Marcos Ferreira Batista, 44, hadn’t sketched in more than a decade. But as he settled into a new city while living at a sprawling migrant shelter in Clinton Hill, he felt compelled to draw again, tormented by the faces of migrants whose paths he’d crossed on his two-month long journey from Chile to the United States.
Now Batista’s etchings in charcoal and pencil are part of a show at the Brooklyn megashelter where he lives that’s run by the city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation. The agency set up an exhibition space in a vacant room next to a laundry facility in the 10-building complex that houses around 3,200 people.
After an initial reception for invited community members, the show, first reported on by The New York Times, was open to shelter residents for several days and is now open only for special visits. Batista’s works are displayed along with the bold surrealist paintings of another artist living at the shelter, 67-year-old Roger Miranda, a Venezuelan painter and former professor who made his way to New York City six months ago.
The collaboration happened organically, said Santiago Bedoya Velez, the shelter’s director. Miranda approached staff with a painting he’d sold and was looking for a safe place to store it while the buyer came to retrieve it. Staff were impressed and circulated pictures of the artwork among shelter leadership. Other staff then learned about Ferreira Batista’s paintings, which he’d been working on in his shelter room.
“I’m hoping that we can also do it for other guests,” Velez said. “Hopefully this inspired them to be able to come out and say, ‘Hey, I am a painter as well, I am a singer. I write music.’ Not to be afraid of using their talent to pursue their dreams,” he said.
Batista’s work in the exposition depicts intimate portraits mostly of young children, including one young girl crying who he’d been told was recently raped in Panama while crossing through the jungle and another whose face is partially submerged in the waters of the Rio Grande.
In each portrait, Batista starts with mostly blackened paper, with the faces emerging from the shadows through rays of light in white. It’s a style Batista traces back to his childhood. Raised in a strict household in northern Brazil, Batista said he was often punished by being sent to kneel in a dark room.
But even in the darkness, “there was always a little light, the light of the sun” he told THE CITY in Spanish.
Those glimmers of light were there when he made his way north last year from Chile, after spending about 15 years running the lights and sounds for a circus traveling around South America.
“When you make that crossing, you always have to be hiding in the shadows so the authorities don’t see you, so other people can’t see you and do you harm,” he recalled. “No matter where I was — in a shelter, in a detention cell — the sun always came out because there’s always a hole and the sun always gets in.”
Now he’s illuminated the faces he glimpsed along the way. Batista has been able to stay at the Hall Street shelter through a medical exemption to the city’s 30-day limit on shelter stays, due to ongoing mental health struggles and multiple suicide attempts, he said. He shares a small room with three others, in a facility where most people live in cavernous dormitories with hundreds more. His roommates are accommodating and let him spread out his drawing materials and use the room as a studio when they’re out for the day. Painting, he said, has served him as a form of therapy.
“I had to find something to change my perspective,” he said.
Batista had been selling his artworks on the Brooklyn Bridge, but was barred from doing that after the city ejected vendors from the highly-trafficked footbridge early this year. Now he hopes to one day compile his artwork and written remembrances of his journey into a book.
‘An Existential Path’
Across from Ferreira Batista’s artwork is that of Miranda who’s brought glimpses of the ivory tower to his shelter cot.
“As a humanist, as a painter, I shouldn’t have taken this path,” he said in Spanish. Miranda was drawn to art as a pre-teen, and painted and taught art history, graphic design, drawing for three decades before leaving Venezuela in 2016, as the reliability of his job as an academic began to implode along with the country’s economic collapse. His political beliefs also put him in opposition to the rule of strongman President Nicholas Maduro.
Before making his way to the United States last year, he spent time eking out a living in Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and Peru for nearly a decade selling his artwork and teaching classes where he could, but found he couldn’t make enough money to buy supplies to continue painting. He decided to leave for the United States last year.
“As a humanist, like a writer or a poet, my work is part of an existential path,” he said. “If you don’t do what you’re supposed to with your life, you remain forever in anonymity.”
He spent two months of his seven-month journey to the United States in Mexico City living at a migrant shelter and taking in the artwork of the giants of Mexican muralism like Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros while painting works of his own.
Soon after his arrival in New York City, Miranda started painting under the elevated Brooklyn-Queens Expressway adjacent to the Hall Street shelter, using supplies offered to him by local community groups. Painting inside his massive dormitory was challenging, he said.
“It’s not easy to paint in an environment where there’s so much noise,” he said. “It’s not a place that favors this, because my work requires a high level of meditation and I spend hours on that level.”
Eventually, shelter staffers let him set up a small artists’ studio around his cot, which is now tucked away in a quiet corner of one of the sprawling warehouse floors, next to a window, offering slightly more tranquility than a typical cot.
“It is an art that is not decorative,” Miranda said of his work. “Nor does it correspond to a global commercial function.” He’s hoping to work on larger canvases “so I can really express my technical, historical and philosophical knowledge, which compliments the trajectory of my 47-year-long career,” he added.
Miranda said he hoped his artwork might inspire young kids at the shelter to apply themselves to their new lives in New York City, and dedicate themselves to their studies.
“Engineers, scientists, artists, musicians, writers, poets,” he said. “This mass migration brings with it all types of people.”
