IMMIGRANT ARTIST NETWORK

What is the Immigrant Artist Network?

The Immigrant Artist Network convenes immigrant artists and their comrades across all borders and disciplines to co-create peer-based creative, personal, and professional development, aid, and support.

Since our inception in 2021 by artist Rupy C. Tut and Queerly Complex's Jason Wyman in Fall 2021, the Immigrant Artist Network has:

  • convened a volunteer-run Advisory Board of Immigrant & Comrade Artists to develop all the IAN programs,
  • designed and facilitated two free, cohort-based Virtual Salons for Immigrant Artists to give and receive feedback on works-in-progress, and
  • facilitated a four-month, drop-in creative space to explore new techniques and ideas,  
  • practiced consensus-based decision-making to co-create all the Immigrant Artist Network offers. 

The Immigrant Artist Network started as a project of Queering Dreams, which is fiscally sponsored by Independent Arts & Media. In 2023, the Immigrant Artist Network is working towards becoming its own fiscally sponsored project. 

STAY IN THE KNOW ABOUT THE IMMIGRANT ARTIST NETWORK!

Sign for the Queerly Complex newsletter.

Who is the Immigrant Artist Network?

We are immigrant artists, which encompasses artists who are immigrants, first generation or second generation immigrants, artists creating work focused on immigrant issues and life, and draw from the immigrant experience in their creative inquiries.

We are comrades, who stand alongside and co-create with immigrant artists opportunities, experiences, and resources that lift up, center, and prioritize immigrant artists.  

We are people who are aligned around specific values & dreams.

We are a community of communities; we are not merely a professional network.
We are people of talents & capabilities & passions & resources.

What does the Immigrant Artist Network value?

The Immigrant Artist Network values: 

  • the plurality of our identities & our specific ways of creating,
  • the complexities of immigration experiences, 
  • the space we make & take & hold together as immigrant artists (and comrades) & the power it generates, and 
  • the creative freedom to not fit in / experimentation & growth.

What does the Immigrant Artist Network dream?

We dream of a distributive, mutual, interdisciplinary, creative development & exhibition-producing network of immigrant artists that:

  • fosters camaraderie among immigrant artists to ease their isolation, 
  • facilitates the process of giving & receiving meaningful feedback, 
  • encourages peer-based skill-sharing on producing virtual exhibitions & storytelling about their art,
  • reaffirms the power of immigrant artists telling & sharing their narratives & art on their own terms.

What is coming for the Immigrant Artist Network in 2023?

In 2023, the Immigrant Artist Network is working to: 

  • strengthen the distributive, peer-based leadership of the Network by becoming a fiscally sponsored project with an official Advisory Board,
  • host bi-monthly (every other month) creative play sessions for members of the Immigrant Artist Network,
  • host bi-months (every other month) peer-based professional development workshops facilitated by members of the Network for members of the Network, 
  • recruit and facilitate TWO Virtual Salons for Immigrant Artists (one in Spring and one in Fall), and 
  • publish a more public presence of the Immigrant Artist Network online. 

How can you sign up for the Immigrant Artist Network?

To stay in the know...

please sign-up for the Queerly Complex newsletter (Jason will send out information when it is available) or follow artist Rupy C. Tut on Instagram.

Queerly Complex & Jason Wyman are proud to be comrades to immigrant artists and commit to continue providing in-kind administrative support to the Immigrant Artist Network throughout all of 2023.