Criselda Vasquez, an artist known for a celebrated painting that explores her parents’ experiences as immigrants, said her father was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement last month.
Vasquez’s 2017 work, “The New American Gothic,” depicts her parents, who are from Mexico, standing in front of a red pickup truck while holding cleaning supplies and a gardening hoe. Her piece is a reimagining of the iconic “American Gothic” painting by Grant Wood.
“My paintings are best described as visual comments on the hidden daily reality of the Mexican-American experience,” Vasquez wrote on social media in 2018. “These portraits and still lifes reveal my family in their own authentic environment and expose how I live in two worlds.”
Now, the California-based artist has said ICE detained her father on March 31 while he was traveling to work.
“Our entire family is heartbroken, and my mother is completely devastated,” Vasquez wrote in an April 3 Instagram post. “My father has lived in the United States for 40 years. He is a devoted husband, father, and grandfather, and the hardest-working person I know.”
Vasquez and her family “have since made contact with him and know which detention facility he is being held in,” she told the art magazine Hyperallergic last week.
“He has become a role model not only to his four children, all of whom are United States citizens, but also to many people he has come across,” she told the magazine.
Vasquez’s family also launched a GoFundMe, where donors have contributed more than $75,000 as of Monday afternoon.
“We are equal parts devastated and terrified. If possible, please consider supporting our family’s efforts to cover fees related to his case, and the day-to-day expenses that his wages would normally have covered,” the GoFundMe page reads.
Vasquez has not publicly disclosed her father’s name. The Independent has contacted Vasquez and ICE for comment.
In “The New American Gothic,” Vasquez sought to capture how her parents’ expressions “deliver that sense of tiredness, resignation, and quiet acceptance,” according to a 2018 social media post.
“When my parents pose for these paintings, their faces are reduced to extremely raw and somehow vulnerable expressions,” she wrote. “Sadly, they strive to be invisible every day. They don’t have to pretend to illustrate the invisible.”
“They have dealt with constant rejection, suspicion and fear so long, that it seems now that it comes naturally to them,” she added.
Vasque hopes her work shows that “underneath all the politicization and undeserved labeling this community receives, these are regular people just like all of us.”
“In the long tradition of immigrants that come to the United States, they have made homes here and they are just trying to live a simple life with a bit of security and hopefulness for their children,” she wrote.
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