Abstract

The guiding questions of my research relate the notions of identity, displacement and art. As artists, what are our particular ways of addressing the issue of identity in the context of immigration? What are our strategies of relocation and empowerment? What are the implications for art education? To answer these questions I gathered and analyzed the life-narratives of three recent immigrant women artists. Included in this analysis are reflections related to my own immigration. Focusing on the artists' accounts, I have explored the relationship between the experience of displacement and the (re)construction of identity. I have looked at the ways by which visual narrative has been used as a strategy of empowerment. Following the artists' stories and inspired by voices in the academy, particularly bell hooks and Marianne Hirsch, I have suggested that overcoming crisis (relocating) does not simply mean suspending displacement; rather it is through a transformation of its meaning and means--from a site of deprivation to a site of resistance--that we arrive to articulate presence and to inhabit our own stories. Both dialogue as a form of solidarity between storyteller and listener, and art-making are presented here as sites of the immigrants' recovery, creativity and resistance