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Such outsider viewpoints -- from new Americans and even Native Americans -- can influence others to see the world in a different light. To dramatize how the forces that ravaged the buffalo still exist, Native American sculptor Bob Haozous constructed 100 steel buffalo, then videotaped art-gallery patrons fighting to buy the pieces before they were sold out. Korean-American Nam June Paik, whose influential multimedia artworks incorporate TVs and computers, says he was talking about the information superhighway in his own work long before it became a catchword. And architect Maya Ying Lin, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, designed the black wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a stark monument that compels visitors not to revel in the glory of war, but to reflect on its sorrows.
Other artists have turned their sights on the nature of the immigrant experience itself. Choreographer Fagan's touring show Griot New York features sets by noted sculptor Martin Puryear and music by trumpet virtuoso Wynton Marsalis. Employing a multiethnic troupe, Griot seeks to capture the drama of immigration. Says Fagan: "It's a celebration of New York City, of West Indians, Indians and Africans, of big urban metropolises that are always being dumped on." Fagan also wrote a poem to illustrate the show's theme of diverse peoples traveling difficult routes to come together in one nation:
Ships Hold/ No Class
Reservations & plantations
concentration . . .
You/me/them/us/brethren/we/be
Celebrate
The celebration was a long time coming. To be an immigrant artist is to be a hyphen away from one's roots, and still a thousand miles away. But it is often that link to a foreign land -- another way of seeing things -- that allows such artists to contribute ideas to American culture that are fresh and new. That slim hyphen, that thin line that joins individual Americans to their past, is also what connects all America to its future.