LMNOPI Takes On The Manufactured “Border Crisis”

Street Art often reflects the people who live in a city; its’ interests, values, aspirations, ongoing debates, sentiments. With the resident of the White House in a sustained attack mode toward the poor and the brown skinned among us – the least empowered people in modern America – it’s a foregone conclusion that Street Artists are going to answer back in this city that is long celebrated as the capital of the “great American melting pot” of immigrants.

LMNOPI (photo © Jaime Rojo)

If our country is in a crisis – and by many accounts it is – it certainly isn’t due to the immigrants and the asylum seekers. You might want to look above on the power pyramid, instead of below.

Street Artist LMNOPI has rendered the human story behind the rhetoric on New York streets for most of the 2010’s – gradually evolving her style and acuity for nuance. Here are examples from a more recent campaign that brings us face to face with the people whom the misled poor are being hoodwinked into blaming for their misfortune.

In these small hand-colored drawings she captures the faces of those who are knocking at our door asking for help. Granted, LMNOPI is partial to the story, but do these folks look like the cause of the problems we are facing as a society?