Michelle Angela Ortiz

MICHELLE ANGELA ORTIZ
Michelle Angela Ortiz will work in collaboration with Bella Vista Neighbors Association on "Our Market", a community centered, multi-layered public art project that will create video, digital archives, and installation/projections focused on supporting the immigrant vendors, business owners, and neighbors that work and reside in the 9th Street Market. This residency invests in the 9th Street Market by offering creative community-based strategies to tackle the issues of gentrification, racism, displacement, and erasure. Through this media work, the residency hopes to directly support the community's agency to own and decide how their stories will be shared.

BELLE VISTA NEIGHBORS ASSOCIATION 
The Bella Vista Neighbors Association (BVNA) improves Bella Vista's quality of life and strengthens community bonds. BVNA encourages civic involvement, provides a neutral and public discussion forum, preserves and augments our institutions and character, supports the delivery of government services, and promotes dialogue with elected officials. We are an all-volunteer, nonprofit, registered community organization (RCO).

Michelle’s Familias Separada is a public art project that focuses on the stories of families affected by detention and deportation in Pennsylvania. The current phase of her film is centered on families formerly detained at the Berks family prison for two years. The goal is to amplify the testimonials of the mothers and host community screenings and talkbacks throughout Pennsylvania to support the Shut Down Berks Coalition's efforts.

Michelle Angela Ortiz (ACG ’13, ’12, ’05, LTA ’08) has been invited by Taller Puertorriqueño to create a solo exhibition in May, her first solo exhibition in six years. Michelle has the opportunity to collaborate with an animator and video mapping projectionist to create some of the content of the exhibit. Quizás Mañana will examine memory and the act of narrative retelling through the creation of visual artifacts and installations.

Over 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States run the risk of deportation and their families being torn apart. Michelle’s project, Broken Families: Picking Up the Pieces, is a series of temporary site-specific public art works that will mark locations of immigrant families affected by deportations in Philadelphia. Through in-depth interviews of family members, each piece of created artwork will tell their stories and be documented through photographs and video. Finally, a virtual online map will spread awareness of the current unjust immigration system.

Michelle will create Aqui y Alla, a public art project that will explore the impact of immigration in the lives of Mexican immigrant youth in South Philadelphia in connection with youth in Chihuahua, Mexico.  This project seeks to work simultaneously on both sides of the border, Chihuahua and Philadelphia, to join the two cultural worlds through the vision of young people. Four artists from the Colectivo Rezizte (Juarez) and Colectivo Madrono (Chihuahua City) will work in collaboration with Michelle by guiding the youth (here and there) in the creation of a collaborative permanent mural in South Philadelphia.

Michelle is a visual artist who combines elements of painting, printmaking and drawing in her work. She has painted murals all over Philadelphia and in South America and Fiji. Raised in South Philadelphia, Michelle, who attended the Moore College of Art, is a first-generation, bi-cultural child of a Colombian woman and a Puerto Rican man, who did not graduate from high school. As a child Michelle often felt like an outsider. She believes that "outsider status" has informed her work and helped her to understand the experiences of children and people in the U.S. and in South America. This has shaped her experience and practice as an artist, change maker and teacher. Michelle sees social change as part of her creative process as well as the final product. An example would be her work Where Girls Grow Strong. At 45' x 60' it is Michelle's tallest mural and one of the first murals in Center City created by a Latina muralist. This project is particularly transformative due to Michelle's use of all-female assistants, including 450 girl scouts, to paint the mural.

Michelle will conduct a series of arts workshops for members of the Las Gallas collective to create visual works that will inspire the collective’s performance piece, “Kidnapping Frida and Che” about the portrayal of Frida Kahlo and Ernesto “Che” Guevara in popular culture. The pieces will be shared in an exhibit encouraging a larger community to explore issues of appropriation of identity, immigration and growing up in the US.