The artist created a project using 66 monarch butterflies to raise awareness about the 66,000 minors from Central America who arrived alone at the US-Mexico border in 2014 fleeing violence. She cut and hand-sewed each butterfly before hanging them in the art room. When asked to remove the installation, she found a new space in the BAIC office to continue sharing the piece. The artist uses her work to shed light on issues of apathy and violence surrounding the idea of the American Dream. She has also held forums on campus to discuss Central American violence and refugee crises.

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Savannah Clarke
Community Spotlight
Thea Bowman AHANA and Intercultural Center
Boston College
What inspired you to do this art project? Was it formal or informal?
It was a little bit of both. I work for an NGO called Foundation and they worked
with refugees in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and their mission is to try to
bring them basic human rights. They work with creating different communities
within the refugee population because a lot of refugees are not seen. The issue
itself is of the same magnitude of the Syrian refugee, but because it’s on U.S.
borders, nobody sees the problem. I organized a talk in November about it, and
had the CEO come and he was speaking at the UN in Boston, so I had him talk
about it, and one of the statistics that struck me was that 66,000 minors, we’re
talking 13, 14, about 10, showed up on the U.S.-Mexico border without their
parents in 2014 because there’s no violence in the country. Their parents pooled
all of the money they had and tried to get their kids to flee because it wasn’t safe
for them to live. You see all sorts of terrible statistics in the news all the time --
you have the Flint, Michigan Water Crisis, Syrian refugee crisis, you have ISIS,
you have all this really, really bad shit for lack of a better word. But it’s not
something that is easily textualized. We hear these things because there’s so
much bad in the world, it goes over most people’s heads. So, I wanted to bring
that humanitarian crisis to the forefront. So, 66 monarch butterflies were
designed in the reverse migration pattern because monarch butterflies tend to fly
south, but these people are going north.
Describe the process.
So, I’m taking Issues and Approaches of Studio Art, and we had to do a project
and originally wanted to do a painting, but I thought that the painting was too
didactic, and it didn’t really have the emotional punch, so I came up with the
monarch butterflies project. I started out hand cutting with zapto knives, but it
took me an hour to do three, so I gave up. I went to the Lynch School and found a
dye cutter, [the film used to use on old-school projectors]. I did that and hand
cut them that way and edged the edges in gold with finger paint. Then I
individually hand sewed them into thread, and then needed to hang them. I
found some beams that nobody was using, so I hung the beams in the art room,
then tied the butterflies onto the beam. They stayed [] until my teacher told me
that I needed to take them down. So, I searched on campus for a place they
would be appreciated because I wasn’t ready to throw away the project yet. So,
found BAIC [the office], and y’all said yes.

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What else have you done with your art?
Well, I’m a military brat, so I grew up around a lot of art. I grew up between
Japan, Hawaii, and a whole bunch of other places, so we always had a bunch of
art in my house. When I was really little, like 5 years old, my family was flying to
Germany and flying in the belly of a C-5, which is a military cargo plane, and I
wouldn’t stop talking to the soldier next to me, and he was on his way back from
Afghanistan, so he just wanted to go to sleep. So, my mom gave me a napkin and
a pen and said, “Honey, draw your thoughts on this!”, and I haven’t stopped
drawing since, but that’s expanded. So, different groups on campus have
approached me to do different photographic commissions for them, like
Taiwanese Cultural [Organization] did. And, my favorite thing to do is [that] I
physically paint models that I’m photographing and turn them into human
paintings. I wanted to make them canvases. I also do traditional drawing type
things -- I love pen and ink, like micron pens, because they are very fine and get a
lot of detail, and watercolor, because those tend to be more realistic. But, if I’m
doing portrait paintings, I purposely don’t paint people in their own skin
tones. When I do self-portraits, I paint myself blue or gold because I feel I’m
representative through that color than through the color of my skin. I’m at peace
with the color of my skin, I don’t mind it, but I feel that there is something to be
said for auras. So, I do all sorts of stuff -- I can’t sculpt though, I hate ceramics.
What other issues do you plan on using your art for?
The overarching issues that I’ve been working with over the past couple of years,
which just hasn’t really changed, is just ‘Apathy and the American Dream’. So
what I mean by that is you have this American dream of the white picket
fence. But there is a lot of bloodshed in this country between events now, cops
and even if you go back 200 years, the Trail of Tears, there has just been a lot of
violence that has created this so-called American Dream, so trying to shed light
on that. So, a lot of people’s American Dream, even if they are not American, is
come to America and make a name for themselves, [but] what do they do when if
their 8-year old kids that can’t go home because their mother was killed and the
father was constricted by gang violence and their brother had his tongue cut
out. You can’t have an American Dream because you go to the border and turned
around. You’re detained for unteen hours and living in ice-boxed conditions in
the extension camps that as same as the prisoners living in Guantanamo Bay. So,
you have the American Dream that way, you have the dream that people have but
can’t have, so you have the American perception of beauty. So, when I tend to
photography projects and portraiture, I like looking at the Western perception of
beauty is, compared to what it is around the world, but if you had to sum it up, it
would be the apathy we have towards other people’s issues than for on our own
because there are so many of them.
Going off of that further, how else did you bring the issue of refugees at the U.S.
border besides through your art?

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The NGO, CEO, was in the area, so I held a forum, in the multi-faith chapel on
the Central American violence and the refugee crisis, and we did not have any
chairs left. It was completely full and people were sitting on the floor, which was
a big moment for me because I’m a freshmen -- I just got here, haven’t had my
chance to get my feet wet in organizations because I am doing a lot of other
stuff. So, holding that forum was a thing.
I feel that the butterflies have done more awareness raising than actually talking
because they are ‘impolite artwork’. They’re hanging from the ceiling, when you
walk into the lounge, and you are like, ‘What are those?’ ‘What are these doing
here?’ And so, it gets your brain thinking and because there is a proportion of 66
butterflies -- 66,000 kids that helps to not only bring awareness, but magnify the
issues. It’s something that people can wrap their brains around.
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