Hidden in Plain Site: Creative Referendums to Human Trafficking
Artist Installations, temporarily sited in cargo containers, Angels Gate Park
April 26 – June 6, 2015Artistic solutions, also known as creative referendums, developed by nine members of an Artist Team are framed within two cargo containers temporarily sited in Angels Gate Park overlooking the Port – an alluring metaphor given that some people smuggled into the US arrive in shipping containers.
April Williams
Consume and Emergence
Paintings
Proposed Referendum:
Challenge the cool pimp, and support Restoration Diversion Services, an organization in Compton on the Long Beach Boulevard ‘Track,’ whose volunteers rescue young women ‘in the life’ who have been coerced to sell their bodies.
The character of the pimp in American media has long been viewed as a cool, suave macho man firmly in control of his stable of ‘grateful’ girls who would be lost without him. In reality, sex trafficking in America is brutal and dehumanizing. The glorified American pimp is no better or different than a sex trafficker in Asia, Africa or Europe. The artist has been investigating and challenging the image of the glorified American pimp through a series of small and large-scale oil paintings on un-stretched canvas.