With carnations, roses and sunflowers blooming on the screen behind her, Johanna Toruño spoke. Microphone in manicured, tattooed hand, Toruño, 28, sat comfortably in the velvet armchair as she recounted the obstacles and triumphs that brought her to this stage.

On Wednesday night in Schine Underground, about 40 people gathered to listen to Toruño tell her story as part of the annual “Universal Womxn” event.

Syracuse University’s chapter of the Lambda Theta Alpha Latin Sorority invited Toruño to talk about her work as part of the yearly event. Toruño is the creator of the Unapologetically Brown Series: armed with wheatpaste and computer paper, Toruño takes to the streets of New York City and paints the city floral with her feminist posters.

Toruño received the “Universal Womxn” award, along with the SU chapter of I Am That Girl and political news site The Executive Tea.

The posters touch on themes like the liberation of black and brown women, Palestine, police brutality and self-love. Often, they feature feminist icons of color like Audre Lorde and Angela Davis embedded among flora.

Toruño said she often gets asked why there are flowers on every poster.

“That’s because when I was growing up and we came here, my mom had very limited resources. We had flowers in the house. But the fake flowers, like 99-cent flowers — the little fake flowers and fruits I feel like a lot of POC households have have,” she said.

Toruño also uses Instagram heavily to spread the word. Currently, the Unapologetically Brown Series has more than 41,000 followers on Instagram.

Toruño explained that she took to the streets of New York City for the same reasons she uses the social media platform: Both methods make art more accessible to marginalized communities.

Still, Toruño emphasized, she wants to use social media as a tool to amplify her greater, offline message.

“I wanted to use Instagram as a megaphone for my work, not a platform,” Toruño said.

Lambda Theta Alpha sisters Loren Gutierrez and Rachel Mitchell presented Johanna Toruño with the “Universal Womxn” award on Wednesday evening. Caroline Colvin | Senior Staff Writer

For a long time, writing poetry was her way of catharsis. When Toruño was 9 years old, she and her mother immigrated to the United States from El Salvador.

Toruño explained that not knowing the language and not having a strong social network as an immigrant family was tough. She felt angry and alone. When she 13 and 14 years old, she was in and out of the juvenile justice system.

She first created a poster series in high school, when she was working on starting a gay-straight alliance. Up until about a year and a half ago, Toruño had been reading her poems for SoundCloud. She realized it wasn’t quite for her.

“SoundCloud is cute or whatever, but it’s kind of not my thing. It was kind of boring to me,” Toruño said. That’s when the Unapologetically Brown Series started to take shape.

“Once I put my posters out there, it exists beyond me,” Toruño told the audience. “I wanted it to take a life of its own. To speak for itself, without me.”

Rachel Mitchell, president of Lambda Theta Alpha Latin Sorority, said the “universal womxn,” as mentioned by LTA’s mission, can be defined individually. When speaking to the idea of the “Universal Womxn” event, Toruño said she liked the idea of the “x” for the same reason she likes it in “Latinx.” There’s freedom there.

“A universal woman can be a heavily tattooed queer woman. It can be a non-binary person. It could be whatever,” she said.

Mitchell said LTA aims to use this annual event as a platform for highlighting and celebrating women of color who normally wouldn’t have a voice in artist spaces.

“We will pay you, we will give you that platform and you can say what you need to say, and empower people while doing so,” Mitchell said.

Mitchell emphasized that she wanted this event to speak to women of color on SU’s campus.

Ahlam Islam, a sophomore sociology and citizenship and civic engagement double major, said, “I’ve been talking a lot about how this year, sophomore year, I’ve become very aware of how white this school is. So it’s kind of nice to have this there also, at the same time.”

Published on March 1, 2018 at 12:02 am