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Social Justice in the Arts featuring Carol Zou, Maribel Rodriguez, and Salomé Cosmique

The Prince George's County Office of Human Rights and the Prince George's County Memorial Library present a panel discussion featuring three immigrant artists: Carol Zou, Maribel Rodriguez, and Salomé Cosmique.

How do social justice themes feature in art? What does it mean to use one's platform as an artist? And how does art hold a mirror to us and our dreams for who we can be?

Social Justice in the Arts showcases three immigrant artists who harness their creative talents to drive social change. Through their art, these individuals give voice to marginalized communities, challenge societal norms, and inspire action.

Carol Zou (b. 1988, Hepu, China) is a U.S. based community-engaged artist whose work engages themes of spatial justice, public pedagogy, and intercultural connection in multiracial neighborhoods. They engage durational, process-based collaborations with community contributors using mediums of craft, media arts, and public installation. As a counterpoint to their collaborative work, their writing and conceptual works interrogate questions of conflict and antagonism constitutive of the public sphere. Their style of multi-sector collaboration gestures to an interdisciplinary, liberatory future in which we are all hopefully a little more undisciplined. Current and past affiliations include: Yarn Bombing Los Angeles, Michelada Think Tank, Trans.lation Vickery Meadow, Project Row Houses with the University of Houston, Asian Arts Initiative, American Monument, Imagining America, US Department of Arts and Culture, Spa Embassy, Enterprise Community Partners with Little Tokyo Service Center, Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, and The Hive.

Maribel Rodriguez loves her roots and her parents’ countries, Colombia and Puerto Rico. Having been to both countries and growing up in Brooklyn, NY a melting pot of many cultures, she has a love for people of diverse cultures and walks of life. She studied photography at The Rochester of Technology and Social Enterprise at American University This is where Love 4 Immigrants was founded as a graduate capstone project out of the frustration of seeing immigrants being depicted in the media in untruthful and inhumane ways. In addition to creating Love 4 Immigrants, she was a social entrepreneurship an educator with LearnServe International. Now Maribel works at the Prince George's County Memorial Library System with Intercultural Services.

Salomé Cosmique is a Colombian artist, Trauma Informed Teaching Artist and curator currently residing in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She has a degree in visual arts from the University of Strasbourg in France. In 2012, (while in France) she obtained her National Diploma of Plastic Arts, with a concentration in sound arts from the School of Arts of the Rhine (Haut École D'art du Rhin) in Mulhouse, France. From 2017 to 2023, Salomé lived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, (USA) where she worked as a curator in Dissident Bodies, Dislocada/Dislocated International and Love 4 Immigrants. In Philadelphia, she exhibited in several individual and collective exhibitions. For Salomé, the arts form a positive vehicle which can bring beneficial changes to society as well as the potential to transform lives, art as a healer, something she promotes in her artistic pursuits. Since 2012, her performance work has been inspired by colonialism, immigration, women's inequality, and dissident bodies. Through her pictorial work the artist seeks to remember the memories of our ancestors. She has exhibited in Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, the United States, and India. She has been granted with: The Micro Grant of Bartol Foundation and Art and Change of Leeway Foundation.