Art, Empathy, and Immigration: Hostile Terrain 94 Conversations at Wagner College

On Monday, April 28, 2025, Wagner College hosted the opening of an exhibit titled Hostile Terrain 94 Conversations. As one of over 150 locations to host the participatory art project organized by the Undocumented Migration Project, the exhibit functioned as a capstone for the course The Body, the Arts, and Shared Heritage, taught by professors Celeste Gagnon of the Anthropology Department and Sarah Scott of the Visual Arts Department. Students in the course had the opportunity to learn through community engagement experiences while working with community partners Catholic Charities and La Colemna. ​

Due to the current political climate, students were not able to work directly with immigrant and refugee clients. Instead, Catholic Charities and La Colemna offered to host on-campus workshops and learning sessions led by staff from these organizations. The course, which is supported by Project Pericles through the Mellon Periclean Faculty Leadership (PFL) grant, integrated art history, anthropology, and museum studies to explore decolonization, artifact trafficking, symbolic thought, and identity creation. Focusing on migration narratives, the culminating project of creating a Hostile Terrain 94 exhibit supported the goals of the course. 

The exhibit includes film biographies and works of art co-created by local community members, and research and reflections created by Wagner students. The installation asks students and other participants to bear witness and engage with and tell the story of individuals who perished while attempting to cross the U.S. southern border. The participatory element of the exhibit includes a 20-foot-long map of the Arizona/Mexico border. Participants handwrite the identifying information of recovered bodies who died between 2000 and 2024 on toe tags. The tags are color coded, white tags represent identified bodies, and orange tags for the approximately 1,300 unidentified bodies. Then, the tags are pinned to the exact location on the map where those individuals were found trying to cross the Sonoran Desert. Students called the experience of writing out the toe tags “emotional” and “sad.” Professor Gagnon noted that she was “surprised by the number of students who talked about how moving they found the experience of completing the tags to be. It seemed (as was hoped) that the act of completing these memorials allowed students to connect on a personal level with what might seem like a very distant ‘policy’ issue.”
Other elements of the exhibit included a collaborative painting by members of Catholic Charities Community Services Refugee Resettlement and students of the course. The piece is titled Collective Hope, as participants were asked to paint what brings them hope. Opposite the large map are 22 portraits of individuals who were interviewed about their experiences with immigration. With these interviews, a short film was created in partnership with the Immigrant Civic Leadership Program to hear and share immigrant voices. 
In an ever-changing political climate for immigrants, it is crucial now, more than ever, to destigmatize what immigration looks like. This project intends to communicate the humanity of immigration. While some students found filling out the toe tags to be busy work, others found the project to have a significant impact on the way they view the topic of immigration. One student mentioned that throughout the process of creating the exhibit, it was “important to remember that the project is not just data or a deadline. These were real people with real lives.” This hands-on community engagement experience was an extremely impactful learning opportunity for students at Wagner College. 
Hostile Terrain 94 Conversations is supported by the Archaeological Society of Staten Island Endowment and Project Pericles.
To learn more about Hostile Terrain 94, visit their website at https://www.undocumentedmigrationproject.org/hostileterrain94