UnHomeless NYC (Kingsborough Art Museum, online and off-site Oct. 10, 2021 – Apr 14, 2022/in-person exhibition Mar 3 – Apr 14, 2022) is a group exhibition of artists utilizing participation, activism, and pedagogy as their media to consider and better understand New York City’s housing crisis, and to think about our future as the city emerges from the Covid-19 pandemic. Traditionally, however, institutions of art remain integral to the city’s gentrification process, as is being debated recently with the Museum of Chinese in America. At the same time, the pandemic has opened up a myriad of possibilities in the virtual space. This panel of scholars and artists will explore the possibilities for new political spatiality for exhibitions. After a brief introduction to UnHomeless NYC and its hybrid form of display by Prof. Midori Yamamura, participating artist Nancy Hwang will discuss Outdoor Dining (2021), which she will create as an extension of her daily life. Artist and housing activist Betty Yu will discuss Imagining De-Gentrified Future (Apex Art), a show she curated at the height of the pandemic in 2020.
Midori Yamamura is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Kingsborough Community College/CUNY, and the author of Yayoi Kusama: Inventing the Singular (MIT Press: 2015). Prof. Yamamura is a specialist in post-WWII Asian and Asian Diaspora art. She is currently working on her second book, Japanese Contemporary Art Since 1989: Emergence of the Local in the Age of Globalization, and co-edited Visual Representations of the Cold War and Postcolonial Struggles
Art in East and Southeast Asia (Routledge, 2021).
Prof. Yamamura has taught art history at Fordham University, Hunter College/CUNY, Pratt Institute, and lectures regularly at the Museum of Modern Art. She has received fellowships from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), Terra Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Center for Place Culture and Politics at CUNY, Terumo Foundation, and Ford Foundation. Her essays have been published in major museum catalogues, including the Tate Modern and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is the co-curator of UnHomless NYC (Kingsborough Art Museum).
Nancy Hwang, born in Seoul and based in New York, has been producing audience-participatory projects spanning two decades in North America, Europe, and Asia. Always possessing a sense of open-endedness, chance, and spontaneity, her practice involves making connections and building relationships. Among various venues, Hwang had exhibited at apexart, Artist Space, El Museo del Barrio, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, MoMA PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Sculpture Center, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Kitchen, and White Columns. Her Blue Button Project (2003) promoted dialogue about the War in Iraq. S was a public intervention to wash the hair of people from all walks of life at a shampoo station installed at Lt. Petrosino Park, New York. Her ongoing project Somewhere in America invites proposals for traveling with her within the U.S. somewhereinamerica.org
Betty Yu is an award-winning filmmaker, socially engaged multimedia artist, photographer and activist born and raised in New York City. She holds a B.F.A. from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts, M.F.A. in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College/CUNY, and New Media Narratives certificate from the International Center of Photography. She is a co-founder of Chinatown Art Brigade, a cultural collective using art to advance anti-displacement fights.
Yu integrates documentary film, installation, new media platforms, and community-infused approaches into her practice. Her work focuses on labor, immigration, gentrification, abolition, racism, militarism, transgender equality among other issues. "Resilience," a documentary about her garment worker mother fighting sweatshop conditions screened at film festivals including the Margaret Mead Film Festival. "The Garment Worker,” an interactive installation, was featured at Tribeca Film Institute's Interactive Showcase. "Resistance in Progress,” a multimedia installation highlighting housing activism in Flushing, was featured at the Queens Museum. Her first solo exhibition, "(Dis)Placed in Sunset Park," was at the Open Source Gallery. Yu won the Aronson Social Justice Award for her film "Three Tours" about U.S. veterans returning home from war in Iraq and their journey overcoming PTSD. Other venues that have screened and exhibited her work include the Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, NY Historical Society, Museum of the City of NY, Tenement Museum, Whitney Museum, BRIC Biennial, and MAXXI in Rome.
For nearly a decade, Yu has been teaching video, film, new media, social practice, art and activism at universities such as Hunter College/CUNY, Pratt Institute, John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY and The New School. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Media Production at Marymount Manhattan College. Her forthcoming photography and art college book, Family Amnesia, will be released in Fall 2024.
