LAURA KINA

Ways of Making: Painting

2012-02-09T14:27:00.000-08:00

Visual Arts Gallery, Governors State University

Ways of Making: Painting
March 9-30, 2012

My 2010 painting "Palaka" from my ongoing Sugar series will be included in "Ways of Making: Painting" curated by Dolores Mercado, National Museum of Mexican Art.

Laura Kina "Palaka" 30x40 oil on canvas 2010

"Ways of Making: Painting" features work by 25 Women Artists in recognition of the 25th year of Women's History Month.

Pilar Acevedo
Lynn Basa
Jennifer Cronin
Jessica Freudenberg-Segal
Esperanza Gama
Paula Henderson
Juliette Herwitt
Laura Kina
Vera Klement
Sarah Krepp
Judy Ledgerwood
K. A. Letts
Bernell Loeb
Sioban Lombardi
Rosanna Mark-Andreu
Renee McGinnis
Betty Ann Mocek
Elsa Muñoz
Martina Nehrling
Joyce Owens
Miriam Socoloff
Sue Sommers
Erin Waser
Maureen Warren
Kathleen Waterloo

CLOSING RECEPTION: Wednesday March 8 from 5:30-8:30 p.m.

Look for us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/pages/Visual-Arts-Gallery-Governors-State-University/164905230206611

For more information contact:
Jeff Stevenson
Gallery Director and University Lecturer
Visual Arts Gallery, Governors State University
1 University Parkway, University Park, IL 60484
708.534.4021
http://www.govst.edu/gallery

Re-Seeing Religion: (De)Colonizing Images in Hawaii, Zimbabwe and Mexico

2012-01-26T04:06:00.000-08:00

The Center for Interreligious Engagement Presents:

Re-Seeing Religion: (De)Colonizing Images in Hawaii, Zimbabwe and Mexico

Wednesday, February 15, 2012
6:30-8:00pm
DePaul Art Museum
935 W. Fullerton Ave.

Three panelists explore the creatively difficult visual interactions among indigenous peoples and their colonizers. Drawing on oral history and family photographs, Laura Kina’s SUGAR paintings recall obake ghost stories and feature Okinawan sugar cane plantation field laborers in Hawaii. Joseph Kinsella considers the often conscious indigenization of Christianity by Zimbabwean painters and sculptors. Kay Read, using a stark contrast between pre-conquest Aztec and post-Conquest Spanish images of the Feathered Serpent, exposes the long-lasting., but influential, colonialist legacy left us by the early clerics.

Participants
Laura Kina - DePaul University, Associate Professor of Art, Media, and Design
Joseph Kinsella - DePaul University, Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Kay Read – DePaul University, Professor of Religious Studies (Panelist and Moderator)

DePaul ART Dept Visiting Speaker Laura Letinsky Feb 28, 2012

2012-01-07T07:03:00.000-08:00

Critical Mixed Race Studies 2012 call for papers deadline Dec 15, 2011

2011-12-05T13:30:00.001-08:00

CALL FOR PAPERS DUE DECEMBER 15, 2011

Conference Description: What is Critical Mixed Race Studies? will be hosted at DePaul University in Chicago, November 1-4, 2012. The CMRS conference brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines nationwide. Recognizing that the diverse disciplines that have nurtured Mixed Race Studies have fostered different approaches to the field, the 2012 CMRS conference is devoted to the general theme "What is Critical Mixed Race Studies?"

Proposals: We invite panels, roundtables, and papers that address the conference theme, although participants are also welcome to submit proposals that speak to their own specialized research, pedagogical, or community-based interests. The primary criterion for selection will be the quality of the proposal, not its connection to the conference theme. Proposals might consider the ways different disciplines approach or provide methodologies for critical analyses of mixed race issues. Proposals might also consider the following areas as related to Critical Mixed Race Studies:

Arts
Census/Racial Counting
Communications
Comparative & Transnational Studies
Commerce
Community Organizing
Critical Race Studies
Cultural Studies
Economics
Education
Global Migrations & Diaspora
Government/Civil Rights Compliance
Health Care
History
Identity
Geography
Indigenous Studies
Interdisciplinary Studies
K-12
Literary Studies
Mental Health
Politics
Prison/Industrial Complex
Psychology
Queer Studies
Religious Studies
Social Services
Sociology
Transracial Adoption
Urban Studies

To submit a proposal or for more information, please visit:
http://las.depaul.edu/cmrs

DEADLINE FOR ALL PROPOSALS: Dec. 15th, 2011
SELECTIONS WILL BE FINALIZED BY March 1st, 2012

All queries should be directed to cmrs@depaul.edu

NEA grant and UW book contract awarded for War Baby/Love Child

2011-11-22T02:44:00.001-08:00

A National Endowment for the Arts - 2012 Art Works Grant has been awarded to a project for which I am the primary investigator (aka project organizer and co-curator/co-author):

DePaul University
Chicago, IL
$39,000
To support the exhibition, War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art, and accompanying catalogue. Featuring art works by approximately 20 contemporary artists, the exhibition will investigate the construction of mixed race and mixed heritage, and Asian American identity in the United States.

http://www.nea.gov/grants/recent/12grants/12AAE.php?CAT=Art%20Works&DIS=Museum

The exhibition, co-curated by Laura Kina and Wei Ming Dariotis, is scheduled to open at the new DePaul University Art Museum April 26 - June 30, 2013,Chicago, IL and will then travel to the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience August 9, 2013 – January 19, 2014, Seattle, WA.

Artists:
Mequitta Ahuja, Albert Chong, Serene Ford, Kip Fulbeck, Stuart Gaffney,Louie Gong, Jane Jin Kaisen, Lori Kay, Li-lan, Richard Lou, Samia Mirza, ChrisNaka, Laurel Nakadate, Gina Osterloh, Adrienne Pao, Cristina Lei Rodriguez, AmandaRoss-Ho, Jenifer Wofford, Debra Yepa-Pappan.

University of Washington Press to publish War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art:

A related publication of the same title, also co-edited by Laura Kina and Wei Ming Dariotis, has been awarded a book contract to be published by the University of Washington Press to coincide with the exhibition in 2013. This multi-author volume will feature a foreward by Kent A. Ono, a co-authored preface and introductory essay by the editors, 19 original artist interviews conducted by the editors, and original essays from Wei Ming Dariotis and the contributing authors: Camilla Fojas, Stuart Gaffney, Rudy Guevarra, Eleana Kim, Richard Lou,Margo Machida, Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, Lori Pierce, Cathy Schlund-Vials, KenTanabe, and Wendy Thompson-Taiwo. Major funding for the publication has been awarded through the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, DePaul University and San Francisco State University.

Related programming will be organized in 2013-2014. Stay tuned!

Video from my artist talk at the Oregon Nikkei Endowment

2011-10-26T06:05:00.000-07:00

Oregon Nikkei Endowment - Hapa panel discussion art and life
August 4, 2011 University of Oregon in Portland
Panelists Dmae Roberts, Laura Kina, and Emily Momohara talk with Tim DuRoche on what it means to be hapa, their life and art practice, and the exhibit Kip Fulbeck: Part Asian, 100% Hapa at the Oregon Nikkei Endowment.

Part 1 of 4 - Introduction and artist talks by Dmae Roberts and Emily Hanako Momohara
http://www.youtube.com/user/OregonNikkei#p/a/u/2/KdV13UFZbMU

Part 2 of 4 end of Emily's talk and Laura Kina artist talk (minutes 1-12:45)
http://www.youtube.com/user/OregonNikkei#p/a/u/0/RSVWqqq2HXY

Part 3 of 4 Group panel discussion moderated by Tim DuRoche
http://www.youtube.com/user/OregonNikkei#p/a/u/1/ZF5r1S1Fihw

Part 4 of 4 End of the panel discussion and audience Q&A
http://www.youtube.com/user/OregonNikkei#p/a/u/0/oZlKSAFt21Q

For more details on this past event:
http://laurakina.blogspot.com/2011_07_01_archive.html

Obake Halloween: A New Season of An Unseen World

2011-10-01T01:00:00.000-07:00

Laura Kina "Issei" oil on canvas, 30x45 in., 2011

Akiko Masuda, from Akiko's Hawaiian Buddhist Bed & Breakfast, is hosting the 7th Annual Obake Night Local Style Halloween Ghost Stories featuring "Tita" Kathy Collins Pidgin storyteller extraordinaire Oct 28 and 29th in Wilea, HI. For more details visit:

http://www.akikosbnb.com/activities/obake%20night.html

I am honored that Akiko Masuda has asked if she could feature works from my Sugar series again on this year's event poster. Mahalo to Charlene Asato for her design.

Fresh off the easel and still yet to be shown, the October 2011 cover of Hawaii's The Paradise Post features my painting "Issei"of my great grandmother Makato Gibu as well as a cover story by Akiko Masuda - "Welcome to a World Of Unseen Spirits& An Obake Halloween," TheParadise Post: A Reader's Monthly,Vol. IV, No. 37, October 2011, cover and p. 2. http://theparadisepost.com/

Paradise Post Oct 2011 cover featuring a detail of Laura Kina's painting "Issei"

Paradise Post p. 2 cover story

Charlene Asato's poster design for the 7th Annual Obake Night. The poster features works from Laura Kina's "Sugar" series.

Interview on Oregon's KBOO Community Radio

2011-09-03T15:23:00.000-07:00

KBOO Community Radio Portland 90.7 FM Friday 9/2/11

APA Compass' Andrew Yeh speaks with artist Laura Kina.

"Laura Kina, visual artist and scholar of Asian-American and Mixed-Race Studies"

Listen to the 15 min. interview: http://kboo.fm/node/30667

Art in a small town: on juried shows – Real People 2011

2011-08-21T07:14:00.000-07:00

I grew up in a small town but I couldn’t breath in a small town. For the past 8 years I’ve lived in a South Asian neighborhood in Chicago, where the savory curry air and minor key of the call to prayer is occasionally punctuated by mariachi music and the pounding base of a sub woofer.

It’s anything but country but I do remember that it was in the country, in Sunshine Studios under the tutelage of portrait and landscape plein air artist and retired U.S. Air Force wife Phyllis Oliver and afterschool popcorn sprinkled with lemon pepper, classical music and a good dose of Right vs. Left political debates, that I learned the fundamentals of painting and drawing. And it was in the North Kitsap Junior High School gym, on portable gray folding walls during my hometown of Poulsbo’s annual Viking Fest, that I learned that the art that gets the most reaction from the crowd probably won’t win first prize - in 1989, I made a disturbing assemblage painting, inspired by the Dec. 1988 Lockerbie Bombing, which featured Barbie doll legs blasting out of the side of the Pan Am Flight 103. Many a mother’s tongue clucked, “What has the world come to that our youth are focusing on so much violence?!” I think the painting is still somewhere in my parent’s basement and the bomber, Abdelbasset al Megrahi, was released in 2009 after being diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer.

Earlier this summer I got an invitation to jury a national figurative art show for The Northwest Area Arts Council (NAAC) called “Real People 2011” (most likely as a result of my realistic 2006 charcoal Loving series). Despite NY gallerist and art world mavin Edward Winkleman’s advice on juried exhibitions and my general principle never to participate in shows where there is an entry fee involved, I said yes and was promptly sent a link to review over four hundred art works. I had no idea who the artists were or where they were coming from. All I had were the visuals and a brief description of the work. I ranked them on a scale of 1-20 and my results were compiled with two other jurors (Chicago gallerist Dan Addington of Addington Gallery and a McHenry county artist Rodger Bechtold) and then 80 works, that received the highest average ranking, were selected.

The NAAC organizers graciously invited me to meet them to review the show early and eat lunch with them at LaPetite Creperie. Sure, no problem. The day I went to meet them, I realized that I thought I was jurying an art show in Chicago at the “Near Northwest Arts Council" (Wicker Park Center). I believe in giving back to the community and I remembered that when I was very young, I had been selected for a juried show at that venue. But this show was for the “Norwest Area Arts Council” in McHenry County in Woodstock, IL! An hour and a half northwest of Chicago through cornfields and too many toll ways, Woodstock was put on the Hollywood map by Bill Murry in the 1993 Groundhog Day movie.

Old Court House Art Center in Woodstock, IL

Upon walking into the old courthouse/jail where the exhibition is held, my first impression was surprise that I really had no idea about the sense of scale from seeing works online. Almost without fail, every work was a different size than what I had imagined. You also have no sense of resolution in photographs online or the surface and texture of a work. Subtlety and nuance just can’t compete online. So what stands out instead are bold blocks of colors, dramatic value contrasts, and strong central images.

But what makes a work actually good both online an in person? You’ll have to go to the opening on August 27^th to see which artists the shows judge, Rodger Bechtold, selected (in person) for the top prizes and honorable mentions but here are three art works from Real People 2011 that that worked for me online and were even better in real life:

Portland, OR Christine Zachary for her Ashcan School of art palette, Edward Hopperesque lighting and general sense of unrest as seen in her painting “Longing.” On her website she says she “concentrates solely on objective painting.” Is there any such thing? It’s the subjectiveness in her work that intrigued me.

Christine Zachary's "Longing" as seen on her website.

Christine Zachary's "Longing" as seen in real life at Real People 2011. The intimate scale, old school modernist dark frame, and the enameled surface of the painting were not apparent online.

Aiea, HI Ann Oshita’s “Barbie Expressionist I.” She describes here inspiration as coming from “cultural icons, children, and my sister” as “they enable the depiction of triumphs and tragedies.” I was drawn to her rough depiction of a confident red haired vintage Barbie – this girl, with her designer clutch in hand, looks like she is going somewhere. Oshita is a graduate from Parson School of Design in fashion and illustration and also from Wellesley College in Art History.

Ann Oshita's "Barbie Expressionist I" as seen in Real People 2011

Slayton, MN Laura Veenhuis’ oversized stylized oil painting of a badass smoking cool wrinkled old lady named “Kitty.” On her website she says it’s the first of 7 in her “Tormented Women” series and “The theme relates to thoughts or feelings that challenge people everyday to be a good person or to lead a God pleasing life.” I thought it was a portrait of a snooty art collector surveying her surroundings! I believe g-d would like all of us, big cities and small towns et al, to appreciate art (make it, buy it, view it, critique it, whatever). Art is, after all, one of the pleasures of a reflective and engaged life no matter where in the world you are.

Installation view of Laura Veenhuis' "Kitty" in the Old Court House and former jail turned art center in Woodstock, IL

Real People 2011 is held in the Old Court House Arts Center located at 101 N. Johnson, Woodstock, IL 60098. The exhibition is open August 4 - October 2. Gallery hours: Tues-Sat 11am-5pm, Sun 1-5pm. A reception will be held on August 27, 2011. Call 815-338-4525 for more information.

48 hours in Stumptown: Portland Arts & Culture

2011-08-07T15:46:00.000-07:00

I flew out to Portland, OR August 4-5th to participate on a panel discussion on mixed race Asian American (aka "hapa") art and identity organized by the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center in conjunction with Kip Fulbeck's Part Asian/ 100% Hapa exhibition. I grew up outside of Seattle but since I left in 1991, I have never really had the chance to get to know Portland's arts and culture scene and truly capture the "Dream of the 90s."

With just 48 hours to explore, I came away with the impression that Portland is an organic foodie heaven with a crafty DIY arts culture and lot's of homeless advocates. Across the board, all the folks I met were very civically engaged. A new friend told me that she recently went to an unveiling ceremony for a public toilet that PHLUSH had been fighting for. If any of you have watched Portlandia, you know it's easy to make fun of (read the NY Time's review) but it's "weirdness" is also terribly endearing. I'm not sure how much fiscal sense this brand of liberalism all makes (they don't pay any sales tax...a totally shocking concept for me, coming from Chicago) but I enjoyed the book stores, good coffee, micro brews, local wines and knowing that the lamb burger with feta, dried apricots, pine nuts, roasted red onion, and spicy mint yogurt was from nearby Anderson Ranch. I didn't catch the name of the lamb or what his quality of life was but I'm sure if I asked the folks at Davis Street Tavern, they would have known.

Keep Portland Weird

I visited the sprawling Nike campus in nearby unincorporated Beaverton, OR

Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center

Nicole Nathan, Director of Collections and Exhibits, and me at the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center

Kip Fulbeck's Part Asian/100% Hapa exhibition on view at the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center through Dec. 31, 2011

Dr. Patti Duncan, Associate Professor of Women's Studies at Oregon State University, leading a discussion on mixed race Asian American identity and a tour of the Fulbeck exhibit for APANO (Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon). We all went out for karaoke and dumplings later that night at the Voice Box. They specialize in infused sake cocktails and are known for their bacon cheeseburger dumplings.

Panel discussion moderated by Tim DuRoche with fellow Hapa and Critical Mixed Race Studies scholars/artists Emily Momohara and Dmae Roberts at the University of Oregon.

It's a small world! In the audience at the University of Oregon was a classmate of on of my Auntie Nora from Hilo, HI - Pam Mattys.

Oregon Nikkei Endowment Executive Director Mari Watanabe and artist Emily Momohara the morning after our panel discussion.

I walked through the gallery district near Portland's Chinatown - I especially enjoyed viewing NY-based artist Ming Fay: Full Circle at Butters Gallery. Read Bob Hick's review in the Oregonian. The show was a mini retrospective of Fay's work and it was great to see his new work alongside the older pieces. He's making these colorful spray foam blobs that read like over ripe fruit with candy petals.

Gallery owner David Butters looking at Ming Fay's work at Butters Gallery.

Another top pick is Rick Bartow: Coyote's Road through August 27th at Froelick Gallery

Rick Bartow's Bear Mother Dancing on Ignorance/Fear

They were still installing this show but if you are in Portland later this month, be sure to check out Niki McClure: Cutting her Own Path, 1996-2011 opening on August 18, 2011 at the Museum of Contemporary Craft

I didn't bother to stand in line for an hour at Voddoo Doughnuts. Every time I walked by there was a line out the door. Locals said that the best time to go is late at night.

If you go to Portland, be sure to grab a cup of coffee at Stumptown Coffee.

I asked the a barista at Stumptown where she suggested I go to lunch. She said they all eat at the food trucks but for something a little more upscale to try the new Little Bird Bistro. I was in a hurry to get to the airport so I just grabbed a soft roll, fried cod, celery root sandwich at the bar.

Portland - Hapa and Critical Mixed Race Studies art panel

2011-07-26T07:35:00.000-07:00

Kip Fulbeck Part Asian: 100% Hapa

August 4, 2011: Panel by Hapa and Critical Mixed Race Studies scholars and artists Emily Momohara, Laura Kina, and Dmae Roberts. This talk will showcase their work as the artists talk about how they address hapa identity through art. Emily Momohara is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at the Art Academy of Cincinnati where she heads the photography major. Dmae Roberts is a two-time Peabody award-winning independent radio artist and writer who has written and produced more than 400 audio art pieces and documentaries for NPR and PRI programs. Laura Kina is Associate Professor of Art, Media, and Design; Global Asian Studies affiliated faculty member; and a distinguished Vincent de Paul Professor at DePaul University in Chicago, where she has also been involved in the emerging field of critical mixed race studies. This panel will be moderated by Tim DuRoche, Director of Programs for the World Affairs Council of Oregon

Held in conjunction with Kip Fulbeck's exhibition Part Asian: 100% Hapa at the Oregon Nikkei Endowment's Legacy Center.
University of Oregon in Portland
August 4, 2011 5:00-6:30pm
White Stag Block Room #142/144 (in the Old Town Historic Chinatown District)
70 NW Couch Street
Portland, OR 97209
For more information contact Nicole Nathan at 503-224-1458
http://www.oregonnikkei.org/exhibits.htm#exhibit

Laura Kina
Hapa Soap Opera #5 (Joey Nakayama, Robert Karimi, Jef French)
Oil on canvas
72” x 48”
2003
View the complete series

Emily Hanako Momohara's new solo show, Islands, also opens this month in Ohio. Check it out in person or online:

Island 4, 2011 Emily Hanako Momohara

Emily Hanako Momohara: ISLANDS

Reception: Friday August 12, 6-9pm

Exhibition: August 12 – September 17, 2011

PAC Gallery, 2540 Woodburn Avenue, Cincinnati OH

view images @ www.ehmomohara.com/Islands.html

Seeing in color - art and mixed race

2011-07-06T08:48:00.000-07:00

I was reviewing an Asian American marketing book (Many Cultures One Market by Robert Kumaki and Jack Moran) and getting my toenails painted dark fuchsia pink, just a few steps from blood red, at a neighborhood Vietnamese nail salon when I got a text that the New York Times article I've been waiting for had finally come out:
Pushing Boundaries, Mixed-Race Artists Gain Notice by Felicia Lee
The article highlights, amongst others, the recent Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival, works by authors such as Heidi Durrow and Danzy Senna, filmmaker Jeff Chiba Stearn's "One Big Hapa Family" and artist Kip Fulbeck's traveling exhibition Part Asian/100% Hapa.

In the hours that followed, my inbox blew up with comments on mixed race (see the Critical Mixed Race Studies Facebook wall and the comments on the NY Times article). I kept thinking that what was missing here (both in the article and the online commentary) was a discussion of the artwork itself in terms of form and aesthetics and the different ways the various art forms (literature, film, spoken word, performance, visual arts etc.) change the terms of discussion on mixed race and how we might see (or read, or hear, or feel and experience) color.

Danzy Senna's You Are Free, a collection of short stories is a great summer read that let's you get lost in a world full of fascinatingly dysfunctional and complicated relationships. The female protagonists of these short stories are either biracial or in interracial relationships and, refreshingly, most of them are a bit older. These aren't the stories of a 20-somethings coming of age and searching for their individual identity. These are lives weathered by racial misreading and the messiness of desire and longing and they are defined against and beside their lovers, husbands, kids, parents, and friends.

Towards the end of the book, I tripped up and was knocked out of my "lost" state of summer fun reading with her story "Tryptich" in which Senna tells the same story (Cherries in Winter, Peaches in Winter, and Plums in Winter) of searching for fruit out of season/region set on a winter day in New Haven, CT the day after the main character's mother dies. At first I didn't like this suite. I resented it. It was disruptive and repetitive....the narrative arc and sentence structure stayed exactly the same in each story but what was switched out were the mix of racial and class details (the girls' music poster, the type of family dog, the type of car, where she shops, the profession of her father). Just as you think you know who is black, white, or biracial, the clues mess with you again. It wasn't until I was done with the book and few days passed that I kept thinking about these stories and how her use of structure made me think critically about the narratives rather than voyeuristically consuming them wholesale. This is what form can do. I think these stories also resonated for me, as a painter, because of the attentiveness to seeing in color.

"The fruit is piled neatly, identical apples and identical pears, not a mark on their waxy skins. There are plums too, imported from Ecuador at $3.99 a point. They are mostly hard, gold still showing under the purple. She fills a bag with six of the ripest she can find."

I could imagine that cool plum color and how it must look just as the sky begins to brighten on a winter morning. I was aware of the uncertainty of color, of its shifting nature, and how much our experience of seeing color relies on context and expectations.

I read the NY Time's and facebook wall posts while walking through the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago with a fellow mixed race Japanese American friend to see the Mark Bradford Project and Pandora's Box: Joseph Cornell Unlock's the MCA Collection. The MCA had a few Paul Thek's up in their Cornell exhibition and this reminded me of the Paul Thek retrospective I saw last month at UCLA's Hammer Museum where I found myself unexpectedly blown away by his intentionally underwhelming low-craft paintings. I couldn't photograph in the gallery but there was this big sloppy pink painting of the Loch Ness monster. The monster was emerging from the water in some far away land and it was sketched out urgently in turquoise paint that reminded me of the 1940s. I went back three times to look at it. Color can leave you with out words and fill you with emotion and shock you into different places and times. I got an idea there that hopefully I'll be able to execute in the studio this week.

Paul Thek: Diver, A Retrospective currently at the UCLA Hammer Museum through August 28, 2011

Another work that caught my attention at the Hammer that brings color into focus is Sam Durrant's lightbox - End of White Supremacy.

Look at this work and then read Steven F. Riley's opening remarks on white supremacy for a panel at the Mixed Roots festival - Don’t Pass on Context: The Importance of Academic Discourses in Contemporary Discussions on the Multiracial Experience.

Sam Durant. End White Supremacy, 2008. Electric sign with vinyl text, 96 x 136 in. Hammer Museum.

Mixed Roots Recap

2011-06-14T07:31:00.000-07:00

The 4th Annual Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival

June 11-12, 2011

Japanese American National Museum

Los Angeles, CA

www.mxroots.org


Mixed Messages- Mixed Race/ Interracial Represenation in TV, Film, & News Media workshop - Me, Jennifer Noble, Monique Fields, Heidi Durrow, Susan Straight

This was the first year I've been able to attend the Mixed Roots festival founded by Fanshen Cox and Heidi Durrow in 2008. If you want the main festival recap scroll down a bit...first I want to recap on my own workshop...I hope you'll indulge me.

Thoughts on Mainstream Media and Mixed Representation:
I was honored to be invited by Ebony journalist and Honeysmoke blogger Monique Fields to participate in a workshop on mainstream media. We were asked to look, in particular, at Ebony's first biracial issue in May 2011 and the New York Times' ongoing series on Race Remixed by Susan Saulny. Since our panel ran out of time and I didn't get to cover much from the notes I prepared, I thought I'd pass along my responses here. This was the original question Monique posed to us:

Q “what, if anything, it means that mainstream media are writing about multiracial Americans, whether there are any concerns about how mixed-race Americans are portrayed in mainstream media and what the panelists would suggest to reporters and editors as they continue to write about the mixed experience.”

My Short Answer: Susan Saulny’s NY Time’s “Race Remixed” series and the Ebony’s May coverage about biracial identity were very validating but they are just a start. We need more coverage like this but also in depth coverage that goes beyond the US Census and personal narratives that exemplify racial progress and pitfalls.

Growing up in the Sesame Street era of the 1970s and 80s I saw a lot of multicultural images in popular culture and the media but not interracial or explicitly mixed race. By the late 1990s, we had Tiger Woods and serial killer Andrew Cunanan squarely in the center of mainstream media coverage so there were images out there, besides the tragic mulatto stereotype, but now we were either racial saviors or demons.

I think this vacuum of representation is one of the motivating factors in me wanting to create artworks, classes, conferences etc. that reflect not only my own story but a larger narrative and history of what it means to be mixed race in the US and beyond.

And my long answers....

Types of Media: Before I could answer Monique's question to us, I had to think about my relationship to “mainstream media.” I'm certainly not an expert on media but I'm a consumer like everybody else. I consume mostly mainstream “prestige media” like NPR, CNN, and the New York Times or I look to mainstream media for mindless entertainment: cooking shows on FoodNetwork, silly animal/reality TV shows like "Hogs gone Wild" on Discovery Channel, or Sponge Bob....I should preface this by the fact that my 6 year-old influences a lot of what I watch. But Anderson Cooper and Mr. Crabs isn’t where I look for news about mixed race – it’s really more through social networking – word of mouth/sharing articles with like-minded folks either through non-profit orgs, academic networks or social networks, blogs, podcasts. Like a lot of people, I’m a niche consumer and I probably know a lot about a very narrow topic. If you really want mixed race news, go to Steven F. Riley's blog www.mixedracestudies.org or Heidi Durrow and Fanshen Cox' podcast mixedchickschat or listen in on the panels or watch videos from CMRS 2010 on ITunesU.

Even as I say this, I'm reminded of a paper that I heard Kent Ono deliver at the Association for Asian American Studies conference on the invisibility of mixed race on TV and how we are both everywhere and yet remain invisible. He was analyzing the reality TV show Jon and Kate plus 8. Also, remember Mary Beltran's keynote at Critical Mixed Race Studies 2010 "Everywhere and Nowhere"?

Usefulness of Media Coverage: Mainstream media is a powerful form of external validation. For example, the NY Times article on the increase of multiracials who are just now entering college, "Black? White? Asian? More Young Americans Choose All of the Above", was useful to me in a concrete way this past month as I was able to advocate in my University to include multiracials in a draft of a strategic plan for diversity that we are currently finalizing.

I also found the demographic shift of multiracials in the South, "Black and White and Married in the Deep South", informative and this will help guide my work on the board of MAVIN for a community mapping project we are working on with Census 2010 data where we plan to look at key cities across the US to analyze where multiracial populations exist and are growing and what and where existing resources are. We are in the process of assessing which southern city to pick.

Q So what would I suggest to reporters and editors as they continue to write about the mixed experience?

I really appreciate is how papers such as the New York Times have been tapping folks that we know and respect in the movement such as Louie Gong from MAVIN and 8^th Generation as experts to consult with during national racial flash points such as when back in October 2010 a Republican candidate for the Senate in Nevada, Sharon Angle, told a group of Latino students that she did not know if they were all Latino because “some of you look a little more Asian to me.” I hope we can see more of our community, academic and cultural leaders tapped as experts on a routine basis....there's always going to be a mixed point of view or lens to issues and they don't always have to be about race.

Further Research - Books I'd like to recommend on mixed race media:
Making Multiracials: State, Family, and Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line by Kymberly McClain Da Costa (Stanford, 2007)

Mixed Race Hollywood by Mary Beltran and Camilla Fojas (NYU Press, 2008)
Souls of Mixed Folks: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium by Michele Elam (Stanford, 2011)

I’ve also been thinking about what needs to be done in terms of cultural work within the mixed race movement. This may or may not relate to mainstream media but I just want to put it out here what I'm thinking about for my own work:

building sustainability and professionalization – by this I mean building fund raising networks, creating opportunities for publications and venues for exhibitions and shows. It seems like a lot of times we are not only creating the cultural programming but having to build the entire delivery system as well. You can only do that for so long without getting burned out.

Go beyond US racial politics and build international networks of folks working on mixed race cultural production. For example, I want to connect more with mixed Okinawan artists in the diaspora and I'm looking forward to showing with fellow mixed Okinawan American artist Emily Momohara in the near future and reading blogs such as Grits and Sushi by Mitzi Uehara-Carter. I’m also curious to learn more about Australia’s "lost (or rather stolen) generation" that is coming of age and reclaiming their hybrid indigenous roots. At a recent symposium on the Future of Asian Art that I participated in at NYU, Dean Chan talked about the work of Brisbane indigenous artist Vernon Ah Kee (who is also of Chinese descent). Ah Kee does these big charcoal portrait drawings based on anthropological photos taken by Norman Tinsdale, at the behest of the Australian government, of what they thought was going to be a dying race. These images include Ah Kee’s own grandparents. Ah Kee states in a video clip on YouTube, “There should be a representation in art of Aboriginal people that is full of depth, sophistry, complexity, and sadness, and sorrow. All these things that everybody else is allowed to be but black fellows aren’t.” I think the same thing pertains to images of mixed race people in art.

I want to use a mixed lens to drill down into Asian American art history– A colleague at DePaul, Scott Paeth, was talking to me yesterday about being a fox vs a hedgehog with research - covering vast territory or burrowing down. My tendency is to be a fox but I think it's time in the mixed race movement and in Asian American art to be a hedgehog. In teaching a class on Mixed Race Art and Identity since 2009 at DePaul, I realized that there was a lot of work that could be done on just looking at one aspect of this vast and emerging topic so for the past few years, I’ve been working with Wei Ming Dariotis, Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies San Francisco State University, on a multi-author volume and traveling contemporary art exhibition called War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art which examines how mixed race Asians are addressing and negotiating their identities through their art. The project also seeks to begin to document the complex historical forces that have defined the hapa experience, namely US Wars in Asia and the legacy of the Civil Rights era. Our experiences as hapas are not necessarily singularly unique. There are patterns and currents in our communal history

Mixed Roots Festival Recap:
After the excitement of the 2010 Critical Mixed Race Studies conference in Chicago that I co-organized back in November, I was curious to see in person what's been happening this year across the US in the mixed race movement. I heard the buzz but missed going to the UC Berkeley Institute of East Asian Studies Hapa Japan Conference and Harvard's Half-Asian People's Association So...What Are you, Anyway?

What is unique about Mixed Roots is that they bring together authors, filmmakers, performers, artists, community, general public, and academics from multiple backgrounds. For the most part I saw representation from the biracial community and hapa folks but there was some representation from multiracial Latino and Native communities as well. I'd like to see more variety in representation but there are historical and colonial reasons why biracials and mixed Asians dominate this discourse.

Steven F. Riley's introduction to his workshop with G. Reginald Daniel, "Don't Pass on Context", gave me a lot to think about. Riley pointed out three main areas that we have been bypassing in the mixed race movement: 1) The persistence of inequality 2) Race is a social construct 3) Historical context. Within this, he had a considered critique of the construction of Loving vs. Virginia being a starting point for mixed activism and representation and the myth of the biracial baby boom. He also talked about white supremacy and how this was the cornerstone for anti-miscegenation laws and how miscegenation laws created race in this country. As he closed he said, "We are not becoming a multiracial society, we are and have been so for centuries." Also, I should point out the Mr. Riley probably knows more about any mixed anything than anyone else in the room. And what does he read? He gave a shout out to Nicole Nfonoyim's blog: http://mixedreamers.blogspot.com/


Don't Pass on Context: The Importance of Academic Discourses in Contemporary Discussion on the Multiracial Experience - Steven F. Riley is pictured to the left and G. Reginald Daniel to the right

Coming to Jesus - I was talking to a friend after the festival and they said they ran into a student who had traveled across the country from some small town in the middle of nowhere to come to Mixed Roots and that she, like so many others, had her "come to Jesus moment." As I work in critical mixed race and the deeper I get into academia and art, it's easy to become cynical and view the act of using documentary and straight narrative to tell your story as simplistic...too easy. I'm all for abstraction and experimental forms but I have to remember where I came from and how powerful and important it was developmentally to be able to see myself in others...to know that I wasn't alone. And I came from a loving and accepting family and community (albeit rural and mostly "white" and we did have one cross burning and my childhood is not without enduring a few racial slurs and a shot gun or two). I can only imagine what it must be like for others who have faced rejection and prejudice and isolation. Even today, I feel down right ecstatic about having an expanding network of friends who I consider kin. I may have converted to Judaism but I still have "come to Jesus" moments myself but I wonder what happens the morning after? I'm also reminded of Frank Chin's critique of the autobiographical impulse in early Asian American literature and the parallels to the Christian concept of the confession and all the baggage that comes with that. This can't just be about self and identity and recognition? The analogy to getting saved is like coming out. It's a relief after years of passing, covering, or being hyper visible or invisible. I know folks have been working on multiracial issues communally in the US for 20-30 years (e.g. MASC and Biracial Family Network) but as part of the 2nd generation of activists post-2000 Census, what are our next challenges?

Me with UCLA students and friends

Why does it matter for us to come together as a community? Maybe Athena Mari Asklipiadis from Mixed Marrow has the answer? Is it about access and improving quality of health care? If race is a social construct, what does mixed race mean in terms of medicine?

Mixed Marrow began in 2009 in response for the need for a multiethnic-specific outreach due to the lack of public knowledge and registered donors.

Mixed Marrow is dedicated to finding bone marrow and blood cell donors to patients of multiethnic descent. Our outreach concentrates on this minority due to the desperate need for registered donors as well as the lack of public knowledge regarding this topic.

We are dedicated to educating the multiethnic community through multimedia tools such as internet, video, and photography and hosting drives to register donors.

I came to the mixed race movement through meeting other artists, writers, filmmakers, and performers involved in the Asian American art scene nationally who just happened to be mixed and who were increasingly coming out as mixed on stage. I made a conscious decision to investigate this more through my 2002-2005 Hapa Soap Opera series and my 2006 Loving series. Only since attending a mixed race leadership retreat in 2008 have I started to understand the larger and more established community component to the movement such as MASC who has been around since 1986! I'm clearly part of a mixed 2.0 generation.

Me with multigenerational members of MASC - Farzana Nayani and son, Nancy Brown, Jennifer Noble, Thomas Lopez


Paul Spickard and MASC founder Nancy Brown

Paul Spickard was one of the 2011 Loving Prize Honorees for his pioneering scholarship "on issues concerning the Mixed experience."

Toasting Mixed Roots 2011

Festival founders Fanshen Cox and Heidi Durrow

Opening night reception

Kip Fulbeck honoring Paul Spickard or rather telling tales out of school!

Kip and Paul hugging


Filmmakers Jessica Chen Drammeh and Marcelitte Failla

The heart of the festival, of course, are the films and readings. I never get tired of seeing Jessica Chen Drammeh's film Anomaly. I was struck by how her film not only tells our story but how it has been an instrument in building community in and of itself. She took a unique approach to production - she would shoot a little and then do a work in progress screening and host a fundraiser and then with that money, shoot a little more and repeat the process. What ended up happening is that in the many years it is taking to finish this film, she both captured individual narratives over time but also the emergence of the 2.0 mixed race movement. I only got to see the Mixed Roots 2011 Short Film screenings (which also included Marcelitte Failla's Uncovering Color and Kamala Todd's Cedar & Bamboo) but I heard quite a bit of buzz around Victoria Mahoney's Yelling at the Sky and I'd seen Jeff Chiba Stearns One Big Hapa Family at the Asian American Film Festival in Chicago earlier this year (my daughter decided to identify as "quapa" after seeing his movie). It's an inspiring and accessible film that covers Canadian mixed Asian history and raises critical questions as to who and why we marry others outside of our racial group. His film is spot on for many of the issues I see in my own Japanese American community and experience (out marriage, assimilation into whiteness, finding your own roots, legacy of WWII and internment and internalized racism, changing what it means to be Japanese American or Canadian today, seeing Japanese identity as expansive rather than disappearing etc.)

Danzy Senna reading from her new book of short stories - You are Free


Sarah Culberson, author of A Princess Found, telling her story

There was a lot of talent and heart felt stories on stage. Musician/story teller Jason Luckett stole the Unplugged special event for me. He's got an amazing and confident yet slightly goofy stage presence and I kept thinking he sounded a little like Jack Johnson. The 2nd Story performers were all on point. I have to give a big shout out to Kimberlee Soo for her hilarious story of coming of age as a transracial Asian adoptee with a blond bombshell big sister and to Khanisha Foster for her powerful story of growing up as a light skinned daughter of a very black Black Panther and what it was like as an adult to teach the story of Martin Luther King to a group of elementary students who saw her as Latina.

It's almost impossible to say what was best about Mixed Roots 2011 but if I had to pick, I'd say Danzy Senna and Sarah Culberson. Danzy because she's just a damn good writer. I remember not being able to put down her novel Caucasia. She read 8 pages from "What's the Matter with Helga and Dave?" from her new book of short stories, You are Free, and I was hooked again! So form really does matter after all. While I may have my "come to Jesus" moment at conferences and festivals, what's going to stay with me as deep inspiration is those stories, movies, and music that is of quality, that is complex, that is innovative, that is unique. Form matters. Sarah Culberson's story just had us all in tears. She grew up as a confused biracial girl in a white family in West Virginia and as an adult, hired a private investigator to track down her birth parents. Her mother had died 11 years earlier but she did end up finding her father and learning she was actually the daughter of an African chief! It's a powerful (and funny) story but what she leaves us with is not just a feel good story with an amazing true life fairy tale ending but a provocation to action. Sarah's father is a chief in Sierra Leone and she is working to help rebuild her father's community, which was torn apart from 11 years of civil war. Through her work with the Kposowa Foundation Sarah is raising funds to "rebuild a boarding school, provide drinking water, provide economically sustainable opportunities, and improve the general quality of life for the people of Sierra, Leone, West Africa." To learn more about her story, watch Sarah Culberson's interview on CNN.

Mixed Roots Midwest anyone?

postscript to my post from earlier this morning

.....An artist friend of mine that I met in Chicago, Gwenn-Aël LYNN, just brought a project of his to my attention and I think he raises some challenging points to think about in terms of the concept of roots. Gwenn wrote to me about his project Roots...[a speaking garden] that, "it's a project I did in Paris this past fall: it investigates the metaphor of roots as pertaining to one's origins: how relevant is that metaphor when one identifies with several identities, with being uprooted, replanted? or as having no roots at all? What happens in the face of migration on a global scale?"

I also just got out of a faculty seminar I'm co-facilitating on the topic of "Distance & Belonging" and one of the things that keeps coming up is that to be part of a group, a tribe, you inevitably leave someone out. Thinking more about the connections between telling your story and "coming out" and the Christian notion of the confessional, I'm also struck by how "getting saved" (or coming out as mixed) also implies that you might be leaving one community for another....this becomes particularly problematic in terms of solidarity for people of color.

Woman Made Gallery - Transnational Artistic Collaboration: Shelly Jyoti and Laura Kina

2011-05-30T08:30:00.000-07:00

Transnational Artistic Collaboration: Shelly Jyoti and Laura Kina

Saturday, June 18, 2011 / 2 to 4 p.m.
Woman Made Gallery
685 N. Milwaukee, Chicago, IL 60642
312-738-0400 / gallery@womanmade.org

Join us for a conversation with Woman Made artists Shelly Jyoti, from Vadodara, India, and Chicago-based Laura Kina about their collaborative exhibition 'Indigo' which was featured in three venues in India in 2009-2010 (Red Earth Gallery in Vadodara, India Habitat Centre in New Delhi, Nehru Art Centre in Mumbai) and is currently touring the US in 2011 (ArtXchange Gallery in Seattle and Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts in Miami). Refreshments will be served.

Japanese American Museum - Mixed Roots Panel - Mixed Messages

2011-05-30T06:09:00.000-07:00

MIXED ROOTS FILM & LITERARY FESTIVAL
Saturday, June 11 11:00 am-12:00pm
Japanese American National Museum
369 E. 1st St.
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Workshop location - National Center for Democracy, Democracy Lab

http://www.mxroots.org/workshops-2011

Mixed Messages – Mixed Race / Interracial representation in TV & Film & News Media

Moderator: Monique Fields

Panelists: Jennifer Noble, Thomas Lopez, Laurel Hoa, Laura Kina, Susan Straight, Heidi Durrow

Multiracial Americans of Southern California (MASC) and journalists and artist activists will discuss mixed race representation in reality TV and in the news media and its impact on the community. Can monoracials tell our stories? Do we want our “dirty laundry” aired? And what is the impact and import of special reports on the Mixed experience in Ebony Magazine and the New York Times? Is there a role we can play with media organizations to get our stories told to the mainstream with sensitivity, without appearing “tragic”? How can we advocate for mixed race and interracial couple stories in the creation of TV sitcom/reality/drama content? Panelists discuss tips and tools for how to create and ensure non-exploitative representation.

Jennifer Noble, PhD, is the current vice president of MASC and a full-time professor of Psychology at Pasadena City College. She also provides psychotherapy for children/adolescents and their families at the Reiss Davis Child Study Center. Jennifer is a past president of MASC, current board member and a part of MASC since 1999.

Thomas Lopez is the Parent Liaison and Treasurer for MASC. He is the leader of the MASC children’s playgroup, a past president and a member for over 15 yrs. Thomas is a mechanical engineer working in the medical devices industry. He is native to SoCal with parents from Mexican American and German-Polish roots.

Laurel Hoa, PhD, received her PhD in Development with a specialization in Developmental Sciences from the University of Maryland, College Park. Her dissertation was on identity development in individuals of Asian/European descent. She is interested in helping parents foster positive identities in their mixed race children. She and her Chinese-American husband recently had their first child.

Laura Kina is an artist and Associate Professor of Art, Media, & Design and co-organizer of the inaugural 2010 Critical Mixed Race Studies conference at DePaul University. She is a board member of MAVIN and is working to launch a journal on Critical Mixed Race Studies through UC Santa Barbara.

Monique Fields is a journalist, teacher and blogger. She launched Honeysmoke.com, and it draws 10,000 unique visitors every month. Her essays about interracial marriage and raising biracial children have appeared on NPR.org, Literarymama.com, the St. Petersburg Times, and theroot.com

Susan Straight was born in Riverside and still lives there with her family. (She can actually see the hospital from her kitchen window, which her daughters find kind of pathetic; most days, she walks the dog past the classroom where she wrote her first short story at 16, at Riverside City College, which they find even more sad.) She has published seven novels and one middle-grade reader. Highwire Moon was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001; A Million Nightingales was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2006. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on Highwire Moon, and a Lannan Prize was an immense help when working on Take One Candle Light a Room.

Heidi W. Durrow (pictured to the left)

Co-Founder/Co-Producer Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival
Heidi W. Durrow (left) is a graduate of Stanford University, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and Yale Law School. Heidi has worked as a corporate litigator at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and as a Life Skills trainer for the National Football League and National Basketball Association. She blogs at Light-skinned-ed Girl and is the co-producer and co-host of the award-winning podcast, Mixed Chicks Chat. She is an occasional essay contributor to National Public Radio. Heidi is the winner of writer Barbara Kingsolver’s Bellwether Prize for Literature of Social Change.

Heidi’s debut novel, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (Algonquin Books), about a young biracial girl’s coming-of-age, is currently a New York Times Bestseller . It was named as one of the Best Novels of 2010 by the Washington Post and a Top 10 Book of 2010 by The Oregonian. Ebony Magazine recently named Heidi as one of its Power 100 Leaders of 2010 along with writers Edwidge Danticat, Malcolm Gladwell and Ntozake Shange, and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. www.heidiwdurrow.com

Press and Pictures from Indigo @ Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts in Miami

2011-05-26T14:16:00.000-07:00

May 14, 2011 Shelly and I traveled to Miami, FL for the opening of our show Indigo. This is the 5th stop for the exhibition. In 2009-2010 the show traveled in India and in 2011, we started touring the show in the US. It was wonderful to catch up again in person and I certainly don't mind Miami's sunny weather! The DLF Project Room features work by an artist from Philadelphia - Caroline Lathan-Steiefel. Here are some installation shots of our work at Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts as well as two press items that came out this week from El Nuevo Herald and Art Circuits.

Critic's Choice in Art Circuits - Miami, FL May 2011

Entrance of Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts, Miami, FL. The work shown here is by Shelly Jyoti

Installation view of my Devon Avenue Sampler series at Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts May14-June 30, 2011

Me, Diana Lowenstein, Shelly Jyoti in front of my new work "Devon Avenue Sampler: Pay to Park"

Laura Kina "Devon Avenue Sampler: Pay to Park" 2011

Laura Kina "Devon Avenue Sample: Alterations" 2011

Laura Kina "Devon Avenue Sampler: For Rent" 2011

Installation view of my work at Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts

Installation view of my work "Devon Avenue Sampler: Eye Brow Threading" at Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts

Shelly Jyoti

Diana Lowenstein and family

Installation view Shelly Jyoti

Installation view Caroline Lathan-Stiefel

Caroline, Shelly, me

Detail of Caroline's work

Caroline Lathan-Steifel in front of her work

Shelly, Juliana, Laurie, Diana, Chino, Caroline, me

Shelly Jyoti in front of her work


May 22, 2011 review in Miami's El Nuevo Herald

5/22/11 review in Miami's El Nuevo Herald
(translated from Spanish to English)
Indigo’s Journey

The color blue is enduringly associated with our common repertoire: navy blue, blue jeans, the blues, all of which share the controversial history of indigo. This natural dye from India figured prominently in United States history of the 17th century, when indigo plantations proliferated to satisfy the European hunger for the desired shade.

Two centuries later, indigo returned to India, and Bengal became the main producer in the world. Later, the discovery of a synthetic process would set indigo on a new course.
Indigo: Laura Kina and Shelly Jyoti, is the title of the traveling exhibition now presented at Diana Lowenstein. The show creates a visual parallel between indigo’s journeys and the its cultural influence. The exhibition is composed of numerous crafted works such as embroidery on khadi and Sanskrit calligraphy.

The work of Shelly Jyoti, who lives and works in Vadodara, India, consists of study into the survival of this tradition in India, passed down from generation to generation. Meanwhile, Laura Kina, who lives and works in Chicago, relies on the multicultural symbology associated with indigo, which the artist acquired on multicultural Devon Avenue in Chicago.

The result is an emerging poetry which, through indigo, allows us to travel by Japanese Kasuri textiles, boro patchwork quilts, Jewish tzitzi-inspired tassels and, of course, blue jeans.

Speaking on panel at NYU symposium "The Future of Asian Art" 5/13/11

2011-05-02T23:52:00.000-07:00

I'll be speaking on Panel 2 which will start at 4:30pm on 5/13/11 at NYU.

May 14 - June 30, 2011 Indigo travels to Miami

2011-04-26T18:28:00.000-07:00

May 14, 2011 2-9pm Indigo: Laura Kina and Shelly Joyti opens at Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts. Shelly is flying in from India and I will also be at the opening. If you are in town, I hope you can join us. This is fifth stop for this show and Shelly and I have both made new work for this venue.

Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts

2043 N. Miami Avenue
Miami, FL 33127

tel 305-576-1804

info@dlfinearts.com

http://www.dlfinearts.com/upcomingexhibit.asp

New Press! Indigo covered in The Times of India

I'm working on three new pieces for the show in Miami. This is a shot of the works in my studio in Chicago

Devon Avenue Sampler - Alterations, 60x60 in., Acrylic paint on hand sewn quilt, 2011

Devon Avenue Sampler - For Rent, 60x60 in., Acrylic paint on hand sewn quilt, 2011

Devon Avenue Sampler - Pay to Park, 60x60 in., Acrylic paint on hand sewn quilt, 2011

Pay to Park detail

The torrid history of Indigo is reimagined by artists from Chicago, USA and Gujarat, India. Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts presents Indigo, a traveling exhibition exhibited in major cities throughout India and now crossing to the US. The exhibition presents complementary bodies of artwork by Indian artist Shelly Jyoti and US artist Laura Kina in a range of media including hand-embroidery on khadi fabric, indigo resist dyeing, Sanskrit calligraphy and mixed-media on canvas. The narrative threads running throughout the artists’ work evoke India’s colonial history, stories of immigration, and the tensions and transformations of cultures evolving in a changing world.

To view the work visit:
Laura Kina's Devon Avenue Sampler
Shelly Jyoti's Indigo Narratives

Surrogate Valentine rocks - Check out the Sexy 16th Annual Asian American Showcase

2011-04-03T06:45:00.000-07:00

The 16th Annual Asian American Showcase

April 1 - 14 at the Gene Siskel Film Center

164 North State Street Chicago, Illinois 60601

http://www.faaim.org/

From Chien-An Yuan's City of Lights, City of Sorrow series

Friday, April 1st the 16th Annual Asian American Showcase opened. Before heading over to the showcase, my husband and our 5-year old daughter, Midori, went to the Chicago Cultural Center for a Japan Earthquake fundraiser where we got to listen to great music and have Midori personally meet Chicago music legends Tatsu Aoiki, Yoko Noge, and Jimmy Ellis. It was hard to break away from the Kobe beef appetizers and boom of the taiko drums and jazz.

At the Gene Siskel Film Center we saw a Sexy show of artwork curated by Larry Lee (the rated R vs isn't at the Siskel...for Sexier you have to trek down to the Zhou B Art Center). Loved Chien Yuan's selections from his City of Lights, City of Sorrow series and Mayumi Lake's photographs are always on point and a little creepy!

Mayumi Lake from her Aether series
The opening night film, Surrogate Valentine, was so sweet and funny. I think I'm in love with Goh Nakamura's singing! The filmmaker, David Boyle, is originally from Arizona by way of Salt Lake City Utah and, as was pointed out in the Q&A, it's not every day a white Mormon becomes a leader in Asian American films (he also made White on Rice). David just says he likes to make movies with people he likes to work with. Enough said. He can write, edit, and produce and his timing is excellent. All I can tell you is that Asian American film has come so far from back in the day. This little film is a gem.

It's playing again on Monday, April 4th at 8pm and Goh will be performing live again. Check his music out at: http://gohnakamura.com/

Surrogate Valentine
A feature film by David Boyle
Starring Goh Nakamura, Chadd Stoops
Filmmaker David Boyle and Musician/Actor Goh Nakamura will be in-person for the premiere!

Cult favorite songwriter/musician Goh Nakamura, whose songs have been featured in films including Robert Benton’s FEAST OF LOVE and Ridley Scott’s BODY OF LIES, plays himself in this laid-back black-and-white road movie comedy. Nakamura’s song "Daylight Savings" was the jumping-off point for director Boyle (WHITE ON RICE, BIG DREAMS LITTLE TOKYO), who pits the loneliness of the musician’s life on tour against a wacky array of acted-out fantasies centering on groupies and erotic adventures, when Goh is hired by a film production to teach their hot young TV actor (Stoops) how to play the guitar, and to coach him in the ways of a rock star.

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you See? - Looking at Critical Ethnic Studies

2011-03-13T09:18:00.000-07:00

I have a big camera and I'm an artist but for some reason I just couldn't bring myself to shoot pictures at the Critical Ethnic Studies Conference...I was frozen. What follows are descriptions of the scenes I wish I had shot.

Scene 1: Over 1,500 people attended the inaugural critical ethnic studies conference at UC Riverside this weekend (March 10-12, 2011 www.cesa.ucr.edu) which billed itself as "a major conference." The panel I presented on with Gina Osterloh and Wei Ming Dariotis, "War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art," was booked for during the very first slot of the conference on Thursday at 9:00am. We had a modest group of students attend who had driven overnight from Colorado as well as Lucy Burns, a professor from UCLA, in the audience.

Scene 2: Sitting in the glaring high noon sun with Gina and Lucy outside the school cafeteria, I realize, after years of working in Asian American studies and mixed race studies, that if it's not about aesthetics, art or visual culture....I'm not that sure if I'm that interested in ethnic studies. Am I a formalist? I've been so concerned with representation but when visual form and structure are not part of the equation....I'm not sure.

Scene 3: Rushing with a mass of people to go hear the evening plenary on "Professionalization and Praxis: The Changing Trajectory of Ethnic Studies", I walk past the African Student Program office. A group of black students in suits are intensely discussing something against the backdrop of a multicolored figurative mural. I sit next to my friend Pawan Dhingra, an Oberlin Sociology professor who is on sabbatical working at the Smithsonian. He tells me about his research on Indian hotel owners. I tell him my family used to own a roadside motel but we sold it a few years back to an Indian family. Local tribal elders open the conference with a traditional Native American blessing. Angela Davis was supposed to speak but she has come down with a fever. The audience is obviously disappointed but Professor Jodi Kim, with her beautiful full bangs, red lipstick and snappy modern dress, keeps the show running. I'm falling asleep, despite three cups of coffee, amidst pop culture references to Fantastic Mr. Fox and black power.

UC Riverside has separate program offices for Chicano, African, Women's, LGBT, Asian Pacific, Native American, Hillel. Student Special Services and Student Conduct offices are also housed here.

Scene 4: It's 11pm and the hotel kitchen has closed. I have to eat. I venture down the street in search of a fish taco. I travel all the time and I never think much about being by myself. I pass a group of white guys who look like gang bangers. One guy start yelling cat calls at me..."you think your so bad?" and walks up behing me going on a diatribe on exactly what he would like to do to me and how. His friends weigh in if they agree or not. I don't turn around. I wonder why everyone is pretending not to see or hear this. I walk straight ahead wishing I knew martial arts. I find the nearest bar...some sort of karaoke cowboy sports bar. It will have to do. Can I make myself invisible? I am half Asian after all.

Scene 5: Friday 9am, eating a scrambled egg breakfast burrito while attending a plenary session on "Settler Colonialism and White Supremacy." Andrea Smith seems really radical and really smart. I have to read her work. I wonder if just sitting in this room will effect my brother's military clearance? He's spent the night flying for the civil air patrol during the tsunami warning in Hawai'i. I remember my friends told me about Andrea's article "Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy." Should I be thinking more about the difference between Titanium, Flake, and Zinc White though? What about Indian Yellow...it's so powerful. A little bit takes over the entire palette. It used to be made from the urine of cows who ate mango leaves. My mind drifts some more to an analogy that Filipino American artist Marlon Fuentes made about the postcolonial position. As Margo Machida writes in Unsettled Visions: contemporary Asian American artists and the social imaginary, "...there is no single 'authentic' preconquest Filipino identity that one can call on in this Asian Pacific territory forcefully consolidated out of numerous distinct island cultures. As Fuentes remarks, attempting to untangle the braided strands comprising such a cultural crazy quilt would be the equivalent of 'unscrambling an egg.'"

Scene 6: Friday afternoon riding the public bus from downtown Riverside to the UC Riverside campus to go back to the conference after taking a much needed break to go see some art (it ended up being a photography exhibit on the Women of Juarez), a retired music teacher asked if I am a student. I say no and explain that I am a professor visiting from Chicago and attending a conference. He asks what it is about. I say "ethnic studies and genocide." "Hmmm", he says, "Good luck with that....do you like to watch movies? I'm going to see The Adjustment Bureau later tonight." I scurry to get off the bus before he can finish asking me out. He shouts after me, "Don't go killing anybody!"

Scene 7: Finding my people on a Friday afternoon - "Deconstructing or Reifying Racial Hierarchy? The Multiracial Idea and Critical Ethnic Studies" (they subsequently renamed the panel but I forgot what the new name was). Our fearless leaders Paul Spickard and G. Reginald Daniel can't make it to the panel. Multiracial UC Santa Barbara protege 2.0 take the stage instead - Rudy Guevarra, Jeffrey Moniz, Lily Anne Yumi Welty, Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly. The panel gets a late start. Lily has finally gotten through to her grandma in Japan. She survived the tsunami and now her grandma wants to small talk. Lily jokes that she asks her why she's not married yet. The official panel discussion is animated, familiar, and a "safe space" for me to speak up. I say something stupid and slightly offensive but I'm sure I'll be forgiven later over Vietnamese food and dreams of the future.


Lily, Rudy, Ingrid, Jeffrey

Scene 8: deleted upon request. Nothing to see or read here.


Brown bear and a questionable scene at the Mission Inn

Final Scene: I was born in Riverside but my family moved away when I was three. I don't remember much. I call my mom and dad to ask them about the town and where we used to live. My mom tells me that she used to spend the afternoons riding her bike with me through the orange groves but those are all housing developments now. My dad used to work at Riverside General Hospital but it's no longer in existence. He asks about the visibility noting that the last time he was there it was pretty smoggy.

It is smoggy and overcast. I'm walking through a farmer's market now and I see a bunch of mixed breed dogs from the local humane society. They are in cages and wearing pink outfits. Even their nails are polished. I snap a shot. It's easy.

downtown Riverside dog wearing pink nail polish

Critical Ethnic Studies Association Conference

2011-03-07T05:15:00.000-08:00

For the past three years, I've been working on a book project and exhibition with Wei Ming Dariotis "War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art." We plan to present papers based on chapters we have each written for our forthcoming book along with an artist presentation by one of our featured artists - Gina Osterloh.

Critical Ethnic Studies Association Conference
University of California, Riverside
Critical Ethnic Studies and the Future of Genocide Settler Colonialism/Heteropatriarchy/White Supremacy
Thursday, March 10, 2011 9am
Location - HUB 355
Panel 11.1 "War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art"

Laura Kina, DePaul University: Chair

Laura Kina, DePaul University
"Same, Same, but Different": Mixed Racea Asian American Art and the Postracial Dilemma

Gina Osterloh, Silverlens Gallery and François Ghebaly Gallery
Somewhere Tropical

Wei Ming Dariotis, San Francisco State University
Miscegenating the Discourse: How Mixed Race Studies Met Asian American Studies and What Will Happen to Their Children

Visit the conference website for details: http://cesa.ucr.edu

ArtXchange in Seattle opening night pictures

2011-01-11T20:44:00.000-08:00

Indigo: Laura Kina and Shelly Jyoti opened at ArtXchange in Seattle on January 6, 2011.

This was my first show in Seattle. I grew up out here but have been gone since 1991 so it was fun to see old high school friends, family friends as well as my new friends from MAVIN and ArtXchange. Thanks to everyone who came out to the opening!

Be sure to check the show out. It's up through February 19th.

512 First Avenue S., Seattle, WA 98104

info@artxchange.org

206-839-0377

Hours: Tuesday - Saturday 11am to 5:30pm
Open First Thursdays until 8pm for the Pioneer Square Artwalk
http://www.artxchange.org/exhibit_detail.php?ExhibitID=44

To see our work in detail, watch the video or download the catalog visit our websites at: http://www.laurakina.com/devon.html

http://shellyjyoti.com/indigo_new_works_2009.htm

Steve Hampsten, Jenny Devlin Aunun, and me

Shelly Jyoti's work

My parents friends all showed up for the opening

Samantha Torpey and Debbie Jergenson

me and my daughter Midori, and my childhood pal Josh Kelly

Portland based artist Karumi Conley is showing her work in the north gallery

The ArtXchange crew - Cora Edmonds, me, Magoux, and Lauren (not pictured - my fellow artist Shelly Jyoti and ArtXchange staff Gail and Islanda)

Indigo: Laura Kina and Shelly Jyoti opens Jan 6, 2010 at ArtXchange

2010-12-04T09:50:00.000-08:00

Indigo by Laura Kina and Shelly Jyoti

Opening First Thursday January 6, 2011 5:00-8:00pm

ArtXchange Gallery presents Indigo, a traveling exhibition previously exhibited in major cities throughout India and now crossing to the US, January 6 through February 26, 2011. The exhibition presents complementary bodies of artwork by Indian artist Shelly Jyoti and US artist Laura Kina in a range of media including hand-embroidery on khadi fabric, Sanskrit calligraphy and mixed-media on canvas. The narrative threads running throughout the artists’ work evoke India’s colonial history, stories of immigration, and the tensions and transformations of cultures evolving in a globalized world.

ArtXchange

512 First Ave. S.

Seattle, WA 98104

206-839-0377

info@artxchange.org

http://www.artxchange.org

Thurs, Jan 6, 2010 - First Thursday Artwalk, 5-8pm. The opening reception for Indigo: Laura Kina and Shelly Jyoti! This textile and fiber based exhibit explores how two artist's history, identity and culture intersect through the tradition of indigo dye.

Audio recordings from CMRS 2010 now available

2010-12-04T09:44:00.000-08:00

Selected audio recordings from the Nov 5-6, 2010 "Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies" Conference at DePaul University are now available on iTunes U.

Look for "Critical Mixed Race Studios" listed under DePaul iTunes U as a lecture series. You can go to http://itunes.depaul.edu/, sign in either as a guest or if you are from DePaul use your Campus Connection User ID and Password. It takes you right to the DePaul site.

There are 18 panel and round table sessions available as well as audio from the three keynote speeches and the audio from the Nov 5th Welcoming Address.

CMRS 2010 audio recordings available on iTune U:

(Please note that there may have been additional presenters on the panels listed below but only panelist who signed release forms have audio posted)

Welcoming Remarks

Dean Charles Suchar, DePaul University Liberal Arts & Sciences

Camilla Fojas, DePaul University

Laura Kina, DePaul University

Wei Ming Dariotis, San Francisco State University

Keynote Speaker Andrew Jolivétte, San Francisco State University - “Critical Mixed Race Studies: New Directions in the Politics of Race & Representation”

Introduced by Wei Ming Dariotis, San Francisco State University

Keynote Speaker Mary Beltrán, University of Wisconsin-Madison - “Everywhere and Nowhere: Mediated Mixed Race and Mixed Race Critical Studies”

Introduced by Camilla Fojas, De Paul University

Keynote Speaker Louie Gong, 8^th Generation; MAVIN; Muckleshoot Tribal College – “Halfs and Have Nots

Introduced by Laura Kina, De Paul University

Re-Envisioning Mixed Race Asian American through Popular Culture

Leilani Nishime (moderator), University of Washington
Teresa Hodges, San Francisco State University- “Blasian Persuasian: Vocal and Visual (Re)presentations of Mixed Black and Asians on Youtube”
Kevin Lim, University of Hawaii at Manoa,- “Alien, Cyborg, Cyberpunk and Exorcist: Keanu Reeves and Alternative Mixed Race Narratives”
Stacy Nojima, University of Hawaii at Manoa, “Identity Politics and Spatial Mapping: Complications of Power and Representation for Multiracial Asian Americans”
Diana Tsuchida, University of Hawaii at Manoa, “Yellowing the Silver Screen”

Critical Dialogues on the Future of Mixed Race Studies

Lauren E. Smith (moderator), University of Miami
Jen Chau, Swirl, Inc.

Joshua Manlove, Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis
Catherine Squires, University of Minnesota
Anna Wheatley, University of Miami

Cross-National Categorizations of Mixed Race

Myra Washington (chair), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Hines Ward: A Case Study on Black/Asian Athletes, Nationalism and Masculinity”
Whitney Laster, Vanderbilt University – “’I'm a Mutt’: An Exploration of Double Consciousness in 21st Century Hyphenated Identities”
Melinda Mills, Castleton State College, “’What Are You?’ versus ‘What Else Are You?’: Making Space for Race in Transnational Contexts”
Chinelo Njaka, University of Manchester – “Cross-National Comparison: A Next Step in Mixed Race Studies”

Growing (Not Mixed) Up: Literature and Youth

Lan Dong (chair), University of Illinois at Springfield- “From Changowitz to Bailey Wong: Mixed Heritage and Transnational Families in Gish Jen’s Fiction”
Tru Leverette, University of North Florida-“The Ethics of Difference: Inscribing Race Mixture in Literature”

Julie Schrader Villegas - University of Washington at Seattle, "Bearers of Dangerous Memory/Revising the Racial Shadow: An International Look at the Border in Literature"

Mixed Medium: Linguistic and Visual Representation of Mixed Race

Alexandrina Agloro (chair), University of Southern California-“Who Screenshot Ya?: Digital Expressions of Mixed Race Identity”
Kevin Escudero, UC Berkeley-“Media Representations of the Mixed Race Experience”
Melissa Eriko Poulsen, University of California, Santa Cruz-"Hybrid Veggies and Mixed Kids: Ecocriticism and Race in Ruth Ozeki’s Pastoral Heartlands”
Nicole Rabin, University of Hawaii at Manoa- “The Mixed Race Body Matters?: Visual and Linguistic Representations of Multiraciality”

Creolization and Colonization

AB Wilkinson (chair), University of California at Berkeley – “Origins of Hypodescent in British Colonial North America”

Cami Augustus, Michigan State University – “‘Mixed Race’ as Colonialist Category: A Comparative History of Indigenous Identities in Law”

Zimitri Erasmus, University of Cape Town & University of Witwatersrand, South Africa – “Creolisation, Colonial Citizenship(s), and Degeneracy: A paradigm for 'mixed-race/-culture' in British Colonial Africa”

Dani Kwan-Lafond, York University – “Multiracial Black Identities in Canada: Fluid or Fixed?”

Higher Ed Challenges for Mixed Race Studies

Nicole Asong Nfonoyim (chair), Oberlin College – “Mixed Is/Mixed Ain't: Finding Selves, Communities & Histories for Mixed Race Students in Higher Education”

Brett Coleman, University of Illinois at Chicago – “The Relationship Between Racial/Ethnic Socialization and Racial/Ethnic Identity Among Mixed-Race College Students”

Kenyatta Dawson, Texas State University – “Transforming Our New Society: The Role of Higher Education in Formulating Mixed Race Identity”
Jessica Guzmán-Rea, University of Maryland, Baltimore County – “The Experiences of Multiethnic Students: A Qualitative Program Evaluation of the Early Connection Opportunity Program at the University of Rochester”

Creating Community: Starting and Sustaining a Mixed 101 Class

Sarah Ledbetter (moderator), University of Washington at Seattle
Alicia Castagno, Wesleyan University
Rachel Cross, Wesleyan University
Sam Gonzalez, University of York, England
Chris Paredes, University of Washington at Seattle
Jamie Stroble, University of Washington at Seattle

Creating and Performing Amerasians

Cathy J. Schlund-Vials (Chair), University of Connecticut at Storrs - “Lost in their Fathers' Country: War, Migration, and Vietnamese Amerasians”
Cindy Howe, M.A.C.K. Foundation - “ The Others: Mixed Race Children Abandoned Abroad”
Ariko Ikehara, University of California at Berkeley- “Black-Amerasian Bodies in Spaces in Between Series: Introduction”

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, Stanford University- “Amerasian Performance”

A Rx for the FDA: Ethical Dilemmas for Multiracial People in Race-Based Medicine

Thomas Lopez (moderator), Multiracial Americans of Southern California

Dorothy Roberts, Northwestern University Law School

G. Reginald Daniel, University of California, Santa Barbara

Michael Hodgson, Cambridge Biomarketing
Athena Asklipiadis, Mixed Marrow

The Biracial Family Network: 30 Years of Multiracial Individuals, Couples and Families

Robin Tillmon (moderator), BFN President
Irene Carr, BFN Founder
Brett Coleman, BFN Member
Arana Fossett, BFN Member; Topaz Club
Heather Meyers, BFN Member

Tyree and Jeff Wright, BFN Members

Mixed Race Youth: K-12 Pedeogy and Narrative

Janet Stickmon (chair), Napa Valley College-“Trickster as Decolonizer: Empowering Biracial Young Adults of African-American and Filipina(o)-American Heritage”
Amina Chaudri, University of Illinois, at Chicago-“Brown Girl, Brown Boy: Gender and Mixed-Race Identity in Children’s Literature”
Dena Luworo, University of Oregon-“Racial Categorization of Black-White Biracial Students in Oregon Public Schools”

Arts ReMix: Exhuminb Ethnicity Koden, Obake, and Anthropolocos

Laura Kina (chair), DePaul University

Richard Lou, University of Memphis-“UnEarthing Whiteness and the White-Fying Project: Examining Los Anthropolocos As They Look Back At Their Future Richard A. Lou – ½ of Los Anthropolocos”
Margo Machida, University of Connecticut-“Remixing Metaphors: Negotiating Multiracial Positions in Contemporary Native Hawaiian Art”
Emily Hanako Momohara, Art Academy of Cincinnati-“Koden”

Critical Mixed-Race Studies Goes Global: An Emerging Paradigm in China, France, Italy, and the United States

Caroline Beschea-Fache, Davidson College – “Beyond National Identity Boundaries: the Status of Fench Mixed-Race Authors”

Community-Based Multiracial Movements: Learning from the Past, Looking toward the Future

Jenee Jahn (moderator), MAVIN
Jen Chau, SWIRL Inc.
Fanshen Cox, Mixed Chicks Chat; Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival
Jennifer Noble, Multiracial Americans of Southern California
Ken Tanabe, Lovingday.org
Robin Tillmon, Biracial Family Network

Visualizing Mixed Race: Art & Ambiguity

Amy M. Mooney (chair) Columbia College Chicago- "Rowdy, Blab-mouth & Noisy: The Etiquette of Resistance"
Myra Greene, Columbia College Chicago - "My White Friends"
Jillian Nakornthap, Cal State Fullerton – “Art and Identity in a Multi-Cultural/Multi-Racial Society”
Debra Yepa-Pappan, Korean/Jemez Pueblo, Contemporary Native American Artist - "Half Empty or Half Full?"

New(Mixed) Media, New (Mixed) "Race"

Alexander Cho (chair), University of Texas at Austin-“Negotiated Revelations: Asian-Descent Multiracial Identities, MySpace.com, and the Politics of Online Embodiment”
Aaron Allen, University of Maryland at College Park-“Truth(s) in Contradiction: Aesthetics, Subjectivity, and Racial Mixedness”
Kristen Lee, University of California at Los Angeles-“MiXeD mE: a Short Film about Three Stories of Mixed-Race Identity, and One Online Community”

Loving Day Movement and Marriage Equality Movement

Wei Ming Dariotis (moderator), San Francisco State University
Stuart Gaffney, Marriage Equality USA; API Equality
Ken Tanabe, Lovingday.org

Sponsored by DePaul’s Women’s Center and LGBTQ Program.

Transfiguration Tales: Re-Imagining Colofrul Families

Mitzi Uehara-Carter (chair) University of California at Berkeley- “Mongrels, Hybrids, and Transfigurations: Re-imagining Colorful Families”

Mercedes Naber-Fisher & Patrice Fisher, transracial sisters -“Growing Up in a White Family: A Tale of Two Transracials”

Yumi Wilson, San Francisco State University -“In Between Two Worlds: Exploring Amerasian Identity”

Multiracial College Students: Racial Climate, Transformational Praxis, Leadership, and Inclusive Anti-Racist Pedegogy

Chelsea Guillermo-Wann (chair), University of California at Los Angeles – “Mixed Race Undergraduates' Classroom Racial Climate: Perspectives of a Research University”

Eric Hamako, University of Massachusetts at Amherst; MAVIN – “Improving Anti-Racist Education for Multiracial People”

Claire Peinado Fraczek, University of Washington at Seattle - “Exposing a Critical Mixed Race Praxis: A Case Study of One Student-Designed Undergraduate Course”

"Sugar" published in ZEEK: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture

2010-11-30T18:47:00.000-08:00

Order the Winter 2010 issue of ZEEK!

A detail from my "Palaka" painting from my 2010 Sugar series is on the cover of a special issue titled "Pursue Justice...but how?"

Kina, Laura. ”Sugar.” ZEEK: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture. Winter 2010.

Cover image and p.62-65.

They also reprinted selected works from the series inside of the journal.

http://zeek.forward.com/subscribe/

http://www.zeek.forward.com/articles/116939/

Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speak Out

2010-11-30T18:40:00.000-08:00

Two images from my 2006 charcoal Loving series (portraits of Elena Rubin and Shoshanna Weinberger) have been reproduced in this anthology.

NEW from Inanna Publications

Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speak Out
edited by Adebe DeRango-Adem and Andrea Thompson

"Speaks boldly and poignantly to who we are, and by 'we' I mean … all citizens of 21st century North America."

INANNA PUBLICATIONS and the TORONTO WOMEN'S BOOKSTORE
invite you to the launch of

Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out
on Thursday, December 9, 2010 from 6:30 pm to 9:00 pm
Toronto Women's Bookstore, 73 Harbord Street, Toronto (at Spadina)

Refreshments will be served.
Authors will read from the book at 7:15 p.m.

OTHER TONGUES: MIXED-RACE WOMEN SPEAK OUT is an anthology of poetry, spoken word, fiction, creative non-fiction, spoken word texts, as well as black and white artwork and photography, explores the question of how mixed-race women in North America identify in the twenty-first century. Contributions engage, document, and/or explore the experiences of being mixed-race, by placing interraciality as the center, rather than periphery, of analysis.

Praise for
OTHER TONGUES: MIXED-RACE WOMEN SPEAK OUT:

In a fresh approach to the quest for understanding mixed-race identity in the Americas, the multiple genres that find their way into the Other Tongues anthology -- from poetry to photography, fiction to scholarship -- perfectly mirror the prodigious spectrum of their authors’ positions toward the topic. This collection speaks boldly and poignantly to who we are, and by "we" I mean not only women of mixed-race ancestry, but all citizens of 21st-century North America.
-- Lise Funderburg, author of Black, White, Other: Biracial Americans Talk About Race and Identity

These exciting, beautifully inked narratives tell us that, as each woman embraces her biracial or multiracial identity, she mothers a new world, one with equal space for everyone.
-- George Elliott Clarke, Africadian & Eastern Woodland Metis, Laureate, 2001 Governor-General’s Award for Poetry

Passionate, courageous and insightful, Other Tongues speaks affectingly about the pleasures and paradoxes of living between the conventional categories of race. It is a significant anthology, one that I've been waiting for.
-- Karina Vernon, Assistant Professor,
Black Canadian Literature and Diaspora Studies,
University of Toronto

About the editors:

Adebe De Rango-Adem recently completed a research writing fellowship at the Applied Research Center in New York. Her debut poetry collection, Ex Nihilo, was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, the world’s largest prize for writers under thirty.

Andrea Thompson’s spoken word CD, One, was nominated for a Canadian Urban Music Award in 2005. A pioneer of slam poetry in Canada, Thompson has also hosted Heart of a Poet on Bravo TV, CiTr Radio’s spoken word show, Hearsay.

The publisher acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council
for our publishing program.

INANNA PUBLICATIONS
www.yorku.ca/inanna

Video from CMRS 2010 now available/join our google group

2010-11-16T06:47:00.000-08:00

If you missed the Nov 5-6, 2010 "Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies" conference or any of the keynote talks or the welcoming address, you can now download the videos via iTunes U.

Here is a link to the:

November 5th Welcoming Remarks by DePaul's Liberal Arts & Sciences Dean Charles Suchar and conference organizers Camilla Fojas, Wei Ming Dariotis, and Laura Kina.
November 5th Keynote Address by Andrew Jolivette "Critical Mixed Race Studies: New Directions in the Politics of Race and Representation"
November 6th Keynote Address by Mary Beltran "Everywhere and Nowhere: Mediated Mixed Race and Mixed Race Critical Studies"
November 6th Keynote Address by Louie Gong "Halfs and Have Nots"

http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/depaul.edu.5183668582

Please note that your computer must have iTunes U installed in order to view the video. It can be download from http://www.apple.com
itunes U also supports streaming. You may choose the file and click on play button to view the video.

Want to stay in touch with people you met at the 2010 Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference?
Please join our google group "criticalmixedracestudies":

http://groups.google.com/group/criticalmixedracestudies

Watershed Moment for Critical Mixed Race Studies

2010-11-14T14:16:00.000-08:00

Critical Mixed Race Studies Inaugural Conference

Camilla Fojas welcoming participants to CMRS 2010 on behalf of DePaul University

Welcoming Remarks Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference 9:30am Friday, November 5, 2010

On November 5-6, 2010 DePaul University in Chicago, IL hosted the inaugural 2010 Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) conference “Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies.” We had over 450 people registered and 430 people actually showed up from all over the U.S. from Hawaii to Tennessee to New York as well as scholars from Canada, Korea, and the UK. The programming included 62 sessions of panels, round tables, and seminars; multiple film screenings, keynote addresses by leading scholars Mary Beltran from University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Andrew Jolivette from San Francisco State University, and community activist and artist Louie Gong from MAVIN and Eighth Generation; a Mixed Mixer social event with live jazz music; a performance by comedian Kate Rigg; an Informational Fair; a Book Table; Caucus and Business meetings.

From left to right: Ranier Spencer, Michele Elam, Habiba Ibrahim, Jared Sexton

Audience at Michele Elam, Ranier Spencer, Habiba Ibrahim, and Jared Sexton's panel "Back from Beyond Black: Alternative Paradigms for Critical Mixed-Race Theory"

"Creating and Performing Amerasians" panel left to right: Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Cindy Howe, Ariko Ikehara

Many panels were standing room only or at capacity. We were honored to have senior scholars present at CMRS including: Kent Ono, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, Stanford University; G. Reginald Daniels (via SKYPE), University of California at Santa Barbara; Ranier Spencer, University of Nevada at Las Vegas; Michele Elam, Stanford University; and Richard Lou, University of Memphis. Representatives from community organizations came out in full force from: MAVIN, SWIRL Inc., Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival, Multiracial Americans of Southern California, Lovingday.org, and the Biracial Family Network. A strong contingent of undergraduate and graduate students from DePaul University and area colleges and a surprisingly high number of graduate students from across the country joined us as well.

"Exploring the Mixed Experience in New Media" round table with (left to right): Greg Carter, Tiffany Jones, Fanshen Cox, and Seven Riley

Thomas Lopez from Multiracial Americans of Southern California

Marriage Equity USA activist Stuart Gaffney, CMRS 2010 co-organizer Wei Ming Dariotis, Ken Tanabe of Lovingday.org

Representing Fusion from Rutgers University - Phillip Handy and Matthew Vaden

When Camilla Fojas (DePaul University), Wei Ming Dariotis (San Francisco State University), and I initially envisioned this conference back in 2008 at a multiracial leadership retreat outside of San Francisco, we thought CMRS might be a small gathering of 50 or so academics. We were blown away not only by the number of people who showed up but also by the level of energy. I saw a lot of people there from the 8:30am welcoming remarks on Friday am all the way through the 10pm Saturday night closing event! I kept hearing people talk about what a legitimizing experience this was for them both on a personal and professional level.

From left to right: filmmaker Jessica Chen Drammeh, CMRS 2010 keynote speaker Mary Beltran, and organizers Camilla Fojas, Laura Kina, and Wei Ming Dariotis

"Visualizing Mixed Race: Art & Ambiguity" panel from left to right: Jillian Nakorntap, Debra Yepa-Pappan, Amy M. Mooney, Myra Green

Audience members Emily Hanako Momohara and Allen Turner

We want to thank everyone who participated in making CMRS 2010 happen and we are looking forward to the next steps for Critical Mixed Race Studies: founding an association and a peer reviewed online journal; planning for CMRS 2012 at DePaul University and CMRS 2014 (hopefully at the University of Washington); looking for ways us to continue to stay in touch virtually (listserv, dedicated website); and ways to keep the momentum going for CMRS for 2011. There is a lot of work to do and we’ll be sending out the business minutes shortly with ways for you all to get involved.

Following the conference, a colleague challenged me to describe what Critical Mixed Race Studies is in layman’s terms. My best attempt for now is, “Critical Mixed Race Studies focuses on multiracial, interracial, and transracial adoption populations and is concerned with social justice.” My co-organizers and I came up with the following “academic” definition back in 2008:

Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) is the transracial, transdisciplinary, and transnational critical analysis of the institutionalization of social, cultural, and political orders based on dominant conceptions of race. CMRS emphasizes the mutability of race and the porosity of racial boundaries in order to critique processes of racialization and social stratification based on race. CMRS addresses local and global systemic injustices rooted in systems of racialization.

Our reason for this wordy and hopefully careful definition was an attempt to describe something that was already happening around us rather than something purely theoretical. The term “critical” builds on the field of Critical Race theory, a discipline that emerged in the 1970s in the US, which has historically been concerned with racial justice advocacy. Multiracial scholarship in the US began to emerge with key publications such as Paul Spickard’s Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century American (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989) and Maria P.P. Root’s Racially Mixed People in America (Sage Publications, 1992). What has yet to happen is an organized effort to establish critical mixed race studies as a field with an aim towards mentoring, networking, and supporting scholarship. We wanted to highlight the interdisciplinary focus and the transnational focus that is currently emerging. Much of the early work in multiracial scholarship has been focused within national boundaries (e.g. the US racial paradigm) or rooted and aimed at only one specific discipline (e.g., psychiatry, sociology). We want to describe something more expansive while at the same time not erase important work that continues in specific geographic regions and within disciplinary contexts.

With this in mind, it quickly became apparent at CMRS 2010 that we might never agree what “critical mixed race studies” is (and that’s perfectly healthy for this to be contested terrain) but I think we can come to a consensus as to our mission “to advance Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) as an academic discipline and a professional field committed to excellence in teaching, research and service to the community.”

Like so many others, I first became interested in issues of mixed race as part of a personal journey to understand my own family history and place in the world. I’m Okinawan, Spanish-Basque, French, English, Irish and Dutch….in other words Asian/White. I grew up in California and the Pacific Northwest identifying as “hapa.” Following the 2000 US Census, I was eager to move beyond biography to find out what other mixed folks were up to. In 2002 I created a series of oil paintings, The Hapa Soap Opera series, starring an all mixed race Asian cast. Living in the Midwest since the early 90s and entrenched in Asian America, I could only imagine such a community in a virtual space. By the time I created my 2006 Loving charcoal series (named in honor of the Loving vs. Virginia Supreme Court Case, which overturned the nation’s last anti miscegenation laws), my work reflected the growing number of mixed race peers that had come into my life. By and large they were members of the post 1967 bi-racial baby boom but, who despite our shared mixed heritage, we were still quite disconnected.

Artists Maya Escobar and Laura Kina, writer Tina Ramirez, composer Alejandro Acierto, filmmaker Jonathan Reinert. Round table organized by Alejandro Acierto "Creating Resistance: Using the Arts in Challenging Racial Ideologies"

In 2008, I created a course for DePaul “Mixed Race Art and Identity” for which there was no existing textbook or sample syllabus to model after. This meant me, as a studio artist, having to set down the brush for a season and pick up the pen (or rather MP3 recorder) to begin to collect artist interviews and assemble a bibliography and index of readings and resources to bring back to my students. At the same time I began to became more involved with MAVIN, “the nation's leading organization that helps build healthier communities by raising awareness about the experiences of mixed heritage people and families.” I currently serve on MAVIN's board. I mention all of this because my story as an academic working on multiracial issues and wearing multiple hats (artist, writer, curator, community organizer etc.) is probably quite typical. It’s been a circuitous, albeit exciting, route of finding existing resources, building my own and navigating uncharted waters. Surely there must be an easier way! Joining efforts with Camilla Fojas and Wei Ming Dariotis, we began to imagine what we might have in common as a larger academic and activist community. With the 2010 Critical Mixed Race Studies conference, our virtual connections have become a physical reality.

CMRS 2010 keynote speaker Andrew Jolivette

Rather than celebrating the arrival of the watershed moment of research on multiracial issues, in which we find ourselves, our three keynote speakers all offered cautionary advice and provocations. In Andrew Jolivette’s November 5, 2010 opening keynote presentation, “Critical Mixed Race Studies: New Directions in the Politics of Race & and Representation”, he asked us, “How do we make coalitions with other oppressed people? How do we break out of the divide of immigrant and citizen or native and non-Native…are these simply binaries and what does all of this have to do with mixed race identity?” He went on to say,

….So what does it mean to be critical, and what can critical mixed race studies offer in dialogues and movements for new directions in the politics of race and representation…what can this critical mixed race studies do about social justice, about human rights, about ending rape, ending economic genocide, about Islamaphobia…and transnational exploitation through capitalist systems of forced and cheap or free labor…in prisons and sweat shops…on borders and in wars…what is our call to action…what will it take for us as Indigenous people and folks of color to work across the divides that have been intentionally set-up to divide us…

Jolivette set the terms for a Critical Mixed Race Pedagogy as he challenged us to “Keep the Revolution Moving.”

Critical mixed race pedagogy as I define it contains four basic components: 1) social justice; 2). Self-determination; 3). cross-ethnic and transnational solidarity; and 4). Radical love. Social justice as articulated by critical mixed race pedagogy asserts that all communities regardless of history, socio-economic circumstance, educational background, health status or national origin require access to the same rights of national and global citizenship as all other bodies.

CMRS keynote speaker Mary Beltran

Mary Beltran in her Saturday morning November 6th keynote address, “Everywhere and Nowhere: Mediated Mixed Race and Mixed Race Critical Studies”, laid out the current media landscape presence of multiracials and as her title implies, we seem to be everywhere but yet there are very few nuanced stories being told on either the big screen or the small screen about the lives of multiracial individuals. What’s happening instead is that mixed race (as in half white) characters fill the diversity requirement and are used to reinforce normative standards of whiteness. Beltran called for more multiracial screenwriters to take on this challenge. What I took away from Beltran’s talk was how she looked at the pros and cons of focusing on mixed race within her own hybrid position as an Associate Professor in Communications and Chican@ and Latin@ studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Because we do not have a set field or departments within the institution, we must work across fields. Interdisciplinarity and intersectionality thus become key theoretical and methodological approaches. The flip side is that many of us work in isolation. Simply finding who else out there is working on related topics poses a significant challenge.

CMRS 2010 keynote speaker Louie Gong

On the evening of November 6^th, Louie Gong who describes himself as “a Native of mixed heritage (Nooksack, Squamish, Chinese, French, Scottish)“ asked us to consider issues of access in his talk, “Halfs and Have Nots.” Gong shared his own story of growing up in a Nooksack tribal community and what the stakes and terms are for education both in Native communities and for mixed race youth. He talked about the multi-generational trauma of the boarding school system on Native communities and how he started high school with 11 other fellow Nooksack tribal members and how by his senior year, only 2 ended up graduating. He asked us all to raise our hands if we had an undergraduate degree or were on our way to receiving one. I’m pretty sure almost the entire audience raised their hands. He went for the heart. Our privilege was obvious. So what are we in Critical Mixed Race Studies going to do about those other 9 kids? He went on to talk about how his work with MAVIN, Mixedheritagecenter.org and the multiracial movement and how it has been through his artwork with his custom Coast Salish shoes (see http://www.eighthgeneration.com/) that he has really been able to open doors to talk about multiracial issues within Native and youth communities. At the end of his talk, Gong told a story of coming home from school each day and grabbing a juicy red apple and going out to get the mail. As he would walk across the res, kids would yell out, “cannibal!” It wasn’t until years later that he figured out why they were yelling that. The audience was silent for a moment….no one laughed. Gong had to go on to gently prod us…”you know, apple - red on the outside, white on the inside….” No, we aren’t all the same as mixed folks. That silence, that space that starts as misunderstanding, is very important. It’s really the beginning of understanding.

and now for the CREDITS:

Help behind the scene. Cristina Rodriguez and Maria Ochoa from Latin American and Latino Studies and the Center for Latino Research

Kenji Tran from Global Asian Studies holding up a conference bag. Logo design and conference cover design by Sandra Franco.

ORGANIZERS

I first want to thank my fellow CMRS organizers WEI MING DARIOTIS, Assistant Professor Asian American Studies San Francisco State University, and CAMILLA FOJAS, Professor and Chair Latin American and Latino Studies.

HOSTS
We wish to especially thank DePaul University Department of Latin American and Latino Studies and the Global Asian Studies program for HOSTING the inaugural 2010 CMRS conference. We are deeply indebted to the countless hours MARÍA ISABEL OCHOA and CRISTINA RODRÍGUEZ put in to make sure all the big and little details for the conference were covered. We also want to thank MAYRA ALANIS, JOVANI PEREZ, ANTHONY RODRÍGUEZ, and CESAR ALANIS of the Latin American and Latino Studies and Center for Latino Research and ELIZABETH LILLEHOJ and KENJI TRAN of the Global Asian Studies. None of this would have been possible without the continued support of the Dean of Liberal Arts & Sciences, Dean CHARLES SUCHAR.

CO-ORGANIZERS/PARTNERS
We would like to thank our partners MAVIN for helping spread the word about CMRS far and wide and MAVIN’s ERIC HAMAKO, AMANDA EREKSON, JENEE JAHN, MONICA NIXON, and THERESA RONQUILLO for organizing workshops for this year.

I have to give a special shout out to KATRINA CALDWELL and LAILA MCCLOUD of the Center for Intercultural Programs for sponsoring and organizing the November 5^th mixed mixer and the November 6th event with comedian Kate Rigg.

Comedian Kate Rigg messing with an audience member after the show

We would also like to thank the following DEPAUL UNIVERSITY units for their generous co-sponsorship:
African &Black Diaspora Studies
American Studies
Art, Media, & Design
Center for Latino Research
College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
LGBTQ Studies
Office of Institutional Diversity and Equity - President’s Signature Series - especially ELIZABETH ORTIZ and MIRANDA STANDBERRY-WALLACE
The Society of Vincent de Paul Professors
Women’s and Gender Studies
Women’s Center

SPECIAL THANKS to all the other individuals who helped organize CMRS 2010. Thanks to SANDRA FRANCO for her amazing logo design and for creating a graphic design identity for CMRS, JENNIFER MANGUINO of Broughton Hotels for shuttle services and delightful accommodations at the Willows, City Suites, and the Majestic Hotels. None of this would have been possible without the assistance of faculty and staff across DePaul including: ASTRA STEPHENS and the staff of the Student Center; LINDA GRECO from DePaul’s Liberal Arts & Sciences Dean’s Office for creating the CMRS 2010 website; WEN-DER LIN and the staff of Information Services; AISLINN CALLAHAN-BRANDT of Parking Services; MARK GOLDBERG-FOSS and the staff of the DePaul Bookstore; and ELIZABETH SOSA and the staff of Chartwells Catering Services.

Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference Nov 5-6, 2010

2010-10-23T21:58:00.000-07:00

“Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies,” the first annual Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference, will be held at DePaul University's Student Center 2250 N. Sheffield Avenue Chicago, IL 60614 November 5-6, 2010.

http://las.depaul.edu/aas/About/CMRSConference/index.asp

The CMRS conference brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines nationwide. Recognizing that the diverse disciplines that have nurtured Mixed Race Studies have reached a watershed moment, the 2010 CMRS conference is devoted to the general theme “Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies.”

Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) is the transracial, transdisciplinary, and transnational critical analysis of the institutionalization of social, cultural, and political orders based on dominant conceptions of race. CMRS emphasizes the mutability of race and the porosity of racial boundaries in order to critique processes of racialization and social stratification based on race. CMRS addresses local and global systemic injustices rooted in systems of racialization.

DePaul University and CMRS is proud to host over 200 participants from all over the world gathering for two full days of programming, including 62 sessions of panels, round tables, and seminars; caucus sessions in one large room so no one has to choose one part of themselves to the complete exclusion of others; multiple film screenings; keynote addresses by leading scholars Mary Beltrán and Andrew Jolivétte and community activist and artist Louie Gong; a Mixed Mixer social event; a performance by comedian Kate Rigg; an Information Fair and a Book Table at which the De Paul Bookstore will sell relevant texts from presenters and other key texts in the field.
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The 2010 CMRS is organized by Camilla Fojas and Laura Kina (DePaul University) and Wei Ming Dariotis (San Francisco State University

Hosts

DePaul University Global Asian Studies

DePaul University Latin American and Latino Studies

Co-organizers/sponsors

MAVIN

DePaul University Center for Intercultural Programs

Depaul University co-sponsors

African & Black Diaspora Studies

American Studies

Center for Latino Research

College of Liberal Arts & Sciences

LGBTQ Studies

Art, Media & Design

President's Signature Series - Office of Institutional Diversity and Equity

Women's Center

Women's and Gender Studies

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For updates and information about the conference join our Facebook group: Critical Mixed Race Studies

All queries should be directed to the conference chairs cmrs@depaul.edu or 773-325-4048

The conference is free and open to the public.
Preregister at:
http://condor.depaul.edu/~aas/CMRSconference/
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CONFERENCE AT A GLANCE

Friday, November 5, 2010
8:30am-6:00pm             Registration
9:00am-6:00pm             Information Fair
9:30am-10:00am           Welcoming Remarks - continental breakfast
Sponsored by DePaul University’s College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Dean’s Office

10:15am-12:15pm        Session One
12:15pm-1:30pm           Lunch Break/Caucus Meetings/CMRS Business Meeting
1:30pm-3:30pm             Session Two
3:00-6:00pm                  Book Table
3:45pm-5:45pm             Session Three
6:00pm-7:00pm             Plenary Session Keynote Address - Andrew Jolivétte
7:00pm-8:30pm             Mixed Mixer Social - appetizers, live music, cash bar
Sponsored by DePaul’s Center for Intercultural Programs

8:30pm-9:30pm             Film Screening - Anomaly

Saturday, November 5, 2010
8:30am-5:00pm             Registration
9:00am-6:00pm             Information Fair
8:45am-9:45am             Plenary Session Keynote Address - Mary Beltrán

10:00am-12:00pm         Session One
12:00pm-3:00pm           Book Table
12:15pm-1:15pm           Lunch Break/Caucus Meetings/CMRS Business Meeting
1:30pm-3:30pm             Session Two
3:45pm-5:45pm             Session Three
6:00pm-7:00pm             Plenary Session Keynote Address - Louie Gong

Film Screening UNRESERVED: The Work of Louie Gong

7:00pm-8:30pm Dinner Break
8:30pm-10:00pm Comedian Kate Rigg

Sponsored by DePaul’s Center for Intercultural Programs
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Here are the two session event that I'm going to be part of at CMRS (besides the welcoming address, CMRS business meeting, and introducing other speakers):

Friday, Nov 5 10:15am-12:15pm
DePaul Student Center 2250 N. Sheffield Room #324
CMRS Round Table “Creating Resistance: Using the arts in challenging racial ideologies”
Laura Kina (moderator) DePaul University
Alejandro Acierto , Musician/Improviser/Composer/Sound Artist (DePaul University Alumni)
Maya Escobar , Performance Artist/Internet Curator/Editor
Tina Ramirez, Writer/Educator/Youth Organizer (DePaul University Alumni)
Jonathan Reinert, Filmmaker (DePaul University Alumni)

Saturday, Nov 6 10:00am-12:00pm
DePaul Student Center 2250 N. Sheffield Room #312
CMRS Panel “Arts ReMix: Exhuming Ethnicity Koden, Obake, & Anthropolocos
Laura Kina (chair) DePaul University
Richard Lou , University of Memphis -“UnEarthing Whiteness and the White-Fying Project: Examining Los Anthropolocos As They Look Back At Their Future Richard A. Lou – ½ of Los Anthropolocos”
Emily Hanako Momohara – Art Academy of Cincinnati - “Koden”
Laura Kina - DePaul University - "Painting Paradise: Cane Fields, Kasuri, and Obake Talk"

BamBUDDHAed Opening Night Oct 16, 2010

2010-10-17T03:58:00.000-07:00

installation view - BamBUDDHAed art portageARTspace in Chicago

Blurring the literal boundary between home and gallery, between art and decoration, between curatorial practice and interior design, between (Far) East and West, MOLAR Productions and portage ARTspace proudly presents

BAMBuddhaed!
Or I Ching, You Ching, We All Ching… for I Ching.

portage ARTspace

Oct 16 - Nov 20, 2010

4837 West Berenice (Enter through rear gate)

Chicago, IL

... (Co-curated by Larry Lee and Johannah Silva)
Imagine an empty room.

Where to put things, all your personal stuff including artwork neatly or not requires geomancy or the art of placement which the Chinese call feng shui. Otherwise the flow of chi is disrupted and negative energy results from lack of Kansei engineering.

But no need to fret or fear.

With fu dogs, ba quas and joss sticks in hand, Johannah Silva (portage ARTspace Founder & Director) and Larry Lee along with their ersatz team of select artists, designers and craftspeople such as

Gabriel Bizen Akagawa, Christina Dougherty, Sean M. Gallero, Surabhi Ghosh, Ling-An Fang, Avika Bhansali, Greyson Hong, Molly Jinam Kim, Cecca Morrone, Joanne Aono, Hui-min Tsen, Hee Jin Koo, Regin Igloria, Naomi Yorke, Shreya Sethi, Laura Kina, James Kao, Martin Kim, Ana Kei Ut, Emily Lin and Jeanne Medina

accessorize if not transform a boring white cube into an exotic den/parlor/showroom inspired by Pier One, Cost Plus World Market, IKEA and other fine home furnishing stores.

*portage ARTspace is a year-long curatorial/experimental art project started by Johannah Silva. Johannah regards this project as an extension of her artistic practice and intends for the project to inspire dialogue, build and promote community, and create new experiences both for herself and the project's participants.

installation view - BamBUDDHAed art portageARTspace in Chicago

Curator Larry Lee giving a tour

Curator Larry Lee sitting on a bench designed by Gabriel Bizen Akagawa/in front of my Devon Avenue Sampler textile

PortageART space founder/director Johannah Silva, friend Carlton Mok, curator Larry Lee, me, friend John Dodge

Gabriel Bizen Akagawa cooking up some yakitori for the opening

My family - Abby Moy, Midori Aronson, Sam Kina chillin at the opening

BamBUDDHAed art portageARTspace in Chicago - Opening night Oct 16, 2010

BamBUDDHAed! Opens Saturday October 16th

2010-10-15T06:51:00.001-07:00

Art & Activism: Telling stories to change the world

2010-10-03T14:51:00.000-07:00

Q. Do you believe that art can actually have an effect on the general society?

Of late I've found myself involved with the practice of oral history - listening carefully to other people's stories and the responsibility of recording, transcribing, and the process of editing, retelling and/or transforming these stories. It started with teaching seminar courses on "Asian American Arts & Culture" and "Mixed Race Art" and simply not being satisfied with the materials out there so for the past two years, my students have been interviewing artists across the country and specifically in the Midwest for the Asian American Artist Oral History Project Archive I started at DePaul. I've also been conducting my own interviews with mixed race artists for a book project. Trauma, loss, pain, suffering, and victimization are not central themes in my own work but when you open yourself up to listening to others....it's all part of the story. So what good can retelling a story of trauma do? How does this empower the original story giver? What toll does this take on the story teller as vessel? What action are we the audience supposed to take after we hear the story?

Cherry Blossom artwork by Alfred Li Tsao

On Sat. Oct 2, 2010, I had the pleasure of attending FALLING PETALS. The show was presented by the theater group Erasing the Distance and Asian American Suicide Prevention Initiative (AASPI). I went to support a fellow artist, Alfred Li Tsao, whose work was on display during the show and also used as the set design. Professionally trained actors and one real life story teller, got on stage and retold true stories of "people of Asian and Indian descent, impacted by mental illness and suicide." Following their intense and emotional performance/sharing, the actors debriefed the audience and conducted a Q&A. We came to find out that many family members and friends of the original story tellers were in the audience. They shared. We all cried. It was very powerful. Leaving the theater, I dashed back to a kids birthday party that I was supposed to be attending at the same time as the play. I ate an amazing red velvet cup cake from Sweet Mandy B's and this took my mind off of what I'd just seen temporarily but I found that I couldn't get rid of the weight of hearing these painful stories. I guess empathy feels like heartburn.

On a side note, if you would like to bring one of the story tellers or the entire play to your organization (say for Asian American Heritage month in May...hint, hint...), please contact the director Brighid OShaughnessy.

So today I found myself on a panel discussion about "Activist Art and Social Transformation" as part of the Iraq History Project Art Festival at DePaul University directed by artist, writer, and activist Tom Block and organized by Tom and the DePaul International Human Rights Law Institute. It was an incongruous place for me to be in one sense. I am not involved in any way in art or activism about Iraq. Here again, the day started out with listening to more stories of trauma.

Tom Block's "Mazlum: Artist Book"

First about the Iraq History Project and the Art Festival:

Iraq History Project (2005 – 2009)
The Iraq History Project (IHP) gathered and analyzed first person narratives of severe human rights violations committed under the government of the Ba’ath Party and Saddam Hussein (1968 – 2003) and by a variety of groups after the U.S.-led invasion (2003 – 2008). While some data on past and recent human rights violations in Iraq is available, the suffering of the Iraqi people has been inadequately documented making it difficult to understand the severity and impact of political violence over the past four decades. The IHP addresses this issue by collecting over 8,900 testimonies representing over 55,000 pages of personal narratives. The material documents the individual experience of torture, massacres, assassinations, rape, kidnapping, disappearances and other violations. The IHP is one of the largest independent human rights data collection projects in the world and provides important insight into both past and current violations in Iraq. The project provides Iraqis with an opportunity to talk about their experiences of political violence, analyzes patterns of violence to provide a better understanding of the systematic nature of political violence, and presents policy suggestions regarding transitional justice in Iraq and mechanism of improving human rights protections.

For the Iraq History Art Festival, artists were asked to make a work of art in response to one or more of the 8,900 testimonies. One of the artists that really stood out to me who took on this brave task of responding and retelling was Benjamin June. He created three handmade artists books (Loss, Trauma, and Hope), in which he hand embroidered excerpts from these testimonials followed by the name of the original teller. His use of embroidery made one slow down to read the text. You had to don white gloves to read the book so this also reminded me that this was something that must be respected. That you had to slow down. I was surprised how much the simple shift of changing the color of thread (black for loss, red for trauma, green for hope), changed the way I read the text.

After viewing the art works at the fair, four students from the DePaul students School of Law, one of whom is from Iraq, took the stage and shared testimonials.The act of listening as an audience member is not a passive thing. My heart began to race and my cheeks turned red, listening to the horrors of war retold on this very personal and specific level. This was not the distanced voice of a news report that we have grown accustomed to. Surly I shouldn't be sipping a coffee or nibbling on snacks while hearing these stories?

After a brief break, I joined my fellow panelists, Miles Harvey, Rachel Albers, and Sufyan Sohel, to take on the more general question of the role of the arts and activism.

One of the prompts we were given as panelists was, "Do you believe that art can actually have an effect on the general society?" More heartburn, anyone? I share my brief notes here in part as my own "therapy"....I'm not sure what to do with these two experiences of listening this past weekend.
__

First of all, I’m a visual artist. In one sense I’m quite traditional. I make paintings. I draw pictures. I embrace the genres of portraiture, landscape, and history painting. My work is aesthetically pleasing, and hopefully beautiful. You can buy it and hang it over your couch, if you wish. I have a solo show called Sugar up right now at Women Made Gallery in Chicago through Oct 28^th:

Set during the 1920’s-1940’s, the paintings in SUGAR recall obake ghost stories and feature Japanese and Okinawan picture brides turned machete carrying sugar cane plantation field laborers on the Big Island of Hawaii. Sugar take us into a beautiful yet grueling world of manual labor, cane field fires and flumes.

My work is not, on the surface, what I think you might think of as “Activist” work. What does align my practice with “activist intentions” is the subject matter of my work, which focuses squarely on underrepresented if not invisible histories – specifically Asian American history and representations of mixed race individuals in the United States.

Just down the hall in DePaul’s Center for Intercultural Programs you can see my 2006 Loving series, which was inspired by the landmark 1967 Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia that overturned this nation’s last anti-miscegenation law. The Loving series consists of nine life-sized charcoal portraits of “mixed-race” friends and acquaintances and one self-portrait. We are all rainbow children of the civil rights movement and members of the post-1967 biracial baby boom. Through the process of drawing and subtle gestures in the sitters’ poses, I wanted to capture a sense of community, the ability to connect with others and the distances between each of us.

(what follows here in my talk are excerpts, in part, from a chapter of a forthcoming book I'm working on with Wei Ming Dariotis titled "War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art")

As an artist, I began to find that it was exasperating to have to tell my whole life story before the viewer could get the nuances of my cultural signifiers. Art can speak for itself but it helps to have a critical discourse between the artwork and artists and the audience – whether that audience is the marketplace, critics, academia or other artists.

American art and cultural critic Dave Hickey visited DePaul last spring and in his talk “on Art and Democracy”[i] he argued,

…works of art have no intrinsic value….all the value of a work of art is invested into it from without. Works of art are elected. And just like our senators, they have no virtue beyond their being elected for us to particularly like them. They aren’t the truth. They are just who got elected. …[The arts] have no stable function. The function of all of these practices shifts and they function in culture as a wild card in the sense that what art, literature, music, dance and theater do is what we need done at that moment.

Like Hickey, I believe that the arts can be a “wild card” and can play a crucial role in envisioning, forming and reflecting (and disrupting) our communities…I need Art to restore what the Culture Wars and rigid multicultural identity politics of the 1990s rendered mute and ineffectual. I need Art to talk about issues of identity, race and ethnicity in a nuanced and non-essentialized way. One of the jobs of Art is to raise questions and complicate things rather than provide us with succinct and tidy answers…

This messy mission, this “wild card” agenda frames my work as an academic, curator, writer, and community organizer and activist and my practice as an artist. I’ve developed and teach classes at DePaul on “Asian American Arts & Culture” and “Mixed Race Art and Identity”; I serve on the board of MAVIN, “the nation's leading organization that helps build healthier communities by raising awareness about the experiences of mixed heritage people and families.”; I’m in the middle of co-curating an exhibition and writing a book called War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art; and next month at DePaul (Nov 5-6, 2010) you can join us for a national conference I’m co-organizing titled, “Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies.”

Individual identity, while interesting and important, can easily fall into the realm of mere identity politics and is limited in its power to affect social change, write history, or demand representation. If this is about getting elected, we need constituents. Perhaps my Evangelical Christian childhood years conditioned me towards a collectivized search for meaning. Art can be our wild card to get done what we need done at this moment. From the physical nature and objectness of painting, drawing, sculpture to the ephemeral and sometimes virtual nature of video, film or performance, Art's ability to recall the past, reflect the present and imagine the future equips us with the perfect tool to present our multifacited hybrid selves. Beyond an academic dissection of words, intentions, and an analysis of political shortcomings in this country, I believe that we need community. For it is through community that we can begin to answer primary questions of origin and purpose, or as the famous/infamous post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin asked - Where Do WE Come From? What Are WE? Where Are WE Going?
__

My glib comments aside, a very real question of what should be done next with these stories still lies on the table. What can and should art do? If you want to get involved or have some ideas for the Iraq History Project, contact Chuck Tucker, Executive Director, International Human Rights Law Institute.

[i] Hickey, Dave. “Art and Democracy.” DePaul Humanities Center. DePaul University Chicago, IL. 21 May 2010.

Obake talk - the scoop behind my Sugar series

2010-09-23T09:57:00.000-07:00

Save the date! If you live on the Big Island of Hawaii, please come out to the 6th Annual Obake Night - local style Halloween ghost stories featuring "Tita" Kathy Collins and Brada Jo Hadeley Pidgin Storytellers Extraordinaire. See the flier above for details.

Through six degrees of separation and total coincidence (if you believe that anything can be a coincidence), my Chicago friend, Czerina Salud who had just come back from Hawaii from her honeymoon, connected my artwork with some community folks who then passed the images along to some aunties (Akiko Masuda and Charlene Asato) on the Big Island, one of which (Charlene Asato) who also happens to be former Hilo High School classmate of my dad! All of this to say, we all started chatting on line about obake stories, Hawaii, and talking story and they asked to use my images for the flier above.

When my images leave the white cube of the gallery wall (where presumably I have more control over context) and land on a community flier in Hawaii (with my permission of course), the context and meaning naturally changes. There are simply more story tellers here and the geographic location and audience is also shifting quite radically.

I want to take this opportunity to put a few of the images in context and to provide some historic information and my own perspective, as an Unchinanchu living in Chicago, about the use of cane fires, cane field workers clothing, obake tales, and hajichi (the Okinawan tattoo), in my Sugar series. The 10 works in the Sugar series highlight ho hana (hoeing cane), cutting cane, burning cane, fluming cane, as well as an image based on a historic labor protest, an Obon celebration, and images of my own hands covered in Okinawan tattoos.

First the easy one....

Cane Fires

Burning cane is a normal part of the cane harvest, it's not really supposed to be "scary" but we can use our imagination. The growing cycle for sugar cane is 18-months. Before they used to cut the cane for fluming and mill processing, they had to get rid of the cane top and excess grass (or "junk"). This was either done by hand cutting or by burning. It's a controlled fire that simply gets rid of the "junk." In Hilo (Pi'ihonua), where my family is originally from, it was usually far too wet and rainy to burn the cane so this image is not historically accurate but it makes for a hopefully dynamic scene that makes you think about the grueling nature of this manual labor. FYI - watch the movie the Picture Bride! The perspective in my Cane Fire painting is also a mash-up. I took the source image of Mauna Kea from Coconut Island in Hilo Bay.

The clothing for the cane field workers in my Sugar series are what Japanese and Okinawan women used to wear prior to the 1940s (1868-1940s). After the 40's you really saw them wearing Western style clothing and often times even men's work cloths (jeans, palaka plaid or whatever they felt like). Many of the women came over initially as picture brides and they would re-purpose their old kasuri kimonos into work jackets. The head scarf (to protect them from sun, dust, and getting poked from the cane) as well as the apron were made from bleached rice sacks (sometimes the aprons were made from ahina/denim). They used to wear a straw hat to protect them from the sun. Their shoes were initially made from hand stitched ahina (denim) and later they would have rubber tabi's (people still use these today). They also had oiled rain coats. They wore protective arm and leg coverings. To learn more about the clothing, visit Textured Lives at the Japanese American Museum and the work of pioneering scholar Barabara Kawakami.

Why are all the women ghosts and why don't they have any faces?

When I showed my work to the aunties in Hawaii, they read the faceless floating women as a feminist take on the Native Hawaiian legend of the Night Marchers, which puts a new and meaningful spin on the work (meaning isn't fixed by the way). Why did I make my ancestors ghosts in the Sugar series? We (my family or the community) don't have a lot of images or material culture (clothing etc.) from this time period because: 1) there was an urgency both for economic survival and in many times personal safety to assimilate following WWII/internment etc. Items which marked you as Japanese or Okinawan might not have been kept as a result. 2) if you were going to get your photograph taken (on the outside chance you had access to a camera) you certainly wouldn't want to be pictured in your grubby work clothes. You would want to be pictured in your finest clothing. So most of the photos that do exist are of people at weddings, funerals, and graduations and they are wearing Western style dresses, suits, or black kimonos and later more colorful Hawaiian print kimonos. Most of the images of cane field workers were taken by plantation owners or the State. The viewpoint is far from personal.

I always wanted to know what my great grandma, Makato Miyanhira Gibu [later Hiyane], looked like when she went to work in the fields. I just remember meeting her when she was very old (in her 90's) and I was 5 years old. I don't know a lot about her. She had a glass eye ball because (legend has it) my own grandma accidentally poked her eye out with a sugar cane stalk. Naturally this image of an old woman with a glass eye was sort of scary for a young kid. So the combination of not being able to see the past (literally), made me start thinking about my ancestors as ghosts or an absence. So I went hunting for ghost stories in Pi'ihonua. In the summer of 2010, I interviewed seven elders (Nisei and Sansei) in the community to gather stories that I then used as inspiration for this series.

Going into the series I knew everything was going to be indigo blue (coming out of my Indigo show in India and the Devon Avenue Sampler series) and I was influenced by a combination of Utagawa Hiroshige's New Year's Eve, Fox Fires by the Nettle Tree at Ōji , 1857 and Bruegel's 1568 The Beekeepers and the Birdnester. I also hatched this idea while in midnight fender bender on a tour bus on a highway in Agra, India coming back from a tour of the Taj Mahal in January of 2010 but that's another story....

Obake tales and Hinotama (literally fireballs that shoot from graves that are thought to be souls of the dead)

I was curious about ghost stories so I asked my dad and Pi'ihonua community member Yushie "Carole" Oshiro and others if they remembered any ghost stories and this didn’t seem to be something that was very important to them personally. I guess I had expected the Japanese tradition of the Obake stories to be part of the Okinawan Hawaiian culture as well. Some interviewees speculated that one of the reasons why ghost stories were not part of the culture is that they had to travel from camp to camp late at night in the dark and you really wouldn’t want everyone scared. That said, everyone acknowledged the Native Hawaiian mythology (e.g., Pele stories etc.) but they did not see these as “myths” but rather something that even if you don’t believe, to show respect. There is definitely a sense that our ancestors are physically with us still...if you want to call that a ghost or not, that's up to you.

My dad did remember, however, walking home one night and seeing a “hinotama” (fire ball) shoot out from the old graveyard located near Pi'ihonua Camp 5. In between Camp 4 and 5 on the other side of the cane field, there was an old graveyard. The road to this no longer exists. Mrs. Oshiro recalls that sometime in the 1940’s or 1950’s, the State asked the families in Pi’ihonua to relocate the remains of any family members buried in this cemetery. She remembers that one of her family members was exhumed, cremated, and then the ashes were placed in a family mausoleum in another location. At any rate, dad recalled seeing an orange fireball shoot from the graveyard and up into the air across the fields. This was a natural phenomenon that occurs due to gases building up inside the grave. Of course as a child, he thought this was a spirit or a ghost!

Now the hard one....

Hajichi (Okinawan Tattoos)

Perhaps nothing is more absent (ghost like) than the tradition of Hajichi. I've never seen anyone with the traditional tattoos myself but the topic kept coming up when I would ask what the Issei cane field workers in Hawaii used to wear. Of the seven community members I interviewed, all of them recalled that either their own grandmothers had these tattoos or that they remembered a friend's mother or grandmother having the tattoos. There are very few images of the tattoos. One woman, Millie Uchima (see interview below), gave me a reproduction of a photograph of her grandmother in a nursing home back in the 1980s and I could make out the designs on her hand. Most of the time, folks just ended up drawing a picture of what they remember the designs looking like. There are images in Okinawa (which I learned about later and which are not in English) but I didn't have access to those when I was making these paintings so I resorted to using my own hands to model the Okinawan tattoo designs. A reporter from the Okinawa Times, Akiko Kakazu who wrote about my work, told me that there was an exhibit on Hajichi and a related publication in 2008 in the Naha City History Museum.

Here is the story of Hajichi as told to me by Mrs. Midred T. Uchima of Hui Okinawa. Mrs. Uchima grew up in the Peepekeo community:

July 6, 2010 interview with Mildred “Millie” T Uchima (President of Hui Okinawa Hilo Hawaii) and Margaret Torigoe

Okinawan Tattoos

Mrs. Uchima gave me some photographs of the tattoos and a hand written history and personal story of the tattoos, which Margaret Torigoe later typed up for me and sent via e-mail:

Tattoo in Okinawa

A Personal Story by Millie T. Nakasone Uchima

For many centuries Okinawa women had the back of their hands tattooed. Like many ancient traditions, tattooing is no longer practiced in Okinawa.

My mother, Toku Miyahira Naksone, had tattoos on her hands – I never thought they were ugly – in fact, the hands always looked beautiful to me. She had circles and squares and lines on both her hands. She told me that as a young girl, it was considered fashionable and beautiful to have tattooed hands. Since she was poor, she could not use the best ink from China. She and her friends used the cheap, inexpensive ink and tattooed each other. It was extremely painful, but she was proud of her beautiful hands.

OKINAWA TATTOO

The Okinawan practice of tattooing may have been introduced through contacts with other countries, i.e. India, China and Japan.

For many centuries, Okinawan women had the backs of their hands tattooed. Like many ancient traditions, tattooing is no longer practiced in Okinawa.

At one time it was considered fashionable to have tattooing done on the hands. It was a fad. All the girls had it done. Many young girls tattooed their hands so that they would not be kidnapped by Japanese pirates and sold as prostitutes. They also knew the Japanese hated tattooed women.

A legend tells of a beautiful Okinawan princess held captive by a powerful Japanese lord. He refused to let her return to Okinawa. Therefore, her servants devised a plan to have her hands tattooed. When the lord saw the princess’ tattooed hands, he was horrified and immediately sent her back to Shuri Castle.

The ladies of the court imitated the princess and had their hands tattooed. They believed that tattoos protected them from evil while others tattooed designs to reflect their social status.

Ladies from very rich families used the best sumi (ink) from China. It was customary for young girls between ages of 17 & 23 to have their hands tattooed before marriage. Tattooing in Okinawa signified a girl’s transition from adolescence to adulthood. A big celebration was held at this time. When the girl turned 37, the design was enlarged and darkened. When the first grandchild was born, the procedure was repeated, with more designs being added. When the woman died, her tattoo was considered her “passport” to the “other side” where she would display her tattoos as identification to her ancestral family.

Today tattooing is forbidden by law and rarely will you see a woman with tattoos on her hand. If she is alive, she will have to be someone’s great, great grandmother since many ladies who had tattoos on their hands have already joined their ancestors.

Millie Uchima

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Mrs. Uchima said that if you were rich, you would have dark black tattoos made with ink from China (sumi ink). Most people, however, had to use homemade ink and it was purplish blue (indigo). The women would get tattoos between the ages 17-23 [before marriage]. According to “Tattoos: A Woman’s Story” by Doreen Yamashiro, “If a woman refused or protested the painful procedure, she was threatened with exile to Taiwan or another country.” Mrs. Uchima recalls that in Okinawa, they would create pigment from the “tinsagunu” flower (balsam flower). They would mash it up. They would use the red, purple, or pink flowers to create nail polish and the purple flowers for tattoos.

She remembers that they would get the tattoos a little at a time – when you were engaged, then when you were married, then when you had children, and then grandchildren. Yamashiro’s essay confirms that the tattooing would traditionally happen two additional times, “When she turned 37, the design was enlarged and darkened, and when her first grandchild was born, the procedure was repeated – with more designs added.” The first tattoos would be on the base of the fingers and then on the back of the hand and eventually the wrist. The geometric shape on the back of the hand was usually a large circle. You would also see diamond shapes or other shapes inspired from kasuri designs. The fingers might be completely tattooed.

I asked why the rich families were sending their daughters to Hawaii to work manual labor. She said there was a famine in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s and that there were no jobs and that this impacted even the rich families so that this why they would take the risk to send their daughters off to Hawaii.
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One of the 6th Annual Obake Night event organizers noted that the events on October 29 and 30, 2010, “will be dedicated to the souls and spirits of women who have been and continue to be violated in wars, whether wars between countries or wars between one human and another as in violence in our families.” They all felt strongly that the tattoo image featured in my painting reminded them of their history both in terms of things that were nostalgic but also frightening and in terms of things you just never ever talked about.

- Laura Kina

Sept 10th Laura Kina "Sugar" opening reception pictures

2010-09-15T19:47:00.000-07:00

Snaps from the opening reception of my show "Sugar" at Woman Made Gallery in Chicago on Sept 10, 2010. The show is up through Oct 28th.

Press for "Laura Kina: Sugar"

2010-09-06T15:48:00.000-07:00

Kakazu, Akiko. "Portrait of Immigrant Brides: Okinawan Kina-san's Oil Painting Exhibition" Okinawa Times. 6, September, 2010.


"Portrait of Immigrant Brides: Okinawan Kina-san's Oil Painting Exhibition" Okinawa Times Sept 6, 2010

The article above was originally published in Japanese. The English translation below is courtesy of Miho Matsugu, DePaul University Assistant Professor Department of Modern Languages, Japanese Studies Program

Portrait of Immigrant Brides: Okinawan Kina-san’s Oil Painting Exhibition
September 6, 2010
Akiko Kakazu - The Okinawa Times Overseas reporter

Oil painting exhibition “Sugar,” opening on September 10th at Women Made Gallery in Chicago, IL, focuses on immigrants from Okinawa to the sugar cane fields of Hawai’i from 1900 to 1959.

The artist is fourth-generation Okinawan Ms. Laura Kina, who uses a pop art sensitivity to portray immigrant brides wearing work clothes in the fields, hands decorated with hajichi (Okinawan tattoos), beautiful figures doing extremely hard labor in stretches of burning fields and flooding creeks.

Displayed are ten works based on Ms. Kina’s memories of her father George Kina, 66, who was born on Hawai’i as a third-generation Okinawan, and her grand parents, as well as what she learned from elders on the Big Island and photos.

Ms. Kina, born to an Okinawan father and a Basque Spanish American mother, grew up in a Norwegian immigrant community in Washington State, and studied art in undergraduate and graduate programs in Chicago.

She is currently teaching courses such as “Asian American Art and Culture” and “Art and Identity of Mixed Race” at DePaul University in Chicago. Her research and art work also focuses on consistent themes such as “Fluidity in Cultural Differences.”

Ms. Kina has made works in her pursuit of portraying Asian American history and people of mixed race. On her current exhibition, Ms. Kina says, “I was moved by the fact that immigrant brides made their work clothes out of the kasuri fabrics they brought and continued to wear, remaking them repeatedly,” throwing a new perspective on this historical chapter.

More "Laura Kina: Sugar" press...
Corrao, Tom. "'Sugar' an Art Exhibition by Uchinanchu Artist Laura Kina" Okinawaolgoy Blog: Life Adventures and Stories of an Okinawa Otaku. 7 September, 2010.
http://chicagookinawakenjinkai.blogspot.com/

"Sugar" ZEEK: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture. 1, Sept. 2010.

"Sugar" featured in ZEEK

Rodriguez, Camelia. "Laura Kina: Sugar" Audrey: The Asian American Women's Lifestyle Magazine. Vol. 8. No. 3. Fall 2010: 15

"Laura Kina: Sugar"
Audrey Magazine: The Asian American Women's Lifestyle Magazine
Fall 2010 p. 15

Laura Kina "Sugar" opens Sept 10th at Women Made Gallery in Chicago

2010-08-30T07:21:00.000-07:00


Laura Kina "Kasuri" Oil on wood panel 30 x 45 in. 2010

Laura Kina "Sugar"
Set during the 1920’s-1940’s, Laura Kina’s SUGAR paintings recall obake ghost stories and feature Japanese and Okinawan picture brides turned machete carrying sugar cane plantation field laborers on the Big Island of Hawaii. Drawing on oral history and family photographs from Nisei (2nd generation) and Sansei (3rd generation) from Peepekeo, Pi’ihonua, and Hakalau plantation community members as well as historic images, Kina’s paintings take us into a beautiful yet grueling world of manual labor, cane field fires and flumes.

The exhibition will run from Sept 10-Oct 28, 2010
Opening reception Friday, Sept 10, 2010 6-9pm.
Woman Made Gallery
685 N Milwaukee Ave
Chicago, IL 60642
Tel 312-738-0400

Gallery Hours: Wed., Thurs., Fri. 12-7 p.m.; Sat., Sun. 12-4 p.m.
http://womanmade.org/show.html?type=solo&gallery=kina2010&pic=1

Laura Kina "Cane Fire" Oil on canvas 30 x 45 in. 2010

Laura Kina "Palaka" Oil on canvas 30 x 45 in. 2010

Laura Kina "Oban" Oil on canvas 30 x 45 in. 2010

Laura Kina "Okinawan Tattoo #1" Oil on wood panel 12 x 12 in. 2010

Laura Kina "Okinawan Tattoo #2" Oil on wood panel 12 x 12 in. 2010

Laura Kina "Sugar Study #1" Oil on wood panel 12 x 12 in. 2010

Laura Kina "Cane Flume" Oil on wood panel 12 x 12 in. 2010

Laura Kina "Ho Hana" Oil on wood panel 12 x 12 in. 2010

Laura Kina "Sugar Study #2" Oil on wood panel 18 x 24 in. 2010

"Closing the Loop" Business Standard Sun June 27 2010

2010-06-27T06:40:00.000-07:00

My collaborative exhibition "Indigo" with Indian artist Shelly Jyoti was covered in "Closing the Loop" by Gargi Gupta Business Standard Sunday, June 27, 2010
http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/closingloop/399495/

As more and more Indian artists collaborate with their foreign counterparts, cultures and nationalities blend in creative ways.

Jugalbandis are accepted practice in music, but in the plastic arts you rarely hear of collaborations. And collaborations across cultures and nationalities — almost never. That is now changing, with greater interaction between artists from different countries through arts residencies, exchange programmes or the Internet.

Take Amitesh Verma, a 34-year-old Delhi-based artist known for his detailed sketches of horses. In November last year Verma was in Marnay-sur-Seine, France, on an arts residency. He met and made friends with Brazilian artist Myra. When she came to India for a residency at the Sanskriti Foundation in Delhi, he went to meet her. There he met another artist, Andrew Connelly, associate professor of sculpture at California State University in the USA. Sharing notes on their travels and working at residencies around the world, the two found themselves agreeing about the “value to an artist in travel and the ability to work in different environments with other artists from far away and from different perspectives”, says Connelly. “We thought it would be interesting to show our work made while in residency from our respective experiences.”

The result, ‘Crossing Over’, a two-man show paid for by both artists, ended at Delhi’s Shridharani Gallery this Friday. It was a disparate show, with Connelly showing sculptural installations influenced by India, in materials such as bamboo, rice, Holi colours, and thread used for religious ceremonies. Verma, for his part, had paintings that revealed a classical European sensibility that he’d imbibed in France. Connections, and the oblique ways in which they are forged in today’s globalised world, thus, were what held the show together.

A similar chance connection brought together Shelly Jyoti, fashion designer and artist from Baroda, and Laura Kina, Chicago-based lecturer on art. They didn’t meet at a residency; it was their shared interest in textiles and cultural identity that got them talking at the show of a common artist friend, Shelley Bahl, and they went on to collaborate on Indigo, held in Delhi and Mumbai early this year.

The exhibition had other threads in common — such as indigo dye and the use of embroidery as a cultural artifact. If for Jyoti indigo evoked Mahatma Gandhi and its importance in the political history of India, for Kina its blue colour had more personal associations. Kina’s grandparents were sugarcane farmers in Okinawa, Japan, and wore indigo-dyed shirts and kimonos. Also, the colour blue is sacred to Judaism, to which Kina converted after marriage.

For Kina, the show was a truly trans-national effort. ‘Devon Street Sampler’, as her series was called, had works based on street signs that she saw in the multicultural, multi-racial neighbourhood of Devon Street, Chicago, where she lived. The works were conceived on computer in the USA and sent to women embroiderers at MarketPlace: Handwork of Work, a fair-trade organisation in Mumbai. “They would send pictures and I would coordinate from Chicago,” says Kina.

If there’s an element of chance in the coming together of Verma and Connelly, Jyoti and Kina, Mumbai-based artist and activist, Tejal Shah, and Han Bing, from Hunan, China, have had a more sustained partnership. They showed together at the Asian Triennial Manchester in 2008 before coming together in March 2010 for ‘A Cry from the Narrow Between’ at Gallery Espace in Delhi.

There’s greater synergy in their art too, in the way they make full use of video, performance, photography and public intervention to address issues of sexuality, power and violence. While the LGBT community is Shah’s concern, Bing’s works have an erotic charge, juxtaposing the naked human body with blocks of concrete and construction material. The violence of everyday life is presumably common across nationalities and cultures.

It's hard to read this from the jpeg but here is a copy of the clipping from the original article:

Save the date - Sugar solo show opens Sept 10th

2010-06-19T04:45:00.000-07:00

Save the date!
I'm in the studio (and Hawaii) this summer making work for a new solo show which will open in the fall.

Laura Kina "Sugar"
Set during the 1920’s-1940’s, Laura Kina’s SUGAR paintings recall obake ghost stories and feature Japanese and Okinawan picture brides turned machete carrying sugar cane plantation field laborers on the Big Island of Hawaii. Drawing on oral history and family photographs from Nisei (2nd generation) and Sansei (3rd generation) from Peepekeo, Pi’ihonua, and Hakalau plantation community members as well as historic images, Kina’s paintings take us into a beautiful yet grueling world of manual labor, cane field fires and flumes.

The exhibition will run from Sept 10-Oct 28, 2010
Opening reception Friday, Sept 10, 2010 6-9pm.
Woman Made Gallery
685 N Milwaukee Ave
Chicago, IL 60642
Tel 312-738-0400
Gallery Hours: Wed., Thurs., Fri. 12-7 p.m.; Sat., Sun. 12-4 p.m.

http://womanmade.org/show.html?type=solo&gallery=kina2010&pic=1

As a point of interest, check out the Japanese American National Museum's current exhibition Textured Lives: Japanese Immigrant Clothing from the Plantation of Hawai'i through August 22, 2010 in Los Angeles.
http://www.janm.org/exhibits/texturedlives/

You can see many of the works from this collection online. It's really fascinating.

http://www.janm.org/collections/barbara-kawakami-collection/?page=1

In the Economic Times and the Sunday Guardian in India June 13, 2010

2010-06-13T05:04:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I have to cop to something. I have my name tagged in "Google Alerts." Because of this, I woke up this morning in Chicago to discover that I'm in the Sunday Economic Times and the Sunday Guardian in India! India seems to be the press gift that keeps on giving. This must be article #20 or something by now!

Growing canvas of Indian art
13 Jun 2010, 0411 hrs IST,Vaishali Dar,ET Bureau

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Features/Sunday-ET/Backpage/Growing-canvas-of-Indian-art/articleshow/6042380.cms?curpg=2

Speaking at Winning the Peace @ JASC on Fri @ 7pm

2010-05-06T04:17:00.000-07:00

“Winning the Peace: The Story of Chicagoans in the Military Intelligence Service, 1941-1952”
Japanese American Service Committee
May 7-June 30, 2010
Opening Reception: Friday, May 7, 2010 7:00pm
Free Admission
4427 North Clark Street
Chicago, IL 60640
http://www.jasc-chicago.org/mis/

"Winning the Peace" tells the story of the Military Intelligence Service, a special unit formed out of Japanese American soldiers trained as linguist to fight in the Pacific Theater. The opening will have a ceremonial color-guard, presented by the Nisei Post No. 1183. A short address will follow by Laura Kina, DePaul University Associate Professor Art, Media, & Design, Vincent de Paul Professor & Director Asian American Studies.

Click "Facebook MIS event" to view the full invitation and receive updates.

For more information, contact Karen Kanemoto via email or call 773.275.0097 ext 222

This exhibit was made possible by grant assistance from the Department of the Interior, National Park Service; Japanese American Service Committee; Japanese Mutual Aid Society of Chicago, Tom T. Arai Bequest; Chicago Nisei Post No. 1183, American Legion; Japanese American Citizens League, Chicago Chapter; and Chicago Japanese American Historical Society.

This material is based upon work assisted by a grant from the Department of the Interior, National Park Service.

Selected of the Selected

2010-05-01T18:10:00.000-07:00

Two of my Devon Avenue Sampler are included in this show.

The 12 artists for this exhibition were selected by three person jury, made up this year by Alma Ruiz, Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Christine Y. Kim, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, LACMA; and David Pagel, Associate Professor of Art Theory and History at the Claremont Graduate University and Art Critic for the Los Angeles Times.

May 7-26th, 2010
Opening Reception: May 7, 2010 7:00-9:00pm
Korean Cultural Center
5505 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 900036
Tel: 323-936-7141

http://www.kccla.org/