If you have the time, visit the Otis Library's Community Room and enjoy the quiet brilliance of the New London Interdistrict School for Arts and Communication (I.S.A.A.C.) student-produced exhibit Community Faces: Humanizing the Immigrant Label.
It'll be there through the end of the month. And if you don't have the time, make it. This is important and deserves to be seen by all of us.
The introduction on the school's website explains that it's "a solutions-based learning expedition exploring community stereotypes and how to make change as global citizens."
It's very understated. Ten black-and-white portraits of every kind of people that each of us passes on the street every day and never give a second glance to, much less a second thought or dare I say a first conversation.
The photos are silent but they shout in a way that our current technology makes both possible, inevitable and most importantly very valuable. Each portrait offers the viewer the subject's name and where their journey to the United States began. As you enter, to your left, you'll meet Mary from Scotland and work your way around the room to Lisbeth from Peru.
Between those two, you'll meet Fiyin, Paloma, Joslaine, Esperanza, Victoria, Pietro, Nancy, and Luqmao. Through the use of QR codes on each portrait, you'll have the opportunity for each of them to tell you the story of themselves, just one person to another, which is really the root of all history.
Everything you are seeing and reading is produced by ninety-four 6th grade students at I.S.A.A.C. under the mentorship of their social studies teacher, Michael Kuczenski, and should help quiet that recurring muttered worry about 'kids these days.' By the time you've examined their work, I think you'll agree they've both learned and taught. These kids are ass-kicking awesome and the easy ability with which they utilize their all the tools at their disposal to remind us that we are so many people in the same device is beyond amazing.
In Norwich, whose public school students speak twenty-nine different languages, where within a two block radius of Franklin Square you can have a completely different 'ethnic lunch' every day for close to two weeks, where we are observing Celebrate Diversity Week this week (kicked off Monday evening by the Norwich Rotary at Howard T. Brown Park), we cannot ever be distracted from the importance each of us is in order for all to succeed as a community, a city, a state, and a nation.
Insisting that differences of race, creed, gender, and color don't result in biases that create walls in our minds and hearts if not at our borders is delusional and destructive. We can and must do better.
The Community Faces exhibit points us in the direction we need to go. It's not a coincidence that the students chose photos of people smiling. Because as a song once noted, "If you smile at me, I will understand, cause that is something everybody everywhere does in the same language."
-bill kenny
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