Arrivals & Afterlives

Melissa Dvozenja-Thomas, Executive Director, Arts Mid-Hudson

When we leave one place for another, what comes with us? We can pack some things in a suitcase, but we also carry things less visibly: family stories, languages, recipes and rituals, beliefs, memories, images, music, and traditions passed from one generation to the next. Some remain remarkably intact. Others change with distance and time. And some take on entirely new meaning in a new place.

Those questions are at the center of Arrivals & Afterlives, an exhibition at Unison Arts Center in New Paltz bringing together five Hispanic immigrant artists whose work explores migration not simply as a journey from one place to another, but as an ongoing process of becoming. Through photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, craft, and artist’s books, the exhibition considers what survives, what changes, and what can be lost along the way.

For Cesar Kastro, those connections reach back generations. Drawing on ancestral objects and contemporary Colombian hip-hop, Kastro explores “blood memory” and how histories can survive displacement. Pre-Columbian objects become not relics of the past, but starting points for considering what happens when ancestral knowledge finds a new voice.

Virginia Lavado explores another unreliable but powerful thing we carry: stories. Her intricate pen-and-ink drawings combine memories, dreams, mythology, and humor, often featuring the trickster, a figure capable of moving between identities and disrupting expectations. Her work suggests that perhaps stories survive precisely because they change each time they are remembered and retold.

Memory becomes something literally made by hand in the work of Esperanza Cortés. After learning from her mother how to create roses from cornstarch, the Colombian-born artist transformed that family tradition into a sculptural language examining memory, tenderness, sacrifice, labor, and absence. A lesson passed from mother to daughter becomes both artwork and archive.

Photography provides Camilo Rojas with another way to consider fragments and memory. By isolating eyes, mouths, and gestures from found posters, or photographing trees so they begin to resemble bodies, Rojas removes familiar images from their expected surroundings and allows us to see them differently.

For Marielena Ferrer, migration intersects with cultural identity, ritual, and loss. Her work draws upon traditions including Venezuela’s Dancing Devils of Yare, while Broken Monarchs II uses wounded, colorless monarch butterflies to reflect on children separated from their families at the U.S.–Mexico border. Here, migration isn’t romanticized: arrival or release cannot necessarily restore what has already been lost.

Together, the artists resist the idea that migration has a tidy beginning and ending. Instead, Arrivals & Afterlives asks visitors to consider the complicated ways people continually remake home, identity, and memory. And perhaps those questions extend beyond the experience of migration. We all inherit stories. We all carry pieces of the people and places that shaped us. We all decide, consciously or not, which pieces we preserve, which we transform, and which eventually become something entirely new.

If you go:
Arrivals & Afterlives
Unison Arts Center, 9 Paradies Lane, New Paltz, NY
Through October 24, 2026
Thursday to Saturday
1:00 - 5:00 p.m. or by appointment
Contact: 845-255-1559
www.unisonarts.org/arrivals