Visual artist Tomie Arai will shares her thoughts and observations about art, activism, and the Asian American movement in a dialogue with poet and editor Russell Leong. Tomie will discuss the process of being an artist, creating a new visual vocabulary in the emerging Asian American art scene in New York City.
What were the differences between creating art then, and being an artist now?
What is the relationship of memory and collective consciousness?
What is the process of being socially committed to certain ideas, and also committed to art-making?
How has the artist’s techniques and range developed during four decades of creating visual images and helping to form what is now considered part of the iconography of Asian American art?
Join this informal conversation with one of Asian America’s stellar “image-makers!” Tomie will introduce rare images of her work created over the past four decades.
Tomie Arai is public artist who lives and works in NYC. Her recent projects include banner designs for the Smithsonian's A/P/A Folklife Festival on the National Mall, public artwork for the new Central Subway Chinatown Station in San Francisco and a community collaboration entitled "Portraits of New York Chinatown" currently on view at the Museum of Chinese in America.
Tomie’s work has been exhibited nationally and is in the collections of the Library of Congress, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Japanese American National Museum, the Williams College Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has been a recipient of two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in Printmaking for 1991 and 1994; a 1995 Joan Mitchell Visual Arts Grant, a 1994 National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship for Works on Paper and three MidAtlantic Arts Foundation Visual Artists Residency Grants. In 1997, she was one of ten women nationwide to receive an Anonymous was a Woman Grant for achievement in the visual arts.
In the year 2000, Tomie Arai was one of 50 artists nationwide to participate in the Artists & Communities: America Creates for the Millennium Project, sponsored by the MidAtlantic Arts Foundation and the NEA. She was a recipient of a 2003 MCAF grant, a 2007 Urban Artists Initiative Grant, a 2007 Arts and Activism grant from the Asian Women Giving Circle and a 2013 Puffin Foundation grant.
What were the differences between creating art then, and being an artist now?
