Tomie Arai “Portraits of New York Chinatown”
The Museum of Chinese in America
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Portraits of New York Chinatown was initiated as an oral history project by artist Tomie Arai and scholar Lena Sze as MOCA prepared to move into its current home in 2009. The project addressed the vital question of MOCA’s own role within the communities of Chinatown, Little Italy, and SoHo through interviews with 27 neighborhood residents and community leaders. At the core of these conversations were the ever-present concerns of gentrification and displacement. Out of this material, Arai will develop interpretive ‘portraits’ based on the content of the interviews.
Tomie Arai is an artist and community activist who was born and raised in New York City. She has exhibited extensively across the U.S. including Museum of Modern Art, PS1 Museum/Institute of Contemporary Art, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Tomie has been the recipient of numerous public art commissions for sites across the country, including New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Phoenix, and Seattle. Among other awards and grants, Arai received the Anonymous Was A Woman Award in 1997, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant Award in 1994, the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship for Works on Paper in 1993, and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for Printmaking in 1991.
[Image: Tomie Arai “Framing an American Identity” (1992)]
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Schedule
from December 13, 2013 to April 13, 2014