Art House North and Cara Megan Lewis of the artist collaborative Díaz Lewis will host a workshop on Tuesday, June 18. Participants will be invited to design a pillow to contribute to the ever-growing pile that comprises the artwork 34,000 Pillows.   

In 2009, to demonstrate its priority to enforce immigration law, the US Congress mandated that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) maintain a quota of 34,000 detained immigrants per day in its 250 facilities around the country.  The mandate also known as “the bed quota” inspired Díaz Lewis’ participatory artwork where pillows created from clothing donated by undocumented immigrants, prior detainees, and their allies form a collective patchwork of individual experiences.

Each pillow is priced and sold at $159 to reflect the average amount of taxpayer money spent each day by Congress to detain one person. 100% of the proceeds for this project support the efforts of national and local immigration organizations whose efforts are dedicated to revealing the injustices of the detention centers and to restoring human dignity to those formerly detained.

The workshop is an important facet of the project and participants learn about the issue, while designing a pillow which is later sewn together by Díaz Lewis. The workshop is free and open to anyone who would like to participate.

If you are interested, please RSVP and then bring a bag of clothes you'd like to donate for the project. We will likely need around 60 articles of clothing if possible.

Hope to see you there!

Learn more about the project here: https://hyperallergic.com/495661/34000-pillows-project-diaz-lewis/