An Open Letter To President Barack Obama
From H. Nelson Goodson
Taxpayers for Immigration Reform
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
December 15, 2009
Mr. President Barack Obama,
As I write this letter to you, more than 12 million of undocumented immigrants remain in the shadows within our borders. So be it, with my outmost respect and with the hope you might get an opportunity to actually read this letter before the year ends…
ADAMA is an hour long documentary film that will be broadcast on PBS in September 2011. The film follows the story of Adama Bah, a 16-year-old Muslim girl growing up in Harlem, who was detained by the FBI after she was accused of being a “potential suicide bomber”.
For many thousands of years people have been settling the Americas. The earliest hunted, gathered, fished, and raised families in small communities. The old tradition holds that people first entered the Americas over a land bridge from Siberia to Alaska about 14,000 years ago. Recent finds, however, put the date of the oldest human remains somewhere between 25,000 and 40,000 years ago. These earliest people were not really migrants in a strict sense because they simply widened their hunting areas over many generations, gradually moving into new territory as the population expanded and the animals they were tracking moved into new habitat.
The New American Leaders Project (NALP) is the only organization in the country specifically focused on preparing immigrants and their children for political leadership. Nearly one in five Americans is an immigrant or a child of immigrant parents. At NALP, we believe that through political engagement and leadership, immigrants and their children can help strengthen the fabric of American democracy.
Glenn Ligon: AMERICA is the first comprehensive mid-career retrospective devoted to this pioneering New York–based artist. Throughout his career, Ligon (b. 1960) has pursued an incisive exploration of American history, literature, and society across a body of work that builds critically on the legacies of modern painting and more recent conceptual art. He is best known for his landmark series of text-based paintings, made since the late 1980s, which draw on the writings and speech of diverse figures including Jean Genet, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesse Jackson, and Richard Pryor. Ligon’s subject matter ranges widely from the Million Man March and the aftermath of slavery to 1970s coloring books and the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe—all treated within artworks that are both politically provocative and beautiful to behold.
