Patricia Leigh Brown

The Rev. Rafael Garcia, a Jesuit priest from South El Paso, got his first inkling of the creativity within the camp when he noticed a cross with a red Sacred Heart entwined in yarn, handmade by incarcerated youngsters. Seeking asylum from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, they would go on to create ingenious tableaus inspired by their homelands: a miniature soccer field with pipe-cleaner players kicking a polka-dot cotton ball, for instance. Or an elegant church with a crepe paper dome resting on a painted sign that read “Female UAC” — unaccompanied alien children. Someone had borrowed it from the restroom.

The inventive artworks by children who wound up in Tornillo are the subject of a haunting exhibition, “Uncaged Art: Tornillo Children’s Detention Camp,” at the Centennial Museum and Chihuahuan Desert Gardens at the University of Texas at El Paso, through Oct. 5. Crafted from memory, the scenes were fashioned from humble materials like bottle caps and Popsicle sticks as part of a social studies project in which a few creative teachers assigned to the camp asked the children to commemorate their native cultures. Birds — especially the emerald-tailed quetzal, the national bird of Guatemala and a symbol of freedom — were a recurring theme.

“If you cut the wings of a bird, it is no longer free,” explained a 17-year-old Honduran youth who gave his name only as Freddy. He spent 2 1/2 months at Tornillo and is now living with a family member in Texas, awaiting an asylum hearing. Freddy traveled alone by foot, bus and car from his rural village. Through a translator, he spoke of swimming across the Rio Grande and said it took him five hours to locate border agents to request asylum. For him, the most difficult moments were seeing children faint or weak from hunger left behind en route. Freddy said he wondered whether he might at Tornillo for the rest of his life.

Tornillo was opened to help the federal government manage an influx of children entering federal custody, those who had traveled alone as well as those who became “unaccompanied” after being separated from parents at the border under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy. The temporary tent shelter was operated by Baptist Child &amp; Family Services under contract with the Office of Refugee Resettlement; typical stays were between 60 and 70 days. But some detentions stretched longer.

While no one is claiming that art saves lives, professionals working directly with detained youths in Texas and elsewhere have pointed to the healing properties and confidence that art can engender in those who have felt powerless and alone. Attorneys and human rights activists routinely use art as a vehicle for communication that is independent of language and literacy. Crayons and paper “can be the portal into the child’s brain and what they’ve seen,” said Holly Cooper, a co-director of the University of California, Davis, Immigration Law Clinic, who frequently uses art to elicit information about traumatic incidents from detained migrant children.

The design of the “Uncaged” exhibition recalls the Tornillo confinement down to the chain-link fences and bunk beds that teens enlivened with bits of yarn. The show’s 29 paintings, drawings, costumes and elaborately detailed dioramas were salvaged before the camp was closed in January. Among them is a Honduran national park with a fountain crafted from upside-down cups, and a cut-cardboard cathedral wrapped in vibrant aqua tissue paper with Popsicle stick pews for the faithful.

That any art survived is due largely to Garcia, who was one of a handful of priests allowed inside the facility to say Mass. As the tents were taken down, the staff threw away hundreds of artworks. The pieces now on view were destined for the trash heap, too, until Garcia intervened. He contacted Yolanda Chávez Leyva, an associate history professor and director of the University of Texas at El Paso’s Institute of Oral History. When the rescued art arrived there, most of the creators’ names had been redacted. The only identifications were the military-style nicknames organizers gave the children’s tents and units — “Charlie 1” and “Bravo 20.”

“These are unaccompanied minors,” Garcia said, in an interview in Duranguito, a historically immigrant neighborhood of El Paso. “But they are also talented children who have a desire to be productive human beings.”

Despite their circumstances, the children's’ work was often infused with buoyancy, wit and prideful affection for landmarks of their native countries.

“There’s a sense of joy and beauty in the art that reflects everything in the environment they were being denied,” said Camilo Pérez-Bustillo, the former director of advocacy and research for the Hope Border Institute, a human rights organization in El Paso, who interviewed children at Tornillo. “They could recover their identities and not be reduced to numbers on a wristband.”

Overcrowded conditions continue to await migrant children in detention. Between September 2018 and May of this year, according to the Los Angeles Times, six migrant children died in federal custody after becoming ill in crowded temporary holding areas. Department of Homeland Security inspectors reported dire circumstances and prolonged detention in several border patrol facilities for families and unaccompanied children.

Recent drawings by three children at the Catholic Charities Humanitarian Respite Center in McAllen, Texas, showed figures in border patrol custody in cages, some of them upside-down. “The drawings express a lot of darkness,” said Sister Norma Pimentel, who oversees the center as director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande. But she also pointed out that most of the art generated by youths was hopeful — full of hearts, houses and “I (heart) you’s.”

“It shows their resilience,” she said.

Tornillo closed after a federal watchdog warned of serious health and safety concerns at the facility. The Trump administration said last week that it planned to open a new, 2,500-bed facility for adults on the same site. The camp’s scale has been replicated in Homestead, Florida, where some 2,200 unaccompanied children are being held. And, 6 miles from the Centennial Museum, hundreds of migrants sleep huddled together on caked dirt in an outdoor holding camp on the Mexican side of the bridge linking Ciudad Juárez and El Paso.

In “Uncaged Art,” Leyva and her co-curator, David Dorado Romo, a historian, draw parallels between Tornillo and detention environments including the Japanese American internment camps of World War II — where detainees beautified their surroundings with found materials. They made furniture, teapots and other objects. “Making art, which they sometimes exhibited within the camps, provided both children and adults a way to escape their dreary circumstances and to express their humanity,” the curators write in the exhibition text.

Historical comparisons, especially to concentration camps, have become a fraught tripwire in the national debate over immigration. The recent influx of migrant families has drained existing resources and led to the kind of overcrowded, unsanitary conditions found at a border station in Clint, Texas. But many, both inside and outside the Trump administration, argue that the migrants, whose chances of winning asylum are not good, should not even be making the trip and that parents who send their children off alone are doing them a grave disservice and even endangering their lives. Parents have said that they are facing gang violence and extreme poverty.

From El Paso to Phoenix, art has been a tool used in the healing process for young people who have been released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection and are waiting to connect with sponsors who can help with transportation.

“It’s the non-endingness of it,” said Ruben Garcia, the director of Annunciation House, a nonprofit in El Paso that provides shelter, showers and hot meals to hundreds of asylum-seekers who have been processed and released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Most stay a day or two before boarding a bus or plane to join relatives elsewhere in the United States.

The nonprofit recently took over a Walmart-size warehouse, christened Casa del Refugiado, whose Red Cross cots can accommodate up to 1,100 migrants. To make the site more welcoming, young local artists were enlisted to spruce up the 125,000-square-foot space with vivid murals. One includes the word “esperanza,” or hope.

Even half a crayon can offer a calming, absorbing activity for children when their parents are speaking with attorneys in crowded trailers, recounting the violence that led them to seek safety in the United States. “These things give a degree of normalcy,” said Dr. Anita Ravi, a family physician in New York who specializes in sexual violence. “I think kids ache for that.”

Trauma manifests itself in different ways, said Ravi, who has assisted asylum-seekers at the South Texas Family Residential Center through the Dilley Pro Bono Project. “The older adolescents, especially the girls, would sometimes sit there and quietly cry,” she said.

At a day center for asylum-seeking families in Phoenix run by the International Rescue Committee, a 7-year-old Guatemalan girl asked to borrow a Post-it note. During 15 minutes of conversation between her mother and an interviewer, the girl transformed five hot pink Post-its into tiny, floral-patterned canvases.

“You can almost see the moms exhale seeing the kids enjoying themselves,” said Ellen Beattie, the IRC’s senior director for program quality and innovation in the United States. “They’ve been gripping them, holding them close, afraid to let them out of their sight.”

In El Paso’s Duranguito neighborhood, banners with images reproduced from “Uncaged Art” were displayed along a chain-link fence in this heavily Mexican neighborhood, which many historians consider the city’s birthplace. The idea was to bring the children’s art “to the people to whom it matters most,” said Daniel Carey-Whalen, the director of the Centennial Museum.

But one day last month, city officials, citing strong winds and sign ordinances, ordered the banners to be taken down, much to the chagrin of residents like Frank Mendez, an 80-year-old retired laborer.

“Those kids from Tornillo way over there wanted to show the world how to paint,” he said, with a pained look on his face. “Those designs came from their brains. That’s the future they took away.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/arts/art-detention-centers-migrants.html" id="d3b38ea2-bc8b-3eea-afbd-82f05e04b420">The New York Times</a>.

EL PASO, Texas — The young migrants often arrived at night. They were teenagers from Central and South America, brought by border agents to the Tornillo Detention Facility and led to rows of metal bunk beds in military tents ringed by barbed wire. Human touch, even a simple hug, was rare inside this secured temporary city, where nearly 3,000 unaccompanied minors at a time were confined between June 2018 and January 2019. In this harsh environment, the Chihuahuan Desert, imagination and faith ...

Border Children and Crayons of Solace

But artist Titus Kaphar wants to shift the narrative to a part of the city little known to outsiders, a once-thriving historic African-American neighborhood called Dixwell where he and his family have lived for more than a decade.

Kaphar, 42, has a profound connection to the forgotten, from the slaves owned by the Founding Fathers to the ubiquity of African-Americans in the criminal justice system, including his own father. The recipient of a recent MacArthur “genius” award, the artist is challenging racism in a body of strong work that has entered the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the Yale University Art Gallery, and was recently featured at the National Portrait Gallery. Kaphar is known for appropriating images from American and European art to subvert them, cutting them into his canvases to pull back the velvet curtain of history. He wields materials like tar, wire, gold leaf and nails to unearth the past’s inconvenient truths, and to shine a restorative light on those residing in the shadows.

In Dixwell, a neighborhood buffeted by need in the shadows of Yale, he is rewriting the script with NXTHVN (for “Next Haven”), a $12 million nonprofit arts incubator and fellowship program he founded to nurture rising talents. The enterprise is housed in two once-moribund factory buildings that are being re-imagined by architect Deborah Berke, dean of the Yale School of Architecture.

He envisions the project as a beacon for graduates hellbent on getting out of Dodge for New York (Kaphar, a 2006 Yale School of Art graduate, “drank the Kool-Aid” himself). “New Haven has some of the most esteemed artists in the world,” he said. “Yet as a city, we’ve done very little to say, ‘Why don’t you stay here?’”

The first half, studios for seven artist-fellows, is up and running in a former ice cream factory filled with natural light. The second building, where lab equipment was manufactured, is under renovation and NXTHVN hard hats are everywhere. The complex will unfold in phases and include a cafe run by a local nonprofit, a combined coworking and gallery space, a theater and a three-story addition with skylights and loft-like apartments for visiting artists-in-residence.

Financing for the 40,000-square-foot project has come from the state ($3 million) and the city ($1 million for facade improvements), with several million dollars from private foundations and philanthropies. Collectors of the artist’s work have helped subsidize the fellowship program.

Long a cultural hub for black residents, with a jazz club where Miles Davis and other luminaries played, the neighborhood was devastated by urban renewal and the 2006 closing of the Winchester Repeating Arms Factory up the street, which once employed 26,000 people. “I think sometimes folks feel like we, as poor people, don’t know the difference,” Kaphar said of bringing distinctive arts and architecture to the neighborhood. “So we’ll get the leftovers — the backpack someone already discarded, the building that the city couldn’t find any other use for.”

The idea of an internationally competitive fellowship was inspired by Kaphar’s residency at the Studio Museum in New York’s Harlem, a program founded in 1968 by William T. Williams, an artist he reveres. The seven artist-fellows at NXTHVN were chosen from 166 applicants. They are being steeped in art business nitty-gritty, from negotiating with galleries to public speaking.

“The art world is full of secrets,” said Vaughn Spann, who graduated in 2018 with a master’s degree in fine arts from Yale. “Titus is unlocking the vault.”

Talented young people from local high schools serve as paid apprentices, learning how to sand and apply gesso to panels, or edit images online.

Historically, artists have learned their craft by apprenticing with masters, Kaphar noted. “Diego Velázquez never went to graduate school,” he added.

Velázquez also never gave a major TED Talk — as Kaphar has notably done, demonstrating how artists convey wealth and privilege by taking a copy of a Frans Hals portrait of a 16th-century aristocratic family and whitewashing the main figures to shift the gaze to a black servant in the background. The painting will be the subject of “One: Titus Kaphar,” an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum starting June 21.

In his 2018 painting, “Seeing Through Time,” perched on two paint cans at NXTHVN (it is now on view at Mass MoCA, the Berkshires museum), Kaphar layered European characters onto a canvas, then peeled them back, creating space for a black girl, dressed in velvet and pearls, to emerge alongside a powerful contemporary woman. The girl breaks through layers of paint, and with it, the patriarchal and monoracial currents in the Western canon.

“For 400 years, the little girl on the side was always there,” he said of the art-historical device. “But you were never supposed to contemplate her personhood — her wants, needs and desires.”

Kaphar did not discover art until his mid-20s, when he was trying to impress a young woman named Julianne, now his wife. He registered for an art survey class at a junior college in California and was outraged when the professor announced that they would be skipping over the “black people in art” section.

As a graduate student he looked hard at paintings and sculpture in the Yale University Art Gallery. Fittingly, his own work now hangs there: “Shadows of Liberty” (2016) is a portrait of George Washington in which his torso and face are obscured by nailed canvas strips, each inscribed with the names of slaves Washington owned in a given year.

In “Yet Another Fight for Remembrance” (2015), commissioned by Time magazine after Ferguson, Missouri, young black protesters, their hands raised in a don’t-shoot stance, are caught in aggressive strokes of white paint, suggesting attempts to silence their voices. The humanity of their gaze is visible above the fray. The work “stops you flat,” Murray Whyte wrote in The Boston Globe. “This is rough stuff, yet it’s plied with seductive grace.”

IN MANY WAYS, NXTHVN represents Kaphar’s own “seeing through time,” reaching back into his own personal history to give promising young people a gift he never had. His father was in and out of prison for most of Kaphar’s childhood. In Kalamazoo, Michigan, where he was born, the family earned extra cash in the neighborhood by carting metal barrels of burned trash to the dump.

For years he bounced among various family members, at one point living in a basement. At age 15, he left his father’s house for good after a violent incident in which the older man hit his girlfriend so hard she flew across the room and struck a mirror. Young Titus picked glass out of the woman’s back — and didn’t speak to his father again for 20 years.

“There is a way in which my life is a trope,” he observed the other day. “‘Poor black boy from bad neighborhood becomes famous artist.’ As with all tropes, it lacks specificity.”

In San Jose, California, where his mother — who now has a master’s degree in counseling — lived briefly, he connected with a stable, close-knit family, a widower and his three sons, who became an anchoring force. He wound up living with them during his high school years. Later, the man, whom Kaphar calls “my dad,” Mars Severe, told him “I saw something in you.”

“Senseless generosity got me here where I am,” Kaphar said.

The Jerome Project, perhaps his best-known work, was inspired by glimmers of reconciliation with his estranged father, Jerome, who was remorseful when Kaphar encountered him at a family gathering. He researched his father’s incarceration record online and was stunned to find “99 other men with the exact same name — all of them trapped in the criminal justice system and all of them black,” he said.

Working from mug shots, the artist painted a series of devotional portraits of 65 Jeromes in Byzantine-style gold leaf, partly submerging each in tar based on the amount of time each Jerome spent in prison. The paintings, shown at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2014, express the suffocation of life behind bars — and the resilience necessary to survive. When his father saw the paintings, he was able to connect some revelatory dots between his own employment challenges and his criminal past. The rapprochement between father and son continues to unfold.

“Redaction,” Kaphar’s collaboration with the poet, lawyer and writer Reginald Dwayne Betts at MoMA PS1 through May 5, casts a critical and artistic eye on the human fallout of the cash bail system, in which poor defendants who have yet to be tried or convicted remain in jail.

“We’re redacting to reveal,” said Betts, who was tried as an adult for carjacking at age 16 and imprisoned. (He has since gotten his J.D. degree at Yale Law School and is pursuing a Ph.D. there.) Kaphar’s piercing etched portraits, intentionally blurred to obscure identities, appear behind hand-redacted poetry drawn from legal complaints filed by the nonprofit Civil Rights Corps, with the dark redacted lines resembling prison bars. The parting image is a large Jerome Project painting of Betts featuring flecks of gold-leaf shimmering in the tar.

“Titus’ work elicits a strong response,” said Sarah Suzuki, the curator. “He works from a place that’s very personal. But he also asks other people to connect their own experiences to it.”

In New Haven, the artist’s unassuming backyard studio stands out for a maraschino cherry-red 1956 GMC pickup in the driveway. Moving here after two years in New York provided the breathing room to take risks like “The Vesper Project,” a five-year effort that involved constructing a house in various states of decay to reflect a fictional character’s mental meltdown.

Kaphar and his wife live about three blocks from NXTHVN with their sons, Savion, 12, and Daven, 10; they selected the neighborhood “so the kids would be able to see reflections of themselves,” he said.

A blitzkrieg tour of some of the artist’s favorite haunts started with gelato by an artisanal confectioner, followed by a chaser of barbecued pork ribs. He is on a first-name basis with the guards at the Yale University Art Gallery, who “spend far more time with the paintings than the curators,” he said. The city (population 130,000) is intimate enough that kindred spirits bump into each other. Kaphar and Jason Price, a private equity professional who became NXTHVN’s co-founder, met when their boys requested a play date. He first encountered Betts at a dinner party where they argued about a book by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

The artist has established personal relationships with collectors who have since donated to the NXTHVN cause. “It’s very unusual for a collector to look beyond his or her own nose,” said Jock Reynolds, the recently retired longtime director of the Yale University Art Gallery, who has known Kaphar since he was a graduate student and is now on the art incubator’s board.

“He doesn’t openly solicit,” said Barbara Shuster, a New York philanthropist and collector. “Because of his personality and his earnestness,” she added, “you hear about what he’s creating and want to be a part of it.”

Kaphar and his team are well aware of the tripwire of gentrification. But they also know the negative effects of disinvestment in the Dixwell neighborhood, where the buildings sat vacant for years after being used as a depot for illegal counterfeit goods. The plan to build NXTHVN in phases instead of a grand ribbon-cutting “is a gracious way to connect with the community,” Berke said. Her design opens the cafe, coworking and gallery space to the street, and apprentices will give tours of rotating exhibitions.

“New Haven has a rich African-American history, with a lot of economic depression,” said poet Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and former chairwoman of African-American studies at Yale. “Reactivating that history and legacy with art is very significant.”

THE PROJECT JOINS a number of urban artist-driven initiatives around the country, most notably Rick Lowe’s pioneering Project Row Houses, which has transformed 39 structures within a five-block area of Houston’s 3rd Ward. Lowe inspired renowned artists Theaster Gates, whose Rebuild Foundation has bought and refurbished dozens of buildings on Chicago’s South Side, and Mark Bradford, whose 20,000-square-foot Art + Practice campus in Leimert Park, Los Angeles, houses an education and employment program for foster youth, including paid internships in its contemporary art programs.

For most people starting an undertaking of this nature would be more than a full-time job. With forthcoming exhibitions Kaphar is trying to balance unfettered time in his studio with the caffeinated boost he gets from the young apprentices and fellows, for whom he is mentor, cheerleader, and critic in chief.

He would like young people from the neighborhood to “experience a Deborah Berke piece of architecture” and start thinking about space and light and the potential of art to transport someone over the threshold of difficult circumstances, as it did for him. “What I’m suggesting is that there is space for excellence and quality in our community — and I think we deserve it,” he said.

Most mornings, you can find him at the local boxing club, Elephant in the Room, where his approach to the punching bag reflects his point of view. He tends to improvise his jabs. “It looks wrong but it works,” his coach, Solomon Maye, said. “Titus sees something, and then sees beyond what he sees.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="8f514b30-1b7c-3a02-a81d-dd54412d5a22" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/arts/design/yale-new-haven-titus-kaphar.html">The New York Times</a>.

An Artist Rises, and Brings a Generation With Him

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Like many town-and-gown cities, New Haven is a community of parallel narratives. There is the storied Elm City of Yale University, a place of carillon bell towers, leaded glass windows and lush quadrangles behind iron gates.

An artist rises, and brings a generation with him

<h1>OAKLAND, Calif. — On a bone-chilling day here with the winter rains pelting down, architects Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello retreated to their cozy 3D printed cabin in the backyard.</h1>

A wall of moist succulents on the facade was springing to luxuriant life, embedded in rosette-patterned tiles 3D printed from chardonnay grape skins, sawdust and cement. Raindrops pitter-pattered across 3D-fabricated ceramic shingles.

Inside, a translucent bioplastic wall with cloudlike swirls — yes, also 3D printed — changed colors on demand as Rael, with a clicker, shifted the hues from pink to green to purple, bathing the interior in otherworldly light.

It was just another weekend for the couple, 3D printing pioneers who have developed novel techniques for sustainable building, often using low-cost waste materials like mud, dirt, nutshells, coffee grounds and other discards that are “essentially free,” San Fratello said.

Along the way, they have made 3D printing cheaper and more accessible, often relying on lightweight printers to fabricate architectural components that can be assembled into large structures. These include the “Cabin of Curiosities” prototype in their backyard.

San Fratello and Rael “create complex and fantastic forms that couldn’t happen any other way,” said Ellen Lupton, senior curator of contemporary design at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, which included their work last year in its show, “The Senses: Design Beyond Vision” and acquired a “Furry Curry Casserole” 3D printed from curry powder. “They have the hybrid brain of an architect, an alchemist and a pastry chef,” Lupton added.

Their work has been included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as well as the Cooper Hewitt.

Rael and San Fratello are evangelists for the 3D cause: He is a professor of architecture and art practice at the University of California, Berkeley; she is an associate professor of design at San Jose State. Their studio, Rael San Fratello, produces elegant and slightly oddball designs inspired by ancient craft traditions, like coiled pottery.

Although the forms are drawn from indigenous sources, the production of 3D printed tiles and other components is anything but. Rael and San Fratello deploy a variety of printing methods, often using a process invented at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called “binder jetting” that consists of a liquid material being sprayed onto a thin layer of powder hundreds or thousands of times until a hardened object emerges. The two also invented a software application for a 3D printer that extrudes wet clay, pushing it through a nozzle like a gigantic toothpaste tube.

A series of clay vessels called “Bad Ombrés” was produced by this extrusion method: The name alludes both to President Donald Trump’s comment about Mexicans and a term for the gradual blending of one color into another. Like much of the pair’s work, the vessels marry artisanship and geekiness. The clay is built up layer by layer, producing striated patterns and surfaces resembling knitting, complete with knots and loops. Occasionally, the code will tell the printer to drop a stitch, which creates visual drama.

As they document in “Printing Architecture: Innovative Recipes for 3D Printing,” published last year, mud is dear to their hearts. Rael grew up in an adobe house built by his great-grandfather in a small Hispanic village in the San Luis Valley of Colorado. His youthful playgrounds were adobe dwellings in varying states of decay. “I was fascinated with the cactuses growing on roofs, the rays of light and dust,” he said.

They met in 1995 on their first day of architecture school at Columbia University and traveled to Yemen to explore the ancient walled city of Shibam, a dense cluster of ancient mud-brick buildings often called “the city of skyscrapers in the desert.”

Their design for a 3D printed free-standing adobe structure is on view in the exhibition “New Cities, Future Ruins at the Border” at the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso (through April 6).

It is also the product of an unusual cross-border collaboration. Accompanied by their 9-year-old son, Mattias, as well as ceramics students, architects, professors and community members, they lead clay scouting expeditions, shovels and buckets at the ready, pinpointing, say, a patch behind a Subway shop in Texas or a Juarez brick factory.

For the project “Zoquetas Fronterizos” (Mud Frontiers) the students learned to shovel mud into 3D printers, building circular adobe structures on a mesa overlooking Juarez.

The border has been a recurring theme in their work. Rael wrote “Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the U.S.-Mexico Boundary” (2017) on alternatives to Trump’s wall, most serious but some fanciful. They have created a poster, called “Reunite,” about family separations at the border, that has been turned into a billboard in Manhattan by For Freedoms, an arts nonprofit.

But it is the pair’s status as the Lewis and Clark of the digital frontier that has impressed the techno cognoscenti. “Instead of paying $600 for 30 pounds of standard materials that come with printers, we said ‘Hey, let’s use salt!'” San Fratello explained. Their spinoff company, Emerging Objects, has recently worked with 3D Potter on a new type of printer to develop low-cost housing using adobe.

“They refused to accept the proprietary materials being sold by 3D printer companies,” said Joshua Stein, a professor at Woodbury University in Burbank and co-director of Data Clay, an online database dedicated to ceramics and emerging technologies. “They said, let’s just hack the ingredients and see what we can do.”

The international roster of designers engaged in the 3D process, known as “additive manufacturing,” is expanding. Among the most high-profile is Joris Laarman of the Netherlands, who started his own robotics company and whose swooping, technically complex metal furniture has fetched hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction. The DFAB House in Zurich, a collaboration between the Swiss National Center of Competence in Research and university professors, also pushes the digital building frontier. The architecture was robotically assembled and features a free-form 3D printed “smart slab” ceiling that is half the weight of concrete.

Rael and San Fratello are committed to democratizing the process for their young acolytes and others, making the point that 3D printing from “upcycled” materials otherwise destined for the trash heap, and forgoing the purchase of drywall and other construction supplies, is a more sustainable design approach. Ingredients like curry and coffee grounds not only lower the cost, they add a dash of poetry, retaining their aroma long after being transformed.

To spend time at Rael’s graduate “print FARM” — the Facility for Architecture, Research and Materials at the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design, is to feel a bit like Lewis Carroll’s Alice as she took her first nibble on the mushroom. It is to encounter a gray “Seat Slug” printed from cement. A light-as-a-feather, star-shaped “Poof” from tires that were pulverized and freeze-dried. It is to wonder about strange-looking squiggles resembling black licorice shoelaces.

“That’s a failure,” Rael said of the bioplastic building material meant to turn snow into patterns on buildings.

Some of the most mesmerizing projects are the couple’s collaborations with scientists. These include ceramic units for seeding coral larvae, spearheaded by Secore, a conservation organization that restores coral reefs. Scuba divers have already placed these microhabitats — which have little legs and look as if they might skitter across the sea bottom — in endangered reefs. The 3D printing allows quick replication.

San Fratello and Rael have also worked with conservationists on ceramic nesting modules for the stocky seabirds known as Cassin’s auklets, off the California coast. (The nests have to accommodate the weight of lolling sea lions, and a private compartment for adults away from their boisterous chicks.)

At home, San Fratello and Rael keep a 3D printer on the dining room table and use it to produce the occasional Captain Underpants figurine for Mattias. Their devotion to the 3D process, they say, is the connection it provides between the designer and the machine, a relationship lost with mass production. Their mission is to create objects and structures that are beautiful — and resolutely human.

“There is a culture embedded in the materials that surround us,” Rael observed. “We’ve lost the intimacy with materials, their tactility. How can you be intimate with foam?”

This article originally appeared in <a id="6d2220ca-33ef-4b71-a11e-cbd3833f3a84" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/arts/design/3d-printing-building-design.html">The New York Times</a>.

Inside, a translucent bioplastic wall with cloudlike swirls — yes, also 3D printed — changed colors on demand as Rael, with a clicker, shifted the hues from pink to green to purple, bathing the interior in otherworldly light.

3D printing for a sustainable future

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Patricia Leigh Brown

Articles written by the author

Border Children and Crayons of Solace

An artist rises, and brings a generation with him

3D printing for a sustainable future