Sara Friedlander Santa Cruz, California www.lensculture.com/sara-friedlander
American Women: Birds of im/Migration—From Amsterdam to New Amsterdam Mixed media: digital collage and paint on 3 sided wooden panel , 20 x 26 x 5.5 inches, 2015 At this critical time, when immigration is seen as a national and global threat throughout the world, these portraits can help us remember and reflect deeply on the reality that most Americans, most of us, are relatively recent descendants of immigrants ourselves. My vision was to create a series of 18 narratives on panels to honor these courageous women, who left their homelands and their families, often under great duress and traveled to America to start a new life. Most of them spoke no English; and holding steadfast to their hopes for a brighter future, faced daunting challenges in order to establish themselves in this new world. Their determination, their vision, is visible in their eyes. By collecting vintage portraits as well as images in the public domain (taken either in photographic studios or on the street during the first quarter of the 20th century) and using Photoshop to digitally combine them with my own photographs (landscapes, birds, trees, architecture), I pulled these 3-sided compositions together with paint. 104