Voice a Wild Dream: Moments in Asian American Art and Activism, 1968-2022

September 8 - November 18, 2022

Voice a Wild Dream: Moments in Asian American Art and Activism, 1968-2022 highlights collectives of Asian American artists and activists and their work toward social change over the past six decades. Sharpened by a recent interest among artists in remaking systems in ways that harken back to the revolutionary impulses of the late 1960's, many exhibitions and publications trace the lineages of feminist, queer, black, and Chicanx arts and activism; however, the story intertwining strands of art, activism, and community aid is significantly less visible within the Asian American community.

Voice a Wild Dream traces connections—both literal and philosophical—between Asian American collectives that intersected art and community service in past decades and their relationship to current art and mutual aid collectives today. By centering artists and their work in a conversation about community care, the exhibition illuminates the power of the artistic act to catalyze belonging, participation, and, most crucially, intersectional connection.

The exhibition borrows its title from traci kato-kiriyama’s poem “Letters to Taz - on meeting (after Taz Ahmed’s ‘If Our Grandparents Could Meet’),” included in their recent publication Navigating With(out) Instruments. kato-kiriyama imagines a shared moment between the two poet activists’ grandparents and the solidarity that they might share in their hope for the future.

Featuring historical, archival and contemporary works, the exhibition considers an expansive notion of artists’ roles in cultural work, incorporating zine culture, grassroots organizing, non-profit art spaces, and self-organized networks as equally important participants in an effort to realign our social relations. Focusing on Los Angeles and New York and the flow of people and ideas between them, the exhibition takes a wide view of cultural production to include groups grounded in Asian American defined communities.

Exhibiting collectives include: Auntie Sewing Squad, Basement Workshop, Chinatown Art Brigade, Giant Robot, GIDRA, Godzilla, the Linda Lindas, Stop DiscriminAsian, and The W.O.W. Project.

The exhibition is curated by Kris Kuramitsu, Fall 2022 Professor of the Practice at Occidental College and Senior Curator at Large of the Mistake Room.

NEWS

About the Artists

Auntie Sewing Squad

Table set up outdoors with a banner and several people sitting around the table.

Basement Workshop

Nighttime city image with "stop gentrifying our neighborhoods" written on a building.

Chinatown Art Brigade

Giant Robot

Godzilla

GIDRA

Linda Lindas

Stop DiscriminAsian

The W.O.W. Project

The Auntie Sewing Squad was founded on March 24, 2020 by performance artist and comedian Kristina Wong as a casual effort to connect with other friends sewing homemade masks for essential workers due to the Federal Government’s failure to prepare them with proper personal protective equipment. Originally intended as a three week stopgap, the Auntie Sewing Squad went on for 17 months, grew to a network of 800+ volunteer Aunties across 33 states who sewed and shipped 350k masks to vulnerable communities. The work of ASS was documented by the Aunties themselves in The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice published by the University of California Press. ASS is also the subject of "Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord"-- this year's finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama.

Basement Workshop was an Asian-American arts collective active from 1970 to 1986. As both artists and activists, the collective membership mobilized to advocate for healthcare, jobs, and resources for communities of color. Besides activism, the collective also ran a youth program and held workshops that encouraged artistic expression. The artists showcased their work through the publication of their Bridge Magazine and the set of folios titled Yellow Pearl. It was at the Basement Workshop where Jack Tchen and Charlie Lai met, the founders of the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA). Many other members of the collective went on to create and influence other Asian American organizations including Asian CineVision, and the Asian American Arts Centre.

Chinatown Art Brigade (CAB) is an intergenerational collective driven by the fundamental belief that our cultural, material, and aesthetic modes of production have the power to advance social change. CAB is comprised of Asian American and Asian diasporic identifying visual artists, media makers, writers, educators, and organizers with deep roots in Manhattan's Chinatown. Together we make work that centers art and culture as a way to support community-led campaigns around issues of gentrification and displacement.

Eric Nakamura founded Giant Robot as a photocopied and stapled zine in 1994 and grew the publication until late 2010. Giant Robot magazine reached a multiracial audience interested Asian popular culture and became known as the premier magazine in the field. Nakamura built on the success of Giant Robot with stores and galleries in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco, and has curated over 300 exhibitions. Currently, Nakamura works in and owns the Giant Robot store and GR2 Gallery in Los Angeles, which continues to offer pop culture goods and hold art exhibitions.

In 2017, Giant Robot Media was launched as new entity. You can see and read articles at GiantRobot.media The project tapered off in 2018. In 2020, Nakamura began live streaming multi-weekly on both apps, Popshop Live and NTWRK, and continues occasional podcasts with Luke Chueh - as Robot and the Bear Podcast.

Nakamura holds a degree in East Asian Studies from UCLA.

The collective known as Godzilla: Asian American Art Network was formed in 1990 to support the production of critical discourse around Asian American art and increase the visibility of Asian American artists, curators, and writers, who were negotiating a historically exclusionary society and art world. Founded by Ken Chu, Bing Lee, and Margo Machida, Godzilla produced exhibitions, publications, and community collaborations that sought to stimulate social change through art and advocacy. For more than a decade, the diasporic group, having grown from a local organization into a nationwide network, confronted institutional racism, Western imperialism, anti-Asian violence, the AIDS crisis, and representations of Asian sexuality and gender, among other urgent issues.⁠

Gidra: The Monthly of the Asian American Experience, the self-proclaimed "voice of the Asian American movement," was a revolutionary monthly newspaper-magazine that ran from 1969 to 1974. It was started by a group of Asian American students at the University of California, Los Angeles as a platform to discuss Asian American interests on campus and later expanded to address the entire Los Angeles Asian American community. Sixty issues of Gidra were published during its primary run, as well as a 1990 anniversary issue and five issues between 2000 and 2001.

Gidra covered mainly issues affecting the Asian American community, including the anti-war movement; ethnic studies at universities; and the struggles of colonized people in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Also crucial to the newspaper was art, mostly illustrations and poetry. Highly politicized, Gidra took stances that were anti-war, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist. One of the first newspapers of its kind in the Asian American community, it inspired the creation of other leftist publications and organizations. Espousing a Third Worldist ideology, Gidra encouraged solidarity with and had ties to paralleling social justice movements in the United States and decolonization movements abroad.

Half Asian and half Latinx. Two sisters, a cousin, and their close friend. The Linda Lindas channel the spirit of original punk, power pop, and new wave through today's ears, eyes, and minds. Mila (11), Eloise (13), Lucia (14), and Bela (17) first played together as part of Kristin Kontrol’s pickup cover band comprised of inexperienced kids for Girlschool LA in January 2018, where they were joined by Bobb and Bethany from Best Coast and Karen O. That summer, Bela asked Lucia, Eloise, and Mila to back her up on a few songs at a Hi-Hat gig, and the group was born.

Stop DiscriminAsian (SDA) is a coalition of workers within arts and culture who are confronting the racism, xenophobia and violence towards diasporic Asians that have been amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic.

SDA seeks to expand awareness through the galvanization of individual voices in solidarity with other marginalized communities to expose and subvert the systemic racism and economic injustice exacerbated by this unprecedented moment of global emergency.

View Full Bio

The W.O.W. Project is a women, non-binary, queer, trans led, community-based initiative that works to sustain ownership over Chinatown Manhattan’s future by growing, protecting and preserving Chinatown’s creative culture through arts, culture and activism. Our core mission is to create space for conversations that cross generational gaps to seed intergenerational understanding. The W.O.W. Project envisions the future of Chinatown that centers young women and nonbinary youth in building intergenerational bridges of understanding, collective empowerment, and solidarity across Asian American communities and beyond. Our projects include artist residencies, youth programs and internships, public artworks and events, and mutual aid.

Voice a Wild Dream: Moments in Asian American Art and Activism, 1968-2022

Past Events

NEWS

About the Artists

Gallery

Activity Guide + Lesson Plans