SAYA Youth Visit Art Gallery in Chelsea

On September 27th, youth from our Young Women’s Leadership Program visited an art gallery in Chelsea, where they viewed an instillation and met the artist behind it. Below, one of these young women shares her experience:

“This was my first time going to an art gallery, and it wasn't what I had expected. We took the stairs up to the second floor and we were greeted by Regina Araujo, the artist whose work made up the exhibition. We were led into a room where various paintings hung on white walls, making the paintings stand out. The room was divided into two parts, and we were led to the second part which was relatively smaller. There were stickers on one wall and on the rest various art pieces like mosaics and prints. In the middle of the room there was a roulette, which is what the show was named after: Migrants' Roulette. The stickers represented money and on them were various historical figures the artist believed were important, and should be more recognized for their actions in society.

We then played Migrants’ Roulette. The objective of the game was to get the ball to land on the figure you chose, and the prize was a sticker of whoever you wanted. Even though I lost, I still got a sticker - the winner got two. I decided to pick Rigoberta Menchu, a political and human rights activists from Guatemala, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. The artist then showed us her other pieces, which all had the same theme of migration; she felt that just like birds, people shouldn't be restricted from migrating to other parts of the world. A piece that caught my attention was a bird house that had a map drawn on its sides. Overall, the gallery space might have seemed small, but the pieces that were hung on its walls all held special meaning regarding migration, and the lives of various people who are and were shaped by it.”

- Gabriela