Canadian Immigrant Artists Anthology
A long-term publishing initiative
by Roots & Bridge
Art. Migration. Memory. Belonging.
The Canadian Immigrant Artists Anthology (CIAA) was created to hold a space for what often resists easy framing: the afterlife of departure, the texture of memory, the reshaping of home, and the new forms of seeing that emerge when a life is lived across cultures.
Through each volume, CIAA brings together immigrant artists whose works do more than describe movement between places — they transform it into image, gesture, colour, and form. What emerges is not a single story, but a growing conversation: unfinished, layered, and alive.
2025-Unframed
Unframed is the first volume of CIAA.
Its title names a state, not a subject: the moment just after a first mark is made, before identity and meaning have settled into form. This anthology lives in that threshold space.
The artists gathered here carry roots in Mexico, Serbia, India, China, Trinidad, and beyond. Through visual work and personal narrative, they offer perspectives shaped by lived experience across cultures — what it means to move, to remember, to find or refuse a frame. Together, they reveal how Canada is seen, felt, and reimagined through immigrant eyes: not as a destination, but as a place still becoming.
Unframed marks the beginning of a continuing dialogue. Future volumes will carry it forward.
ISBN: 978-1-7383809-2-3 (Softback),
978-1-7383809-4-7 (E-book)
Publishing date: Apr-2026
"May this publication be a humble yet heartfelt effort to add to and uncover elements that can help build a more plural and just society."
"It's taken me years to realize that I was trying to connect with my roots through each painting, colour choice, and brush stroke. The details are very deliberate and meticulous, as if I'm trying to conjure up something lost in the years that have gone by."
"I was holding on to the past but I realized it might be interesting to focus on where I was, to tell the stories of the people I had met, my new sister, and this new country to which I now belonged."
"My work now seeks to hold what slips away: the feeling of family, the taste of childhood, the rituals we carry with us as immigrants."
"It reminded me of my own journey, how I've had to move through confusion, contradiction, and the heaviness of being misunderstood. But like the lotus, I'm trying not to carry the muck with me. I'm trying to rise above it and grow into something fuller, more whole."
A Note from the Publisher
In a world eager to categorize, to label, to frame — we present Unframed.
This anthology is not a map. Not a passport. Not a statement of belonging, or its refusal.
It is a collection of voices that move. That see. That mark, erase, and reimagine the world through color, shape, and shadow.
Our featured artists — each navigating the shifting terrain of migration, memory, and visual identity — are not simply telling stories. They are building new ways of seeing.
From stitched borders to pixelated dreams, from fragmented roots to bold reinterpretations of home: these works resist containment. They ask to be encountered, not explained.
These are not just immigrant artists. These are artists.
And their art speaks — loudly, tenderly, and unframed.
