topic

Environment

“Eating is the act of ingesting the environment.” -- Naomichi Ishige (qtd. in Fernandez, "Culture Ingested")

 

"[S]low violence ... occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. ... [Slow violence] is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales" like "[c]limate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes." -- Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011)

"ChimaCloud" (Midnight Moment, Times Square)

Saya Woolfalk

2016 Photograph Courtesy of Ka-Man Tse for Times Square Arts

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Saya Woolfalk

b. 1979

Saya Woolfalk is a New York based artist who uses science fiction and fantasy to re-imagine the world in multiple dimensions. With the multi year projects No Place, The Empathics, and ChimaTEK, Woolfalk has created the world of the Empathics, a fictional race of women who are able to alter their genetic make-up and fuse with plants. With each body of work, Woolfalk continues to build the narrative of these women's lives, and questions the utopian possibilities of cultural hybridity.

She has exhibited at PS1/MoMA; Deitch Projects; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; the Brooklyn Museum; Asian Art Museum, CA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Frist Center for the Visual Arts; The Yerba Buena Center; The Newark Museum; Third Streaming; MCA San Diego; MoCA Taipei; and Performa 09; has been written about in the New Yorker, Sculpture Magazine, Artforum, Artforum.com, ARTNews, The New York Times, Huffington Post and on Art21’s blog; and has also worked with Facebook and WeTransfer. Her first solo museum show The Empathics was on view at the Montclair Art Museum in the Fall of 2012. Her second solo museum exhibition ChimaTEK Life Products was on view at the Chrysler Museum of Art in the fall 2014. She recently completed a new video installation commission for the Seattle Art Museum, and is a recipient of a NYFA grant in Digital/Electronic Arts. She is represented by Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, NYC and teaches in the BFA and MFA programs at Parsons: The New School for Design.

Photo credit: LaMont Hamilton

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  • Born: Japan
  • Based: New York, USA

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"ChimaCloud" (Midnight Moment, Times Square)

Saya Woolfalk

2016 Photograph Courtesy of Ka-Man Tse for Times Square Arts

contributor

X

Saya Woolfalk

b. 1979

Saya Woolfalk is a New York based artist who uses science fiction and fantasy to re-imagine the world in multiple dimensions. With the multi year projects No Place, The Empathics, and ChimaTEK, Woolfalk has created the world of the Empathics, a fictional race of women who are able to alter their genetic make-up and fuse with plants. With each body of work, Woolfalk continues to build the narrative of these women's lives, and questions the utopian possibilities of cultural hybridity.

She has exhibited at PS1/MoMA; Deitch Projects; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; the Brooklyn Museum; Asian Art Museum, CA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Frist Center for the Visual Arts; The Yerba Buena Center; The Newark Museum; Third Streaming; MCA San Diego; MoCA Taipei; and Performa 09; has been written about in the New Yorker, Sculpture Magazine, Artforum, Artforum.com, ARTNews, The New York Times, Huffington Post and on Art21’s blog; and has also worked with Facebook and WeTransfer. Her first solo museum show The Empathics was on view at the Montclair Art Museum in the Fall of 2012. Her second solo museum exhibition ChimaTEK Life Products was on view at the Chrysler Museum of Art in the fall 2014. She recently completed a new video installation commission for the Seattle Art Museum, and is a recipient of a NYFA grant in Digital/Electronic Arts. She is represented by Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, NYC and teaches in the BFA and MFA programs at Parsons: The New School for Design.

Photo credit: LaMont Hamilton

location

X
  • Born: Japan
  • Based: New York, USA

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"ChimaCloud" (Midnight Moment, Times Square)

Saya Woolfalk

2016 Photograph Courtesy of Ka-Man Tse for Times Square Arts

contributor

X

Saya Woolfalk

b. 1979

Saya Woolfalk is a New York based artist who uses science fiction and fantasy to re-imagine the world in multiple dimensions. With the multi year projects No Place, The Empathics, and ChimaTEK, Woolfalk has created the world of the Empathics, a fictional race of women who are able to alter their genetic make-up and fuse with plants. With each body of work, Woolfalk continues to build the narrative of these women's lives, and questions the utopian possibilities of cultural hybridity.

She has exhibited at PS1/MoMA; Deitch Projects; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; the Brooklyn Museum; Asian Art Museum, CA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Frist Center for the Visual Arts; The Yerba Buena Center; The Newark Museum; Third Streaming; MCA San Diego; MoCA Taipei; and Performa 09; has been written about in the New Yorker, Sculpture Magazine, Artforum, Artforum.com, ARTNews, The New York Times, Huffington Post and on Art21’s blog; and has also worked with Facebook and WeTransfer. Her first solo museum show The Empathics was on view at the Montclair Art Museum in the Fall of 2012. Her second solo museum exhibition ChimaTEK Life Products was on view at the Chrysler Museum of Art in the fall 2014. She recently completed a new video installation commission for the Seattle Art Museum, and is a recipient of a NYFA grant in Digital/Electronic Arts. She is represented by Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, NYC and teaches in the BFA and MFA programs at Parsons: The New School for Design.

Photo credit: LaMont Hamilton

location

X
  • Born: Japan
  • Based: New York, USA

comments

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"ChimaCloud" (Midnight Moment, Times Square)

Saya Woolfalk

2016 Photograph Courtesy of Ka-Man Tse for Times Square Arts

contributor

X

Saya Woolfalk

b. 1979

Saya Woolfalk is a New York based artist who uses science fiction and fantasy to re-imagine the world in multiple dimensions. With the multi year projects No Place, The Empathics, and ChimaTEK, Woolfalk has created the world of the Empathics, a fictional race of women who are able to alter their genetic make-up and fuse with plants. With each body of work, Woolfalk continues to build the narrative of these women's lives, and questions the utopian possibilities of cultural hybridity.

She has exhibited at PS1/MoMA; Deitch Projects; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; the Brooklyn Museum; Asian Art Museum, CA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Frist Center for the Visual Arts; The Yerba Buena Center; The Newark Museum; Third Streaming; MCA San Diego; MoCA Taipei; and Performa 09; has been written about in the New Yorker, Sculpture Magazine, Artforum, Artforum.com, ARTNews, The New York Times, Huffington Post and on Art21’s blog; and has also worked with Facebook and WeTransfer. Her first solo museum show The Empathics was on view at the Montclair Art Museum in the Fall of 2012. Her second solo museum exhibition ChimaTEK Life Products was on view at the Chrysler Museum of Art in the fall 2014. She recently completed a new video installation commission for the Seattle Art Museum, and is a recipient of a NYFA grant in Digital/Electronic Arts. She is represented by Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, NYC and teaches in the BFA and MFA programs at Parsons: The New School for Design.

Photo credit: LaMont Hamilton

location

X
  • Born: Japan
  • Based: New York, USA

comments

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"ChimaCloud" (Midnight Moment, Times Square)

Saya Woolfalk

2016 Photography Courtesy of Ka-Man Tse for Times Square Arts

contributor

X

Saya Woolfalk

b. 1979

Saya Woolfalk is a New York based artist who uses science fiction and fantasy to re-imagine the world in multiple dimensions. With the multi year projects No Place, The Empathics, and ChimaTEK, Woolfalk has created the world of the Empathics, a fictional race of women who are able to alter their genetic make-up and fuse with plants. With each body of work, Woolfalk continues to build the narrative of these women's lives, and questions the utopian possibilities of cultural hybridity.

She has exhibited at PS1/MoMA; Deitch Projects; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; the Brooklyn Museum; Asian Art Museum, CA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Frist Center for the Visual Arts; The Yerba Buena Center; The Newark Museum; Third Streaming; MCA San Diego; MoCA Taipei; and Performa 09; has been written about in the New Yorker, Sculpture Magazine, Artforum, Artforum.com, ARTNews, The New York Times, Huffington Post and on Art21’s blog; and has also worked with Facebook and WeTransfer. Her first solo museum show The Empathics was on view at the Montclair Art Museum in the Fall of 2012. Her second solo museum exhibition ChimaTEK Life Products was on view at the Chrysler Museum of Art in the fall 2014. She recently completed a new video installation commission for the Seattle Art Museum, and is a recipient of a NYFA grant in Digital/Electronic Arts. She is represented by Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, NYC and teaches in the BFA and MFA programs at Parsons: The New School for Design.

Photo credit: LaMont Hamilton

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  • Born: Japan
  • Based: New York, USA

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Clare Counihan

b. 1977
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Clare Counihan earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and her B.A. in English Literature from Duke University. Her research focuses on contemporary southern African experimental literature and the relationship between narrative form and national belonging for unbeloved subjects. She is also deeply interested in food: eating it, cooking it, understanding the ways it reflects and mediates our identities and interactions.

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Sarita Echavez See

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Sarita Echavez See was born in New York City but raised as an "embassy brat" moving from city to city around the world. She received her B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, where she first became involved with U.S. women of color politics, especially the arts and culture movement. She obtained her Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. While studying in New York City, she met the Filipino American artists and writers who inspired and continue to inspire her teaching and scholarship. In 2013, she joined the faculty of the University of California, Riverside, where she is an associate professor of Media and Cultural Studies. She previously taught at Williams College, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the University of California, Davis. Her research and teaching interests include Asian American and Filipino American cultural critique, postcolonial and empire studies, narrative, and theories of gender and sexuality. She is the author of the book-length study The Decolonized Eye: Filipino American Art and Performance (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), in which she argues that contemporary Filipino American forms of aesthetic and performative abstraction powerfully expose and indict the history of American imperialism as itself a form of abstraction. She is at work on the book-length project “Against Accumulation,” which is a study of the politics of accumulation in the American museum and university and of the politics of anti-accumulation in Filipino American theatre, writing, and visual art. She was one of the core organizers of the 2011 conference "Critical Ethnic Studies and the Future of Genocide" held at the University of California, Riverside, and she has served as a member of the working board of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association. In her work with the Center for Art and Thought and its focus on the contemporary medium of the digital, she envisions CA+T to be a transnational venue for more meaningful, reciprocal encounters between artists and scholars, and she is committed to fostering new forms of literacy, rather than tutelage, and to the transformation, rather than the mere transmission and replication, of knowledge.

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  • Born: New York, NY, USA
  • Based: Los Angeles, CA, USA

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Critical Filipina and Filipino Studies Collective

As an activist-scholar group, the Critical Filipina and Filipino Studies Collective (CFFSC) seeks to organize educators and scholars to interrogate and challenge histories of Western imperialisms (Spanish and U.S. imperialisms), ongoing neocolonial relations in the Philippines, and their relationship to past and present Filipina/o migrations through our research and teaching both within the university and beyond it.

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Ahon

Franz DG

2014 Illustration Courtesy of the artist

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Franz DG

b. 1984
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I was born in 1984 in Quezon City, Metro Manila. My parents are both artists. My dad Danilo Garcia is an abstract visual artist. My mother Lolita Garcia is an educator. She was a visual communications and fine arts professor at the University of the Philippines at Dilliman. It was natural that I picked up the arts. I started with pencil and Crayola crayons. My parents did not want an artist’s life for me because it is difficult especially in the Philippines. They’d hide my pens and pencils because I was drawing ninja turtles. Ninja turtles made me want to draw! My mom said “Uh-oh.” They wanted to stop me but they could not. When they saw that my passion for art was unstoppable, they introduced me to Fernando Cena. They took me to a class every Sunday at The Heart Center, a kind of hospital. The lessons took place in their big hall and it was there that I learned the foundations of art. Although my father definitely influenced my work ethic, his abstract style of art is his own. I am more drawn to traditional fine arts. 

In terms of content, I draw social justice art. I was almost 17 years old when I left the Philippines. Since my mom was a professor, I would see students drawing on placards messages like “No to Student Hikes!” I wondered why they were writing that. What was going on? I began to comprehend the balance of society in the Philippines through the perspective of students’ protests and activity. They opened my eyes and made me question things. My mom also helped me develop that social consciousness.

At the end of high school, I won an art contest in which the grand prize was a full scholarship to a fine arts school in Texas set up by a Lion’s club. One week after I graduated, I took the art exam in high school to qualify for the University of the Philippines in Fine Arts. That very day, my mother told me, ”Oh yeah, you’re flying to Texas, America, in one week.” I was totally taken by surprise by the news. I didn’t even get a chance to properly say goodbye to my friends. My initial experience in Texas was complete culture shock. I barely spoke English. After a couple of weeks, I told my parents that I wanted to move to L.A. where I could attend vocational school and also link up with my father’s college friends. And that is when I met the chair of Habi Arts, Danilo “PAPO” De Asis in early 2001.

Under De Asis’ influence, I returned to the questions that began with my exposure to the students from the Philippines.  I began to connect that history to the present. What is really going on in the Philippines? Papo showed me everything. I realized things about the Philippines that I didn’t know when I was actually there. Many years later in 2012, Habi Arts co-curated my solo art exhibition “Kiskisan” which means "to clash.” In this exhibition and my art in general, I try to show the richness of the struggle and history of the Philippines.

As an artist, I work hard to develop illustrations that speak to me and to others about the beauty that exists in the struggles within society. Part of my process before I begin drawing is reading as much as I can about the specific set of issues that I am about to recreate on paper or canvas. I do not merely want to capture the image with my brushes; rather, with careful, colorful strokes, I want to challenge, question, and create dialogue.
 
With every finished work, I try to breathe life into a forgotten culture so that its designs, ideas, innovations, and lifestyle are displayed in my illustrations. The challenge with any recreated moment from the past is to not caricature the moment and instead capture it in all its rich history. My artwork speaks not only for me but for people that are silenced.
 
That is why the project Storm is important.  My illustrations question and expose the causes and legacies of this devastating tragedy.

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  • Born: Quezon City, Philippines
  • Based: Los Angeles, CA, USA

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American Studies Association - "The Fun and the Fury" - Flashmob - November 8, 2014

Raffy Piamonte

2014 Digital photographs and video Duration: 2m 45s Courtesy of the artist

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Raffy Piamonte

b. 1986

Raffy Piamonte has been dancing since the age of 4. However, it wasn’t until the age of 15 that he decided to take it seriously and audition for teams locally in San Diego. Since then, he’s danced in companies like FORMALity, The Effect, CADC & Boogiezone’s Breed. Currently, he is one of the Artistic Directors for Boogiezone’s Offspring Young Directors Program and a newly indicted member of Culture Shock Los Angeles. Aside from dance, Raffy serves as a Flood Control Engineer for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works and enjoys his work as a public servant. In his spare time, he enjoys traveling, going to concerts and riding his bike.

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  • Born: Vallejo, CA, USA
  • Based: Los Angeles, CA, USA
  • Also Based in: San Diego, CA, USA

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An Invocation After Haiyan in News Reports

Janice L. Sapigao

Jan 2014 Poem Courtesy of Eileen Tabios of Meritage Press

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Janice L. Sapigao

b. 1987
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Janice L. Sapigao is a Pinay poet born and raised in San Jose, CA. Her work has been published in Quaint Magazine, Jacket2, AngryAsianMan.com and the anthology Empire of Funk: Hip Hop and Representation in Filipina/o America (Cognella Academic Publishing, 2014), among others. She earned her M.F.A. in Critical Studies/Writing at CalArts. She co-founded an open mic in Los Angeles called the Sunday Jump. She now lives in the Bay Area where she teaches at Skyline College and San Jose City College.  She enjoys drinking green tea, running, and playing with stuffed animals. She is at work on a poetry collection about immigrant women who build the Silicon Valley, microchips for millions. Please visit her website for more reflections: janicewrites.com

I meditate on a Pinayist documentary poetics: an active pursuit of how my lens, my reality of my experience growing up Filipina American is undoubtedly truthful, rich and implicated in how I experience the world, my family, justice, love and sociopolitical events. I call for: women of color experiences, ones that are validating from the start, one that recognizes the difficulty in speaking, sharing, loving self and others, healing, teaching ourselves and owning up to it in ways that reflect growth, pain and self-love (pinayism). A Pinay documentary poetics allows the Pinay to trust herself, to place her grief, silence, and hurt as moments that shape and construct larger narratives towards gaining consciousness of herself and her community. I think that a Pinay documentary poetics allows a reflexivity that we discover ourselves, one that puts self in and out of social context, one that is an act towards freedom. It might be to take the fragments and create story, to take loss and misunderstanding and give them voice and material, to take hearsay and rightfully flip, subvert and launch into something humanizing, intuitive, weird, joyful, crazy and precise.

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  • Born: San Jose, CA, USA
  • Based: San Jose, CA, USA

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