Author’s note: The artist profile below was originally published in Hard Copy 12 in 2021. Gerardo Peña made the print for that issue and its subject matter has, unfortunately, only become more relevant since then. We posted a poll about the Northwest Detention Center recently and found that a third of respondents either didn’t know we had an ICE detention center in Tacoma or had known for less than a year.
A lot of the big ICE raids that we’re seeing on the news are happening in other parts of the country but Tacoma has been a major part of this system since the prison opened in 2004. With capacity for over 1,500 detainees, it’s one of the largest in the country. The federal government spends billions of dollars to keep facilities like this open. This means private corporations like the GEO Group (which manages 17 ICE facilities in the US) are making enormous profits from the detention of immigrants in Tacoma.
This is compounded by the fact that the detention center pays $1-$5 per day for detainee labor including cleaning, laundry, and kitchen work. GEO Group has been fighting a lawsuit since 2017 that would compel them to pay workers minimum wage.
This painting is important, its message is important, and the work Gerardo continues to do is important. Pay attention, stay informed, and follow Gerardo’s work on his website, Instagram, and TikTok.
Gerardo Peña is a rare kind of artist. His work is heavily symbolic but he leaves interpretation up to the viewer. The subject matter is often viewed through a political lens but he’s not trying to push any political agendas. It simply is what it is.
When we met up for an interview he told me, “My art has been politicized a lot, which is why I added a lot of abstract elements. I wanted to represent more how my mind is wired and let it be less politicized because the whole point of my paintings is that I see something I feel very passionate about and I paint it. It’s more of a humanitarian issue, less like I’m picking sides.”
That doesn’t mean that his art isn’t meant to evoke feelings. “When I became a public artist, I wanted to make murals that pushed the envelope, as a little slap in the face of racists,” he explained. “And I didn’t think that representation is literally all it would take.”
Gerardo came to this country from Mexico as an undocumented immigrant when he was five years old. As a result, his life here has always been somewhat precarious. Life as a DACA recipient got harder in 2016, though, when the Trump administration put the program squarely in its crosshairs. It was at that time that he started taking his artistic career seriously.
“It felt very unstable,” he recalled. “Everything was very uncertain. Like any moment now they could dissolve the program and I’d have to leave the country. So I wanted to build something. If I become an artist, I can sell my paintings anywhere in the world.”
His paintings and more recent sculpture work often represent his culture and community with Mexican iconography as well as Aztec deities. If you follow his work you’ll notice a lot of monarch butterflies. This goes hand in hand with his motifs of life, death, and migration. When I first met Gerardo and presented the idea of him painting something that addressed the Northwest Detention Center, I wasn’t sure how he would react. I also had not realized the gravity of what I was asking him to do.
I knew that this issue was on the minds of a lot of people in Tacoma and I figured if any artist could pay it the attention it deserved, it would be him. The timing of Governor Inslee’s recent signing of HB 1090, putting an expiration date on for-profit prisons in Washington State, made it all the more timely. Gerardo was intrigued and immediately came up with some interesting concepts.
As it turned out, though, the project would be much more challenging than either of us had anticipated. After working on the painting for a few weeks, he told me how he had previously avoided going to the detention center in person. He scrapped the first two concepts of the painting before landing on the current version. It wasn’t until he went there in person and spoke with a friend of his working at La Resistencia that he really got a feel for what the painting had to be.
In a lot of ways, this painting conflicts with his typical style. The subjects, normally full of warmth and vitality, are now cold and sterile. Bold colors and natural elements are replaced with concrete and linoleum; sunshine with fluorescent bulbs.
Even the scene in the background that so many of us enjoy in our day-to-day lives serves only as a reminder of the freedoms that the detainees have been stripped of. The kite is both a symbol of the tenuous relationship detainees have with the outside world as well as a reference to prison culture. When a detainee makes a written request (either to another prisoner, someone on the outside, or to a guard—often anonymously) it’s known as “flying a kite.”
When I first saw the finished painting, it felt like it was missing something. I felt like people who saw it wouldn’t understand the point of the whole thing. I asked him about including a logo of the Geo Group with their ironic slogan, “Continuum of Care.” He explained that he had thought of that but he felt like it was just too obvious. He was right. “I want people to see this hanging on a wall and ask questions,” he told me.
Giving it away like a labored movie plot line would take something significant away from the art. To anyone familiar with the detention center, the overall theme might be clear. There is enough subtlety left, though, to spark a conversation.
With the notable exception of his butterfly girl painting, most of his work has avoided the direct topic of ICE detention facilities. I learned later that that painting took him a year to complete, partly because of his learning how to work with oil paints for the first time but also because of the deeply personal nature of the subject matter.
“My art will always be a commentary on what’s happening around me, whether it gets politicized or not,” he told me. “It could be my friends in there. My family. It could be me.”
