Delilah Anaya


Master of Fine Arts in Studio, Photography

Delilah’s work questions the law and how one’s moral compass doesn’t seamlessly align with the law. Her work involves human migration, “undocumented” immigrants, freight trains, maps/location/borders, and graffiti writers. Two themes that reoccur are appropriation and liminality. In 2017, Delilah started human migration work in southern Mexico alongside the non-profit Las Patronas -which is run and operated by women. She went every summer until the pandemic. While in undergrad at SVA in NYC she started making large vinyl stickers of migrants she had documented on freight trains in Southern Mexico, and applying them to the advertisements in the subway cars. In 2019, her first year at SAIC, she did a project that reflected this. Delilah used a photo she had taken of a Central American migrant in the sugarcane fields, she redesigned and appropriated the Chiquita banana stickers and then applied them onto bananas in Target. Any appropriation work she created had a QR code that would take you to a site for more information on her reasoning behind the appropriation. All of her work stems from graffiti. Delilah has been documenting graffiti writers late at night in freight yards or out in the streets since 2015. This documentation has made her hyper aware of location, people, laws, unwritten codes, and all human sensory. This appropriation -graffiti, which is a felony, has her questioning every facet of life and the systems we are seamlessly accepting of as a country.

Delilah is Mestiza who identifies as Chicana, was born and raised 41 miles from the border of Juarez, Mexico in Las Cruces, New Mexico. She is a Coast Guard Veteran who worked in Search and Rescue off the coast of Oregon. She currently resides in Little Village here in Chicago where she’s a volunteer to teenage girls in the G.E.M.S (girls empowering meaningful stories) program.