About Almost Home

Ryan Mendoza’s installation is a house, a work of art, a symbol and testimony to it weather. A reassuring and recognizable architectural object in its intrinsic meaning, family, intimacy, safety in the essentiality of its structure, but this closed house protects a space and a time in the name of those who lived it. Rosa Parks symbol of the struggle for civil rights is the house itself and it is in the artistic action that the house becomes a body and its empty space, enclosed between the wooden walls, the soul of the African American woman who keeps saying “I don’t think I should have to stand up. You must never be fearful about what you are doing when it is right “. The suggestions inextricably linked to the house are transformed into a succession of images strong and engaging that call our attention, our civic commitment, the value of conscious actions still needed today. We turn around an inside that wants us to be present and participate. The door of the house is closed, the windows are darkened by curtains, there is nothing to glimpse all there is to experience is out from when it was built in the 1920’s to today, and not just at Pine Level in Alabama, where it was built, but everywhere in the world. For the project shared with the Morra Greco Foundation, the students were offered a historical and thematic path of knowledge linked to the work of Ryan Mendoza Almost Home the Rosa Parks Project. The participants in the workshops painted canvases using only acrylic white, inspired by a research of objects from the 1950s and hypothesizing their use in Rosa Parks’ home environment. The canvases were exhibited in the courtyard of the Royal Palace where Rosa Parks’ house was installed and a short video was shot that put together the performance with the children of the Dedalus intercultural center and the work of Ryan Mendoza.