Atlanta artist receives National Fellowship for New Americans

May 1st, 2023

Yehimi Cambrón Álvarez, an artist and educator, is one of a small number of people to receive the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. (Matthew Pearson/WABE)

Bright monarch butterflies surround five faces of immigrants painted on a mural overlooking the Home Depot Backyard at Mercedes-Benz Stadium.

Yehimi Cambrón Álvarez, the mural artist, looked up at one of the faces– it is molded after her father, inspired by a photo she took of him while she was a student at Agnes Scott College. The painted face stares back at her, showing a calm, solemn look.

“It’s important for me to allow the people in my murals to decide how they want to be depicted,” she said.

Cambrón Álvarez is an artist and educator born in Mexico and raised in Atlanta. An immigrant herself and a DACA recipient, she’s one of a small number of people to receive the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.

With it, she will get her master’s degree in print media at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and use her art to keep telling the complex stories of immigrants.

Cambrón Álvarez has painted many murals highlighting immigrants throughout the metro Atlanta area. The artwork located at Mercedes-Benz was one of several that she called landmarks to the undocumented experience.

“With this mural, I really wanted to continue expanding the conversation about immigrants beyond it being just a conversation limited to the experiences of Latinx people or Mexican people,” she said.

One in ten people in Georgia were born in a different country, and a little more than 20,000 of those immigrants received DACA like Cambrón Álvarez.

“I’ve had opportunities that have allowed me to become a monument maker for immigrants in the South and to create the kinds of spaces in public that I needed to see growing up undocumented in Georgia,” she said.

While her art is rooted in concepts from her experiences growing up in Atlanta, she also includes motifs that nod to where she is from. Monarch butterflies, for example, come from Michoacán, her home state in Mexico. They’re a reminder of how natural migration is.

“That journey, that duality of fragility and resilience, I think it’s something where immigrants find ourselves reflected in that journey,” she said. “It’s such a natural process for people to go where they need to survive and then to thrive.”