Art
14,000 & Counting Missing Childhoods
- Client: 72andSunny
- Campaign: 72U Immigration
- Exhibition Type: Public Art Installation
- Location: Venice Beach Windward Plaza, CA
- Year: 2018
- Role: Artist
14,000 & Counting Missing Childhoods is a large-scale public art installation that visualized the significant increase in immigrant children detained by the U.S. government in 2018. The number rose from 2,400 in 2017 to over 14,000 in one year, representing children separated from their homes, families, and communities, and deprived of their formative experiences.
The installation featured thousands of bespoke milk cartons, drawing from the missing children campaigns that circulated throughout the U.S. in the 1980s and 1990s. Each carton served as a symbolic stand-in for an immigrant child held in detention, marked with what they were missing: family, community, freedom and the fundamental conditions needed for healthy development.
Installed at Venice Beach Windward Plaza, the work recontextualized a public space as a site for heightened visibility and critical reflection, bringing the scale of the crisis into focus beyond policy language. It stood as both a memorial for stolen childhoods and an invitation to deeper civic consciousness.
