A SPECTACLE"

Risograph collage in orange with text: A SUBJECT

Risograph collage in yellow with text "A DESIRE"

Risograph collage in green with text "A FANTASY"

Risograph collage in blue with text "AN OBSERVATION"

SONG WU | Asian/American

Bio

Song Wu is a figurative painter living and working in Stanford, California. She is currently a student studying art and engineering. Her confrontational paintings aim to alienate viewers and force them to reckon with their spectatorship towards Asian bodies which have been a long source of fascination for the Western gaze. Using humor as a starting point for her paintings, Wu aims to create a spectacle where the viewer, including Wu herself, is interrogated and scrutinized. Wu’s work has been exhibited in New York, San Francisco, and Berlin.

Project Statement

In the 2010s, when websites like Reddit, Buzzfeed, and other listicle hosting sites dominated mainstream media, it was common to see titles like “21 Hilarious Poorly Translated Asian Shirts. #8 Is So Wrong It Hurts!” or “80 Hilarious Asian T-Shirts Which Definitely Got Lost in Translation”. In these compilations, you’ll see toddlers wearing sweaters with “COCAINE” stitched in all caps, or gong gongs and po pos fashioning t-shirts exclaiming “WUSSUP HATERS”, or one of my personal favorites, “Sniffing Glue Wont Keep Families Together”. My project is a collection of artworks depicting Asian individuals wearing clothes displaying “bad English”. Pulling from websites and family archives, the subjects of these photos and of my paintings are all assumed to be unaware of the “hilarity” of the situation. They are a source of fascination, entertainment, and bewilderment for the Western gaze. Like the subjects of Arnold Genthe, Theodore Wores, and Frances Benjamin Johnston’s works, the foreignness of the oriental is spotlighted (This is not always done with malicious intent, but there are inherent power dynamics between the artist/documenter and subject). As it is obvious that the subjects of these artworks are not white, it is just as obvious that the Asians in the “bad English” photos are not American. My work is about confrontation, not only to others, but also to myself.

Painting of two figures, one wearing a red tshirt with the text "may I suggest the sausage" and an arrow pointing down

A paitning of a person with short dark hair and glasses wearing a black tshirt with gold writing "I LOVE SEX NEVER STOP STUDYING"

JENNY XIONG | Dusk on the Shore

Bio

Jenny Xiong (she/her) is a writer, composer, flutist, and pianist who uses music and literature to express images and stories about the natural world, beauty, environmentalism, anticapitalism, gender and her Chinese-American identity. She is inspired by art ranging from classical music, English literature, religious texts and ink wash paintings to works of magical realism, contemporary installations and video games, all of which inform her artistic practice and perception of the world. Jenny grew up in Bothell, Washington and is currently a junior at Stanford University, where she is majoring in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing and Music with a concentration in Composition.

Project Statement

“Dusk on the Shore” traces the journey of a girl named Kai as she struggles to find her place in a world dominated by consumerism and the gender binary, works to protect the ocean from the toxic byproducts of capitalism and eventually grows a non-binary young adult. In this work, I aim to intertwine the realistic world of Kai’s home with the magical world of the shore to create a piece of magical realism that explores perspectives beyond the boundaries of gender, capitalism, and humanity itself.

IAN PARTMAN & ELLIE DUNN | Visions of Justice

Bio

Project Statement

A screenshot of the Visions of Justice "about" page: a red background with black text

A black, red and white print with the words "ENVISION A WORLD WITHOUT PRISONS"

Photo of Jeiru Fang, an Asian woman with shoulder-length black hair in a rust colored t shirt

JIERUI FANG & ROWAN INGS | BeeReal

Bio

Jierui Fang is a multimedia artist, with a focus on new media, who creates at the intersection of nature, technology, and human culture. She is pursuing her Masters in Product Design at Stanford University through the Knight-Hennessy Scholarship. She earned a BS in Art & Design at MIT with minors in biomedical engineering and computer science. Her past projects involve a combination of mechanical design, digital design, and creative technology to explore living system interactions on the environmental and on human scale.

Rowan Ings is a filmmaker and artist from London. She is currently a MFA Candidate in Documentary Film and Video at Stanford. Rowan works across film and new media to explore land, memory and the environment. Her films have been screened at festivals internationally, she is a Knight-Hennessy Scholar 2021 and a BAFTA / Pigott Scholar.

Project Statement

‘BeeReal’ is an interactive VR and immersive film experience that allows participants to experience the journey of a honey bee, shipped on trucks from Florida to California for the annual pollination of the almond industry in the Central Valley. The experience allows the participant to engage with the natural world as a honey bee might through their UV vision and electrically charged particles. BeeReal uses play and immersive storytelling to highlight the issues of monocultural mass agriculture, climate change and sustainability in local Californian communities.

In this project, we are challenging participants to experience the world outside their own bodies and beyond human perception. We don’t seek to anthropomorphize the bee, but rather to find an eco-centric language that we hope will challenge participants to think critically about their relationship to the environment, and participation in the systems that contribute to its collapse. We believe in the powers of immersive media to provoke more visceral reactions and generate longer lasting questioning among participants.

Screenshot from VR film, showing a dark mountainous landscape with floral print boxes and a towering honeycomb

SYDNEY REESE | love + ecowomanisms

Bio

Sydney or syd (she/they) is a fiber artist, sustainable designer, and writer. She is from Northern California by way of their Black American father and Chicana mother. In her academic life, she studies Sociology and Spanish. In her art, her work is rooted in ecowomanism—the marriage of ecofeminism and Black anti-capitalist feminism. Above all, syd strives to explore, in her art and her being, how sovereignty can be sowed and sown.

Project Statement

Working with fibers and textiles allows me to interrogate themes of consumption, fashion, labor, sustainability, and Black land autonomy. Through the creation of garments, textiles depicting landscapes, and a plant propagation station, I am to make a project that acts as a manifesto on consumption.

Feminist film critic Laura Mulvey wrote, “It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it.” As I design garments, I must confront the fact that a lot of fashion is rooted in body politics and desirability. My project aims to explore what it means to feel whole, liberated, and generative through fashion outside of the violent ideas of beauty and desirability.

GWENDOLYN LIU & RACHEL WANG | Uncovering the Arboretum

Project Statement

Uncovering the Arboretum is an augmented reality tour that unwraps the hidden stories behind the Stanford Arboretum. The project utilizes spatial storytelling and technologies such as LiDAR scanning, 3D modeling, and augmented reality interaction to break the linearity of time and explore the overlapping of history and reality. Inspired by the research conducted by the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project and the Native American Studies department, this AR tour will lead the audience to observe the foreign Eucalyptus trees planted over 100 years ago, excavate digitally historical artifacts left by the unsung Chinese workers who helped build Stanford’s campus, and meditate on the ancestral heritage of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe. It seeks to examine the themes of land ownership, migration and family heritage.