When she was in seventh grade, Dalila Sanabria was doing homework with her family when she heard a knock at the front door. What waited outside would change her and her family’s lives forever.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers were there to detain her parents, who had lived and worked in the U.S. for 20 years.
A few weeks later, they were deported from Florida back to South America, and her family dealt with the fate that millions of immigrant families in the U.S. dread: separation, instability, and the overwhelming anxiety of what the future will bring.
‘Reconcile’ Opening Reception
Sat. June 3, 7 p.m.-10 p.m.
Quaid Gallery
5128 N Florida Ave., Tampa
quaidgallery.com
The day that those ICE officers knocked on her door back in 2009, and the events since then, have led Sanabria to become the artist that she is today.
“The experience shaped my adolescence,” she tells Creative Loafing Tampa Bay.
This period of her family’s history inspired Sanabria’s exhibit “Reconcile,” which has its opening reception on Saturday, July 3, from 7 p.m.-10 p.m. at Quaid Gallery (stylized “QUAID”) at 5128 N Florida Ave. in Tampa’s Seminole Heights neighborhood, where Sanabria is currently the artist-in-residence.
Created and installed inside Quaid’s renovated garage art space, Sanabria’s art directly references her grandmother’s garage in Central Florida, where the cardboard boxes that held her family’s belongings sat for years. A multidisciplinary artist, she often combines construction and craft materials to tell her story.
“Using both the literal remains of her family’s boxes, recycled carpet squares, salt, flour, coffee, and found furniture, ‘Reconcile’ attempts to recall and disrupt the familiarity of the domestic space, culminating a decade of familial estrangement and the artist’s former homes spent between Florida, Chile and Colombia,” QUAID’s announcement for the show reads.
Although they are legal citizens because they were born in the U.S., Sanabria and her three siblings moved to South America with her parents, because they were too young to take care of themselves. After four years, she returned to the U.S. to finish high school. As a child, she enjoyed drawing and collecting objects to build structures out of whatever she could find, but it wasn’t until college that she learned more about the contemporary art world. She received a BFA in Art from Brigham Young University and is a prospective MFA Sculpture candidate at Cranbrook Academy of Art.
While pursuing her artistic goals, Sanabria and her siblings were also hard at work advocating for their parents’ return to the U.S. In 2019, they were finally granted legal status and reunited in Florida.
Her parents are in their 50s now, and they still face their share of struggles. But overall, there is an overwhelming sense of relief for Sanabria and her family. It means so much just to be near each other.
The illusion of stability permeates “Reconcile.” It’s a reflection on those tumultuous years of Sanabria’s youth, but rather than focus solely on expressing the suffering and anguish that they experienced, Sanabria uses this work to highlight a new phase of her family’s life.
“For so many years, I longed for nothing more than to be with my family. It felt so unfair that we had to be apart,” she says. “But ‘Reconcile’ is more of a memorial to that time. Now, we’re all thinking about what comes next, together.”
Sanabria has exhibited nationally and internationally, with recent exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans and the Rio Gallery in Salt Lake City, UT. She has also received numerous awards and grants that have allowed her to perform projects in locations such as Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Germany, and South Korea.
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This article appears in Jul 1-7, 2021.