Introduction: 

Where are you from? A simple question for many but, for those born of immigrant parents in a country different to their kin, it may carry more weight than what many have had to consider. For children born in America of immigrant parents, also known as second generation immigrants or second generation Americans, many simple questions concerning background and culture may cause some feelings of infliction in comparison to their non-immigrant related peers. With this project, I have made three typography portraits of second-generation Americans that reveal insight into their lives, expanding on their core ideas of “self” identity, heritage & tradition, and values & beliefs. The typography portraits are extracted from interview transcripts of the individuals discussing their experiences as second-generation Americans. 

Literature review: 

An inspirational artist for this project is Irene Pham. They created a series delving into struggles between first and second-generation immigrant families. This artist takes the idea of multiple cultures into their art by symbolically expressing the struggles they face within their own family, which are common with those faced by other second-generation children. The demonstration of this idea is conducted within the portraits. 

A work supporting this research is “Home: A Feeling Rooted in the Heart” It speaks how second-generation children “often have conflicts with parents or ethnic communities because [of] their American values and beliefs” and how within “the larger society, they constantly run into awkward situations where they are alienated or excluded as ‘forever foreigners.’” (Weimin and Wenju, pp. 2 & 30) A key takeaway the audience should understand from these artworks. 

Methods: 

The main artistic technique is typography. Typography is the method and art of ordering and manipulating type in a legible and appealing to meet a certain purpose, communicative and/or decorative. With typography, the interviews conducted are directly integrated with the artwork and better authentically represent the subjects. This insures genuine personal voice in describing themself and their experiences. Throught the assistance of Microsoft Transcribe feature; the Word document will be typed out for which the portrait was made on. For research, two one-hour long interviews were conducted with each of the three portrait subjects, investigations about the subjects and their cultures were done before and after each one to develop the interviews, and surveys were taken to provide basis for early research. 

Audience & Impact: 

The intended audiences for this project are immigrant or first-generation American parents, non-immigrants, and non-immigrant related or associated people. For the parents, they will understand how different, and often clashing, cultures are affecting their children. For the unrelated in any way to immigrants, they will develop an awareness of how the lives differ, though superficially second-generation live quite exactly to non-second generation.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge Harold Burgess, Heather-Erin Bremenstuhl, and all Arts Scholars Teaching Assistants in guiding me and in refining my project. I would like to give much thanks to Zeina Rahi and Kaylin Nguyen for being wonderfully willing participants in my research and collaborators in revisions. 

Reference List

Weimin Mo, and Wenju Shen. “Home: A Feeling Rooted in the Heart.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 38, no. 3, Sept. 2007, pp. 173–85. EBSCOhost, 

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-006-9023-3. 

Pham, Irene. “Eneriology Art: Illustration.” Eneriology Portfolio, eneriology.wixsite.com/portfolio. Accessed 7 Oct. 2024.