Photo: FWD.us
Yehimi Cambrón ’14
“Monuments: We Carry the Dream” byYehimi Cambrón ’14 features of a series of portraits of the promising students from Freedom University, a nonprofit organization that provides college preparation classes, college and scholarship application assistance as well as leadership development for undocumented students in Georgia. Celebrating the humanity and resiliency of immigrants, the mural is a reminder that the power of their dreams transcends the borders of marginalization and anti-immigrant policies that try to criminalize them.
Alumnae, Art and Activism
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Atlanta is a city steeped in a history of civil rights, and Agnes Scott College is an institution steeped in a history of educating students to engage the intellectual and social challenges of their times. These two histories met with Off the Wall, a citywide mural project co-led by local arts organization WonderRoot and the Super Bowl Host Committee. Alumnae Yehimi Cambrón ’14 and Charmaine Minniefield ’95 were two of 11 muralists selected to create community-driven public art installations around the city that tell the stories of its civil rights legacy and the current fight for social justice. The murals were completed before Super Bowl LIII this past February, with Minniefield’s celebrating Ruby Doris SmithRobinson, who was a pillar of the Atlanta Student Movement and founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and with Cambrón’s highlighting the promise of young undocumented immigrants and the perseverance of freedom fighters of the civil rights movement, respectively. Both Minniefield and Cambrón were honored to participate in Off the Wall and contemplated what it meant to be included in the deeply meaningful initiative.
“This was an opportunity as an artist for me to represent the rich civil rights history of our city. It gave me a chance to work in communities and to highlight that important history and to use the national platform of the Super Bowl to address contemporary social justice issues that continue to plague our country today. I had a chance to reflect on the past by remembering the voices of youth activists of the civil rights movement in particular,” Minniefield says.
“Through Off the Wall’s process—from community conversations to conceptualization to the installation of the murals—I was able to multiply tenfold my activism and the social justice-based and narrative-based art projects that I have been working on,” Cambrón says. “I am a young Mexicana undocumented artist, and this identity is a huge point of pride for me. I want to take back my narrative and that of my parents, who are the original dreamers, and frame it in a
“Freedom Fighters” byYehimi Cambrón ’14 features inspirational words from civil rights leader and Atlanta native Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., with a sunrise in the background symbolizing hope and the dawning of a new day. Past and present fights for justice are represented with the figures, inspired by activists who participated in lunch counter sit-ins during the civil rights movement, risking arrest, and by undocumented youth mobilized in civil disobedience, risking deportation.
