Here to Stay: Education is Liberation Monarch
April 2019
Living Walls, the City Speaks
Location: 2750 Buford Hwy NE, Atlanta, GA 30324
Artist Statement:
I painted the first Education is Liberation Monarch mural in 2017 but it was destroyed by the owners of the wall within a year after I fixed the #HereToStay under my signature that had been vandalized.
With the support of Living Walls and my community, the Education is Liberation Monarch found at home at the Latin American Association. The Education Is Liberation Monarch is a design I created for an earlier project with Teach for America’s DACAmented educators. Through that project, I became aware that I had created a universal symbol for education and migration.
Immigration activists around the world identify with the monarch butterfly. They have adopted it as a symbol of liberty and their own journeys in life. Monarchs traverse thousands of miles across the borders of North America each year. Each year, these small but mighty creatures migrate north to spend their summers in Canada, and the last and strongest generation makes the entire journey back home to Michoacán, Mexico for sanctuary in the winter. Activists empathize with the duality of the butterfly’s freedom. Its delicate, but resilient status. The monarch cannot resist its nature - and to survive - it must migrate. And in migrating, it reminds us that we have the power to define home for ourselves.
The text in the center of the mural now reads, “Here to Stay” in English and Spanish—Aquí Estamos! This mural’s journey is a testament to the resilience of immigrants: we constantly have to reinvent ourselves and redefine home, much like the monarch butterfly, and we have to create home for ourselves wherever we are.
