At RoCo’s current exhibition, artists and community members forefront victims of sociopathic immigration policies, and work to connect the dots (Hey! We're the dots).

BY REBECCA RAFFERTY

As early voices for the midterm elections proceed to pour in, the level of urgency to turn the toxic red tide is visceral. We do know who the actual parasites are: They’re the ones calling the shots and shifting the blame for all the suffering they’ve orchestrated with their divisive rhetoric so they can keep comfortably operating as they are, right in our faces. And that’s true everywhere.

Our glowing screens feed us relentless waves of headlines about the current administration’s heartless actions and their life-disrupting impact on real, breathing people. Bad-faith leaders and talking heads lie, and their tactics to sharpen and focus existent xenophobia and division work on us far too well. As does the exhaustion that this all causes.

But you know what? We can press pause and breathe together without losing sight of the good work that needs doing. For example, good work:

On view through November 14 at Rochester Contemporary Art Center is the sobering, cathartic, and heartening “Sanctuary: Borders & Belonging in 2026,” an exhibition that includes photos, paintings, installations, video art, and documentary work by artists and community members who refuse to be cowed by the threat of adjacent danger to themselves brought on by merely standing up and looking around. Instead they put their steady eyes, minds, hearts, and hands on the complex experiences of immigrants, migrants, refugees and citizens who are determined to bear witness to those experiences and their causes, and offer a collective space for collective thought and action.

“The project brings together a wide range of artists and documentarians, activists, and also just citizens in a range of projects that reflect the climate around immigration and borders today,” said Bleu Cease, executive director at RoCo and curator of the exhibition.

Before you even enter the ‘gallery proper’ you’ll encounter a related work, “BELONG,” by regional artist Gianna Stewart that has been installed on the side, park-facing wall of the East Ave. space since June. Her beautiful work confronts both intentional viewers and passersby with phrases and words deemed anathema by the current administration, contained within the blaring letters spelling out the titular word on a main thoroughfare. I won’t spoil it, so you can sit with it and digest it yourself — it’s on view through Nov. 15.

As is typical for RoCo, the show inside serves as an entry point for crucial conversations about what the hell is happening to us and what we’re going to do (and what many advocates and neighbors are doing) about it all.

I’ll keep saying it until my dying breath: Art-making is deep thinking. It’s an act of reflecting reality and imagining what else could be, and creating crucial connective tissue in our communities. We need it, and we need to support it.

REFUSED ENTRY, OR SNATCHED FROM THEIR LIVES HERE

At the front of the gallery, the show introduces us to one instance of the manifold waking nightmares, by making personal the threats of detention and deportation with an installation about one local individual of the many who have recently been swept up in the Department of Homeland Security’s ramped-up domestic terrorism.

This opening installation honors Dolores Bustamante, a Rochester farmworker and community leader who became a local high-profile case when she was detained by ICE in the spring of 2026 and was released after advocates wrote 137 letters, including those from Rochester Mayor Malik Evans, members of the clergy, and everyday citizens, each speaking to her character and importance to the community. Though freed, her legal case continues.

A collaborative effort by artist-journalist Erica Bryant and artist-educator Carly Fox, the work presents portraits of Bustamante, a grandmother at the center of our community’s mutual aid, collective care, and resistance to immigrant detention, alongside the missives of support, “turning a local campaign for her release into a public shrine,” Cease said.

Located across from this intro to the topic is a stunning work, installed for the first time in the US, “Documenting Border Barriers,” by the award-winning and widely-collected Toronto-based artist Pamela Dodds. Cease called Dodds’ ongoing work in this series of hers “one of the more global projects in the exhibition.”

Dodds’ work comprises more than 20 painstakingly-rendered etchings of border walls, fences, and anti-immigration barriers from around the world, with extensive bilingual archival research flanking each print in Spanish and in English. Dodds’ attention spans continents, giving an idea of the scope of this dissonance.

In each work, woodgrain printed in relief describes a wavering desert terrain and atmosphere, while Dodds used drypoint etching to form the hard, modern, too-familiar concrete and steel walls, fences, and concertina razor wire.

Border walls have always existed. Arguably the best known is the Great Wall of China, a series of fortifications built by the Ming Dynasty between 1366 and 1644 to keep nomadic groups from the Eurasian region out. Its winding, serpentine length and watchtowers are immediately recognizable whenever they are reproduced.

But in Dodds’ work, the bare, brutalist architecture and the empty landscapes speak to boundaries that are relatively new and rapidly expanding, and take on an almost abstract quality. Importantly, Dodds leaves each scene ambiguous as to where in the world it could be, until visitors read the accompanying texts.

Well, all but one of her works. A 10-foot ditch carved into the border between Chile and Bolivia stands out as distinct in appearance from the others — a hope-killing moat.

Though most of the locations Dodds has depicted aren’t immediately identifiable, she chose to put the viewer on the side of the people being kept out of the somewhere, and the main-character energy shifts from the structures to the personal experience, to the feeling of being faced with such barriers while in such desperation. This is indicated through subtle tells that include the direction that the architecture points its aggression.

“They just built a big ditch,” she said of the South American boundary. “But for the most part, the borders come with barbed-wire atop fences and walls that will really slice your skin … which is often the most economical. Sometimes the country will start with that, and then they get more funding, and they, you know … develop it. It's basically steel fences and then cement walls or steel walls, like in Israel. They’re really expert wall-builders, and they build underground as well; they often carve quite far underground because desperate people build tunnels.”

Dodds embarked on this artistic journey in 2020, hamstrung like many creatives by the pandemic, and searching for a way to make heart-calling work. Already sympathetic to the folks on the forsaken sides of things, she’d been watching the worldwide shitshow go down back in 2015, when the Euro-migrant crisis hit the fan. In 2019, she travelled to the West Bank with a Palestinian-Canadian friend who told her that if she wanted to grasp what was really going on, she’d need to travel there and see it for herself. She trusted that advice, and went.

“I learned a lot. I saw and heard things I didn’t completely understand before,” Dodds said.

In early 2020, she participated in an artist residency in Spain, and came to know other arcane stuff about the world: Spain has had border walls for ages in two territories it owns on the African continent.

In the past several years, Dodds’ fixation on this global issue brought her to participate in five international academic conferences about global migration and border crises, which expanded her understanding of everything, and solidified her alliance with the ones who are blocked and beaten down for trying to move with the same freedom as the rest of the world.

There’s a wild tension in her work that draws you in. The prints are beautifully crafted and snare your focus; then the deeper message hits and rips through you.

“We can consider this as sort of a contemporary study of the architecture of control,” Cease said of Dodds’ work.

Zigzagging back across the space, we encounter Tom Policano’s “Slim Pickin’s,” a set of his 1970s-era photographs paired with Cher Valentino’s painted reinterpretations of those images. Together, their work connects past and present farmworker conditions; Policano’s images spotlight Black individuals from the South hired as farm laborers, and the circumstances they endured. Today, as Valentino shows, there are migrant workers from further south with manifold reasons to be here and little understanding from citizens about why and how they came, and what becomes of them once they’re here.

Deeper into the gallery, Julio Salgado’s work highlights DACA activism and queer immigrant advocacy in prints and a video about his work.

Salgado’s digital art project, “I Am UndocuQueer,” features heavily alongside the artist’s own personal reflections about the intersectionality of two contested identities in the video “My Name Is Julio.” Standing for undocumented queer people’s incredibly brave, leading role in the immigrant-rights movement, the work echoes the ways queer people have always led human-rights movements from infancy to relative popularity, and confronts widespread fear with defiant pride, humor, joy, and self-representation — you don’t tell me who I am, I get to say it and be it — regardless of the threat of deportation. Defiant queer joy may save us all yet, but we shouldn't be on the sidelines while the most vulnerable folks do this work for the sake of the rest of us.

“The main piece is here to talk about Julio's life,” Cease said. “This is a documentary made by his friend, which follows him as an undocumented person going to visit his own work installed at the Smithsonian.”

Salgado is one of a small set of undocumented artists to have had their work shown at that lauded institution. But attention is a double-edged sword, and too-few organizations are willing to stand, as RoCo is, with vulnerable artists through the dangerous attention so the useful kind of attention can happen.

A wall that gently juts into the center space holds the work of Napa-based Arleene Correa Valencia, whose embroidered, family-based work explores separation, loss, and longing.

These portraits show various dynamics of family members holding one another close. Formed from hand-stitched, donated fabric, they’re silhouettes of adults and children engaged in an embrace. Their identities are obscured, but their stories are writ large through the tragically endemic reality they’ve faced.

The works are based on family snapshots that Valencia reworked and embroidered, Cease said.
“In many instances, she's using fabrics that were given to her by specific people in her community, and it's all intended to somewhat ambiguously represent the loss of a family member — very intentionally not clear who's on what side of what border and for what reason,” he said, “but a way for her to illustrate the experiences of many families.

Valencia’s father came to work in the US while she was still living in Mexico, and her art forms an homage to him, Cease explained. It integrates some parts of his construction uniforms into the pieces — that warm gray, reflective material from uniform vests subtly insists upon being seen in the right light.

“Each piece presents an incomplete family snapshot where absent figures represent the lives interrupted by borders, policies, and immigration enforcement,” Cease said. “It isn’t clear where the person missing from the frame has gone, or who is on which side of what border fence.”
To the bereft children in the images, none of those details matter. It’s just a confusing and devastating loss.

Reader, I wanted to touch them, embrace them. Place a hand on their shoulders. Whisper in their ears that we see them, that we give a shit.

IN THEIR OWN WORDS

Around the corner, a RoCo-produced installation brings together nearly 100 immigrant interviews recorded by 13 local videographers.
You can only experience this particular part of the exhibition in the gallery, as it will never be viewable online or elsewhere — a sharply intentional move by RoCo in order to ensure participant privacy and safety.
This video work in which interviewed participants open up about their experiences as immigrants, with their backs turned to the viewers, is presented on two screens with listening stations.

Reader, I wanted to touch them, embrace them. Place a hand on their shoulders. Whisper in their ears that we see them, that we give a shit.

Immigrants’ experiences are not monolithic, but there are common themes, because we all want the same things: Safety, security, needs met, an enduring sense of self and belonging in culture; connection. And then there are the commonalities they didn’t ask for: Nostalgia, fear, loss, persistent hope, and the hard-scrabble ways they have to work out survival and support for family.

From these videos: Evelyn moved from Panama to Rochester for love, and spoke of the shock of winter weather and the pain of separation from her family and culture, and says she works to instill and maintain a sense of identity-pride in her strangers-in-a-strange-place children.

Others spoke their truths, originally from Mexico, Bhutan, Pakistan, Haiti.

Lars from East Germany got his green card but stopped the process of seeking citizenship last year because ICE began detaining petitioners during their meetings and hearings. He also fears the threat of being detained if he tries to visit home.

“It started to feel like the American Dream was becoming exclusive,” he confessed.

Abdul, a still-child from Yemen, came to the US at age four, and said he misses the food and traditions of home. Other kiddos spoke of experiencing racism, and learning how to camouflage themselves to fit in, for self-preservation.

So many more folks weigh in as immigrants to the ‘promised land,’ from Venezuela, Afghanistan, Canada, China; the interviews form an impressive cross-section of folks in dozens of diaspora communities. They share stories of gratitude, fears, adjustment, education, love, religious persecution, war, and the state of their destabilized home countries that still makes their souls sick.

Some shared the stories of their harrowing journey here through the almost insurmountable desert, or through avenues of grueling bureaucracy and its problematic processes, its absurdities and contradictions in the rules as DHS operates seemingly without repercussion under this administration’s ever-encroaching, ever-nebulous code.

Some others state that their quality of life here is better, though their related struggles and fears are loud.

One young woman, whose parents are agricultural workers, talked of the daily stress of not knowing if her mom and dad will make it home from work each night or become among the disappeared.

One of the 13 community interviewers tapped by RoCo, Mubaraka Mohammadi, spoke with me about her life and described herself as an amateur photographer and refugee, originally from Daykundi, Afghanistan.

Following the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban in August 2021, Mohammadi at the tender age of 26 fled her home country. She spent nearly two years living as a refugee in Belgium before finally receiving her visa and arriving in the United States in September of 2023.

Today, she works as a Community Program Director with Keeping Our Promise, an organization committed to the resettlement of wartime allies from so-called conflict zones.

“I entered this field initially because I was looking for a job,” she said. ”Although I did not intentionally pursue this career path, it eventually became closely connected to a goal I developed after experiencing the many challenges of starting a new life in this country.”

A perhaps hidden trial of emigrating is that a person’s education and work experience are not immediately recognized and honored, if at all, when seeking honest work where they’ve landed.

“One of the biggest challenges refugees face when they arrive in the United States is finding employment that aligns with their skills, experience, and education,” she said. “Many refugees come with years of professional experience and valuable skills gained in their home countries, yet they often struggle to find jobs that recognize their qualifications.”

Mohammadi continued, “I had years of experience working with nonprofit organizations in the education and sports fields, and I could communicate effectively in English. However, the first job I found was in a manufacturing company, where I was responsible for ordering nuts and bolts and earned close to minimum wage.”

Once Mohammadi was in the United States, one of the first things she asked her caseworker was if she could have an opportunity to volunteer her time for the sake of others like her.

“I wanted to demonstrate my abilities, show that I was willing to learn, and share the fact that I already had valuable work experience,” she said.

And she brought these personal experiences to the work she does for others who are displaced.

“My experience helped me understand how important it is to create meaningful opportunities for refugees and newcomers,” she said. “They should not have to start from zero simply because they have moved to a new country. Their previous work experience, education, and skills should be recognized and valued. Sometimes, all they need is an opportunity to demonstrate what they can do.”

Mohammadi aims to support fellow refugees and immigrants every day as they navigate unfamiliar systems, overcome challenges, and re-build their lives in this country.

“Having gone through many of these same experiences myself, I understand how overwhelming it can be to start over in a new place,” she said. “I know firsthand how important it is to have someone who understands your journey and can guide you along the way. Being able to offer that support to others and help them navigate the system, just as I had to do when I first arrived, makes this work especially meaningful to me.”

FINDING HOME IN THE WILDERNESS OF THE NEW

Rochester Contemporary Art Center's public open call for work about coming to this country is fleshed out in a sub-exhibit within this exhibit, “(I’m)migration: Community Artists Share Their Experience.” All works submitted to the call for art were accepted into the show, and though the ages of participants were not formally collected, Cease said the show includes everyone from school-children through elders.
Installed in the LAB Space, this volume of artwork speaks of beauty and pain, hope and longing, memory and cultural richness. There are dazzling colors and patterns, shadows of former lives and the great unknown future, and a spectrum of humanity working through the complications of migration: Relief and loss. Relief and grief. Carrying onward.

And, as a balm, there’s this snuggly little space right in the center of the gallery, where Anaglog, led by Sean Mulligan — a local musician you should definitely follow — has set up “Sound of Sanctuary,” launching a nine-track debut album co-created with five first-generation and immigrant artists.

Sat in a nice, big-pillowy space, viewers are invited to hear the complex layers of sound, both uplifting and dancy. Sanctuary, indeed. A gentle celebration of culture, bombastic and true.

Cease avidly approached some artists for work to be included in this show. The photo and video art of Iranian brothers Saman and Sasan Oskouei, who as artists go by Icy and Sot, were among his requests.

I originally knew these brothers from the Wall Therapy artist cohort. The founder of that mural festival, Dr. Ian Wilson, brought them to Rochester to create poignant and uplifting paintings on our city’s walls. Icy and Sot have since moved on to defiant installations and documentation of the moments we’re living through.

Here, their work is clever in a devastating way. A set of photos documenting their installations flank a central video called “Border Wall,” which depicts a barrier, reflected in a mirror the brothers set into the landscape, being smashed by a rock heaved at the wall’s reflection. It’s cathartic and frankly, makes one want to follow through on that imitated threat. I watched the short, repeating video for a long time, shaking my head in undying agreement. “I reached out to them specifically because of this work,” Cease said. “It's a surrogate wall that they are able to destroy in one dramatic throw of a rock.”

The surrounding photos show the brothers’ other artistic interventions in these too-familiar landscapes. The one that pierced my heart the most is an image of an ineffectual boat. It’s a metal frame, with curved sides built of airy chain link fence. It can bear no one safely over water. The message is clear: Desperation and danger twisted up into a symbol of hope, and a world of people that will turn away from the reality of parents and children drowning in their attempt to reach sanctuary.

There’s much more to be viewed in the middle of the gallery space, but I must note that the show is physically bookended by two works of documentation that show individual faces, as well as the trauma response from the community. With Bustamante at the front of the space, the response was successful, so far. At the back end, we encounter the ongoing impact of the trauma that fascism is forcing on us.

In a private viewing space at the rear of the gallery, Bloomfield-based Worldwide Documentaries presents the work, “When They Come for Me,” providing a brief yet jarring introduction to palpable terror.

If none of this has been enough to convince you of the reality of our mutual humanity, the pathos payload comes in the form of this short film, screened on a five-minute loop behind a black curtain, in a hyper-intimate space RoCo dedicates to film and documentary art. The work deftly covers the standoffs between ICE/DHS agents and the legal representatives and good neighbors who advocate for victims of the state-sanctioned terror (when state-sanctioned becomes state-led) against this rampant state of violence.

Fair warning: it forefronts the trauma of children split from parents and left twisting in the wind. Uncomfortably but importantly, the documentarians reveal the moments of separation — chaos and brutal confusion, the screaming of bewildered children and parents rendered helpless — which in many cases has compounded the existent trauma of parents and kids who have borne who knows what in their former homes.

The doc pairs these brutal, unfeeling arrests with the vicious rhetoric of our current regime and its cronies. It’s a powerful, quick vignette of a ‘sanctuary city’ under siege, and an exploration of how Rochesterians have responded and defended one another.

Moving back into the center space, there is one of our local art-heart steadies. Jim Mott, an artist in ongoing support of the possibilities of deep community connection, presents “Detention Centers in the American Landscape: Seven Studies,” paintings that explore six detention centers and one planned site that has been on heavy news rotation, in downtown Rochester.

This project of Mott’s began when his friend Omar was detained. Omar’s current whereabouts are unknown, much to the massive anxiety of his family and friends.

Filling a massive strip of the wall are seven squares, each made of four square paintings depicting architectural details in vignettes of landscapes; the banality of evil, familiarity and subtly creeping fascism. Visual white noise depicted in grayscale. They are a hyper-local pairing to Dodds’ work; they reveal our national issue made regional. We are asked to think of who, who, who will be detained, taken from right next to us.

Turn right and spend some time with Annette Dragon’s “Resist or Surrender,” another gigantic oeuvre, this time featuring photographs that recognize local participation in immigrant-rights advocacy. Dragon’s focus on the big and the small protests (including one dedicated individual stationed daily under an overpass) shows a huge variety of people of all demographics who are all-in for one another.

And back toward the front, toward our exit from this time together, Pamela Araya’s wonderful triptych work, “Saints of Our Time” canonizes Liam Conejo Ramos, Bad Bunny, and Renee Good, in a bleeding tribute to the victims of all of this, and to the heroic work of known and newly-known people caught up in the mess or doing desperately important service to all of us: A child (essentially livestream-orphaned by ICE), a globally-respected artistic advocate, and a Good woman who stood against her killers, and fell.

Before studying and sitting with the work in this show, I didn’t anticipate needing to further crystalize my feelings about borders, immigration policy, and who ‘belongs’ here or anywhere. But I did need it, I did need to hear more, to widen my witnessing, and to think more deeply. These state-sponsored disruptions to individual lives may seem like little earthquakes, but each instance of the brutality being carried out in real time creates fissures throughout our lives, communities, and the world. We simply cannot look away.

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Rebecca Rafferty is an artist and journalist based in Rochester, where she writes about the consequential collisions of aesthetics and ethics. Her byline has appeared in CITY Magazine, Afterimage, Ceramics: Art & Perception, Artvoices Magazine, POST, 12oz. Prophet, Cornelia, and elsewhere. She was co-producer and host of CITY’s “art/WORK” arts conversation television series presented in collaboration with local NPR-affiliate WXXI, and has written and voiced arts and culture stories broadcast on Morning Edition, Weekend Edition, and All Things Considered. She lives in the city’s North Winton Village with her partner, trad musician and Irish folklorist John Ryan, and their two children, Aoife and Diarmuid.