11 x 17 poster print
Me Tuve Que Ir
Daniel Arzola, 2025
11x17”, fine art smooth matte
Print sale proceeds will go to Twin cities Logistics.
This work was created as part of Art Prints 4 Mutual Aid, a project with support provided by the Visual Arts Fund, administered by Midway Contemporary Art with generous funding from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York. Four artists were chosen to participate, and each artist created new work with guidance and mentorship centered around trans-national solidarity and international mutual aid movements. Print sales proceeds will go to mutual aid organizations of each artist's choosing.
Daniel Arzola artist statement:
In one of the few preserved interviews with Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas (1943-1990), he described leaving Cuba not as a triumph but as a sense of peace—not peace from the end of war, but the peace of someone who has survived their house burning down. That image is not unfamiliar to Daniel Arzola, a Venezuelan artivist who, like Arenas, was forced into exile as a direct consequence of his activism and visibility as a queer person. At the age of twenty-four, Arzola left Venezuela after facing threats tied to his human rights work for the LGBT community.
Me tuve que ir takes the image of the burning house as a symbolic intersection between Arenas’s testimony and the contemporary experience of forced migration. At the center of the artwork, a young figure with monarch butterfly wings bears a burning house on their chest. The choice of the monarch is intentional: every year, approximately 200 million monarch butterflies migrate from Canada and the United States to the forests of central Mexico, traveling thousands of kilometers in a survival process that can take up to five generations to complete. This natural phenomenon provides a parallel to forced migration as a generational and collective consequence, rather than an individual act alone.
Over eight million people have emigrated from Venezuela in recent years, marking the largest forced migration in the history of the Americas. Me tuve que ir reflects this human movement and translates it into visual form. The butterfly—a fragile yet persistent creature—replaces the classical image of the sorrowful exile with something vital: a body in flight, carrying memory, burning but unbroken.
The fire in the chest does not only represent loss—it is also a form of propulsion, the force that drives movement. Seen from a distance, it is a fire that both destroys and illuminates. Arzola positions exile as an experience shaped by urgency, but also by the possibility of transformation.
www.danielarzola.com
