The Official Unofficial Voting Station: Voting for All Who Legally Can’t

About the Exhibition:

Experience the act of voting as it could be: broad, inclusive, and cause for celebration. The Official Unofficial Voting Station is an idealized online polling place created by artist-activist Aram Han Sifuentes. A wide-open extension of democracy, the playfully designed voting station welcomes everyone to cast a symbolic ballot—regardless of the legal barriers that prevent approximately ninety-two million people in the United States from participating in elections. Make your voice heard online and join an aspirational voting movement from home, with custom “I Voted” stickers and more, all designed by the artist and sent to Skirball participants upon request. Keep an eye on the online tally as Sifuentes counts your ballots through the election season!

Following two sold-out, artist-led online workshops offered by the Skirball this past summer—in which participants created their own fabric protest banners—The Official Unofficial Voting Station: Voting for All Who Legally Can’t represents the next phase of a 2020–2021 collaboration with Sifuentes, anchored in the multi-stage exhibition Talking Back to Power: Projects by Aram Han Sifuentes (fall 2021 opening date TBA).

About the Artist:

Aram Han Sifuentes is a multidisciplinary fiber, social practice, and performance artist who works to claim spaces for immigrant and disenfranchised communities. As an immigrant herself, Sifuentes often creates work that revolves around skill sharing to create multiethnic and intergenerational spaces for empowerment, conversation, subversion of oppressive power structures, and protest.

Her work has been presented in exhibitions, performances, and workshops at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), the Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis, MO), Illinois State University Galleries (Normal, IL), Asian Arts Initiative (Philadelphia, PA), Chung Young Yang Embroidery Museum (Seoul, KR), and the Design Museum (London, UK). Sifuentes is a 2016 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow and Adjunct Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently Artist in Residence at Loyola University Chicago.