Hanifa Hameed's artwork for "Arrival" was inspired by the story of Lakshmy Parameswaran's journey from India to the U.S. in 1973, when she was 24 years old.
What's the story?
Lakshmy Parameswaran arrived in the U.S. in 1973, when she was 24 years old from Chennai, India. Her story is preserved in the First Days Project, SAADA’s archive of immigrants’ and refugees’ experiences of arrival in the U.S. In her interview, she describes her initial excitement and the reality of exhaustion on her first day in New York. Lakshmy is also one of the founders of Daya, Inc., established in 1996 to serve South Asian victims of family violence–one of the things that she’s done as an immigrant that she’s “very, very proud of.”
• Paper thickness: 10.3 mil
• Paper weight: 5.57 oz/y² (189 g/m²)
• Giclée printing quality
• Opacity: 94%
• ISO brightness: 104%
HANIFA HAMEED X SAADA
Arrival
"When I left, I was wearing a silk sari and I was all full of smiles; when I arrived here, my sari was in tatters and my shoes were biting, you know, the shoe bites, so my legs were full of sores. I couldn't even walk, I was limping. And I was practically in tears." – Lakshmy Parameswaran
Hanifa Hameed's artwork for "Arrival" was inspired by the story of Lakshmy Parameswaran's journey from India to the U.S. in 1973, when she was 24 years old. In her interview for SAADA’s First Days Project, which preserves the experiences of immigrants’ and refugees’ experiences of arrival in the U.S., she describes her initial excitement and the reality of exhaustion on her first day in New York.
Through her design, Hanifa wanted to depict Lakshmy proudly arriving in her sari–as Lakshmy’s younger self had originally imagined–and create an iconic image for South Asian immigrants.
