TuftsPUBLIC: Jenny Polak

Jenny Polak makes site and community responsive art that reframes immigrant-citizen relations, amplifying demands for social justice. Originally from England, Polak’s family history of migration drives her to examine detention centers, racial profiling, and strategies for surviving hostile authorities. For the 2019/2020 academic year, Jenny Polak’s decentered public art project ICE Escape Signs, organized by the Tufts University Art Galleries and customized to Tufts University campuses, will be on view. This ongoing and evolving site-specific series is based on fire-escape signage and placed in buildings using their floor-plans. Drawing attention to the fact that people are living in daily fear of being caught in a raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the signs both place those not living with undocumented status in the shoes of those that do and shares the often-obscured reality of the undocumented lived experience. Originally conceived during the George W. Bush administration, when the Homeland Security Act led to the establishment of the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement now known as ICE, the project gains new relevance in the debates of the present. Polak worked directly with students at Tufts University to conceptualize this iteration, dialoguing about the overlapping realities of living undocumented or experiencing it through family members and communities, the potentialities and drawbacks of sanctuary city mandates, support systems available through the university, and evolving federal policies. What emerged is a complex terrain of navigation through anxiety and life-affirming community, and this signage opens a dialogue about what is necessarily hidden from public view.

Signage is sited at SMFA at Tufts and accompanied by a website at www.escapesignstufts.com. ICE Escape Signs have appeared at multiple venues nationally and internationally including NJIT School of Architecture, Newark, NJ; Tompkins County Public Library, Ithaca, NY; Queens Central Library Gallery, Jamaica, NY; Copenhagen Central Library, Denmark. This project is part of TuftsPUBLIC, an ongoing program of yearlong, temporary public art projects designed for spaces outside the Art Galleries.

Jenny Polak makes responsive art that reframes immigrant-citizen relations, amplifying demands for social justice. Originally from England, her art draws on her background in architecture and includes public and socially engaged projects such as architectural installations, drawings and useful commemorative objects. Her family history of migration drives her to examine detention centers, racial profiling, and strategies for surviving hostile authorities.

Polak’s collaborations and site-specific projects have been exhibited widely and awarded support by NYFA, the Graham Foundation for the Advanced Study of Visual Art and Franklin Furnace, among others. She has held artist residencies including with the National Park Service, Newark Museum, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.