The Committee on Cultural Affairs at Bucks County Community College will present “Better Together: A Community Lecture” with visiting artist Aram Han Sifuentes on Oct. 25 at 6:30 PM in the Gallagher Room at the Newtown Campus, located at 275 Swamp Road.

This event is free and open to the public.

Artist and activist Aram Han Sifuentes’s work confronts social and racial injustices, interweaving fiber, social practice, performance, and pedagogy to consider themes of immigration, labor, and protest. Many of her projects, such as the ongoing Protest Banner Lending Library, aim to make art more accessible to the disenfranchised, especially immigrants of color.

Since 2016, Sifuentes has brought communities together to sew protest banners, creating a creative outlet of resistance for those who cannot attend protests for their own safety. 

Sifuentes is a fiber and social practice artist who creates participatory projects that center 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.

Solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in Chicago, the Hyde Park Art Center, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, the moCa in Cleveland, and the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. 

She has received numerous awards including a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, 3Arts Award, 3Arts Next Level Award, Map Fund Grant, and Joyce Award. 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 BA in Art and Latin American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently a professor, adjunct, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a board member of the National Korean American Service & Education Consortium (NAKASEC) fighting for Citizenship for All 11 million undocumented immigrants and adoptees.

Learn more at Bucks County Community College.

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