They Tried to Bury Us
8 x 10” color offset print
“This is one of the first and most popular banners made for the Protest Banner Lending Library, where Aram Han Sifuentes has been facilitating free and public protest banner making workshops and runs physical lending libraries of donated protest banners since 2016. More than 3,000 banners have been made in workshops, and there are Protest Banner Lending Libraries in cities all over the United States and Canada that house around 600 banners. It is an ongoing project where banners are constantly circulating, being checked out, used, and returned. This print is a collaboration between Han Sifuentes and Walls Divide Press.”
Aram Han Sifuentes is a fiber and social practice artist who works to claim spaces for immigrant and disenfranchised communities. Her work often revolves around skill sharing, specifically sewing techniques, to create multiethnic and intergenerational sewing circles, which become a place for empowerment, subversion and protest. Selected exhibitions include Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, Chicago; Chicago Cultural Center; Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis; MCA Denver; Moody Center for the Arts, Houston; and the Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles.
Aram is a 2016 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, 2016 3Arts Awardee, and a 2020 Map Fund Grantee. Her project, Protest Banner Lending Library, was a finalist for the Beazley Design Awards at the Design Museum (London, UK) in 2016. She earned her B.A. in Art and Latin American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and her M.F.A. in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently an Adjunct Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the 2020-2021 Artist-in-Residence at Loyola University Chicago.