Art opens us, facilitates healing, and creates spaces that seed change. My art practice instigates embodied healing by furthering advocacy to end gender violence and spur racial equity. Through participatory art, I foster connections & transformative healing – particularly in the face of violence & structural inequity. Enabling change, in oneself & in community, is healing. Enabling healing furthers change – catalyzing an art of transformation, catalyzing justice.
My social practice is rooted in communities & conversation. Our stories are gateways for healing and inspiring a truer democracy. From public art projects to creating films to leading embodied healing workshops, I’ve engaged communities to widen our possibilities for our selves, equitable society, and complex truths rooted in diverse lived experiences. Projects include:
Green Card
Green plays hide and seek in a tapestry of grey asphalt & brown buildings in Jackson Heights, Queens. As a neighborhood, Jackson Heights ranks next to last in our City for public green space. Without trees, birds find it hard to make home. In Prospect Park, Brooklyn, e-birders report up to 293 species of birds as opposed to 32 in Jackson Heights. A lack of trees means a dearth of places birds can call home.
As part of the Street Works Earth festival kicking off Climate Week 2024, we asked community members: What makes Jackson Heights/Queens/NYC home for you? What would make Jackson Heights a better home for birds? What is your favorite bird or spot in Jackson Heights? We made origami swans while exploring how green space helps increase clean air, limits heat index, and gives space for our feathered friends (and people!) to nest & soar. You can make neighborhoods bird-friendly by planting native species of plants and partnering with local groups like Queens Climate Project for a green agenda. Big thanks to Make Justice Normal and The Puffin Foundation for supporting this project to realization!
Movement to Power
How do we end violence and heal ourselves — in community? How do we enable creative practice to regenerate possibilities and create new stories for our pasts, present, and futures? Building on my my advocacy to end gender violence, in the community-based project Movement to Power, we brought together Asian American survivors of gender and sexual violence, gender justice advocates, and community members invested in ending violence to move, express, heal, and transform our relationship to violence, our communities, and ourselves. Hosted by the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective, I served as Project Director for this free 6-week creative arts workshop series. Alongside co-facilitators Deesha Narichania and Parul Shah and project participants, we generated space for connection, community-building, healing. See transformations in our short film, Movement to Power.
Ready to Heal/Ready to Grieve
Where do you encounter grief? Where do you encounter healing?
In a time of isolation, in October 2021, Anjali Deshmukh and I created space for people to feel & map their grief & healing. Using silver (grief) and pink (healing) stickers, people of all ages marked where they encounter grief and healing on a spiraling lotus pattern of circles, some marked with actions and experiences. In community with others, they then expanded the installation with shared visions of future healing. Our interactive installation enabled people to connect with themselves, share grief, and invoke healing with one another.
Thank you to NYFA and DCLA for a City Artist Corps grant and to the Queens Theatre for making our work — and healing — possible.
Weave&Woven
What does home mean? How can we belong? How do we create space for ourselves and for beloved community – especially in a time of heightened racism and xenophobia?
In Weave&Woven, Anjali Deshmukh and I engaged community members in scribing, drawing, enacting home, belonging, the feminine, the divine. Through our bodies, alone and together, we furthered somatic belonging, a tactile incarnation of language, enactment of democracy in participation. A weave of collective joy through play.
Together We Are New York: Asian Americans Remember and Re-Vision 9/11
For communities facing the aftermath of 9/11, community storytelling and poetry of witness is vital. In Together We Are New York: Asian Americans Remember and Re-Vision 9/11, a multimedia performance and community-based art project, Asian American poets interviewed community members on their experiences with 9/11 and the decade since. Our community voices — survivors of the attacks and racist backlash — have often been overlooked or silenced. Through oral storytelling, creative expression, and dialogue, we help ensure Asian American voices are a vital part of City memory and our nation’s journey forward. Each multimedia performance included audio clips of interviewees, original poetry, and dialogue with audiences. I served as Artistic Director of the project and film scriptwriter. In partnership with Kundiman, the poet team comprised Hossannah Asuncion, Tamiko Beyer, Marlon Esguerra, April Naoko Heck, Eugenia Leigh, Bushra Rehman, Zohra Saed, R.A. Villanueva, and myself.
Make Your Self Meek/Make Your Self Vast
Make Your Self Meek/Make Your Self Vast explores how our well-being reflects in our bodies and how our bodies reflect our well-being. People of color, queer & trans folks, and folks without structural power hold and express the pain of injustice – even as healthcare inequities shorten our lives.
Make Your Self Meek/Make Your Self Vast offers space to explore and reclaim mind-body-spirit connections and possibilities for wellness in our bodies. In this participatory art project shown at the LMCC Workspace Open Studios in April 2017, Anjali Deshmukh and I encouraged people to explore, interact, reflect, and play on a space created on the floor. Here we guided participants through movements and enabled them to pause to feel and witness their bodies & physical and spirit connections. Afterward, we enabled participants to take home a talisman based upon how they seek to move in the world – and how these movements would be embodied.
Participants also added to a Community Wishing Well – fostering individual and community healing.
Giving Space / Changing Space
We enabled Queens residents to share how they give & change space — whether a space of emotional well-being or the physical space of a neighborhood park. Through the evening, as twilight passed, the light of the candles grew more vibrant — illuminating community evocations on joys of nature, art, running around, and being good to one another.
What Creates Change?
How do we end violence against women? One way is through art, storytelling, and action. In What Creates Change?, hear solutions from survivors of violence along with staff and volunteers of Sakhi for South Asian Women. In this short film, for which I served as Executive Producer, we offer elements of change including allies, courage, determination, self-reflection, and faith. This film, with photography by Fariba Alam and music courtesy of Karsh Kale, has been shared at community events to further community action to end violence. Films I developed at Sakhi furthered specific policy change on language access in the courts and community action. By charting struggles and the power of transformation, we see how together we can create change.
Social Crossings
From its founding, Grinnell played a role in the Underground Railroad, and its intersecting rail services have been at the heart of the town’s growth and presence, both literally and figuratively. In June 2017, along with artists Keva Fawkes and Anna Swanson, I spent a two-week residency partnering with a series of different Grinnell, IA community organizations to produce a social map of the town’s four quadrants. We asked: How can Grinnell continue its spirit of justice for marginalized socioeconomic and racial groups? How do we build communities of (intersectional) belonging? What does it mean to be committed to freedom? And what does freedom look like today in Grinnell?
We interviewed 14 community members about their lived experiences in Grinnell and what it means to belong to the town. From the map and interviews, we generated a toolkit for transformative listening and community conversations, launching it on June 30 during a final community gathering, dialogue, and meal.
Hear a community member and us speaking on the project here:
Public Writing, Public Libraries
It takes a community to create community art. In May 2015, partnering with Grin City Collective, I created poems after connecting with community members & library staffs in 3 Iowa towns: Grinnell (Burling Library), Marshalltown, and Cedar Falls. We placed my poems, spun from interviews and my observations, on vinyl on library windows. See poetry, see the world. In exciting community involvement, the Marshalltown Library chose to have my poem appear in Spanish and Myanmar to reach its diverse communities. Thank you to Veronica Guevara for the initial Spanish translation I riffed on and to Joan Jaimes for double-checking me! Thank you to Pandora for her Myanmar translation. Thank you to all the amazing community members (adults, teens, and kids!) & library staffs who shared their stories with me: together we can keep creating the world we want to see.
