We the People: The American Dream
Immigrants often face great danger in choosing to come to the United States. Despite this reality, the pull of a potentially better life—including economic opportunity, safety, and democracy itself—is enough for many to make this choice.
Immigrants have often led the charge for equal rights in the United States, while simultaneously facing discrimination and anti-immigrant laws. Many immigrants escaped poor conditions, poverty and tyranny in their home countries, only to experience difficult conditions in America as well. Some have labored in factories and given voice to the need for labor reform, while at the same time being dismissed as “part of the problem.” Led by the promise of the American Dream, immigrants have fought for equality in all aspects of American life.
Highlights
Henry DiSpirito
Digital rendering courtesy of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, The City University of New York.
New York State Museum, H-2022.4.1
Henry DiSpirito
Plaster
DiSpirito was commissioned to create a large-scale work of the Utica College symbol, the Pioneer; himself an Italian immigrant who arrived in Utica in 1921 and built a life as a stonemason and sculptor, he chose to imagine the figure not as a man in buckskins in the American West, but as an immigrant, creating this study of a man from his own diverse East Utica neighborhood.
New York State Museum, H-2016.30.1A-B