What Remains is an ongoing public art project that offers a series of FREE downloadable templates for vigils, memorials, and community use.

I translate real photographs of immigration enforcement and loss into designs that anyone can download.

Use them to make something of your own. Hang them in your home, wear them on a t-shirt, or share them with others.

Unfortunately, this project will continue to grow as ICE, police, and detention centers continue to kill, torture, and dehumanize people in this country.

Papel picado is fragile by nature, it is also communal. It is meant to be hung, to move with air, to be seen strung together.

In this form, these images shift from something consumed in passing into something to pause and hold.

I grew up watching my grandmother and her friends make things together; crocheting, sewing, figuring out how to mend the world around them.

Making was how they supported each other and made sense of the world. This project comes from that same place.

The medium has long marked celebration and grief, hanging overhead to unite people during gatherings.

By placing contemporary immigration imagery within this visual language, I connect present day realities to a form historically used to mark a shared experience.

Its fragility and repetition reflect the vulnerability and persistence present in migrant lives.

Papel picado is a living Mexican folk tradition rooted in ceremony, memory, and collective expression. I approach it as cultural dialogue, honoring its use of symmetry, repetition, and negative space.

Be part of what remains. Your donation makes it possible for me to continue creating and sustaining these memorials.

The What Remains templates are FREE to download and use for personal and community projects, including classrooms, religious groups, and shared spaces.