2013


2013 GRANT PROJECTS

• GROUP PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBIT
Our Portraits, Our Family • $12,000
Aries Lao and Suma Reddy of the Asian Pride Project
The Asian Pride Project, a collaboration between several Asian American LGBTQ groups: Q-Wave, SALGA-NYC, and GAPIMNY, is an online multimedia and multilingual community resource for Asian LBGTQ families that sheds much needed light on a topic often silenced within our API communities. Our Portraits, Our Family is a group photography exhibit that will increase visibility and empower API LGBTQ individuals and families through the use of visual media and arts by highlighting and acknowledging the beauty of diverse families.

• MULTI MEDIA PUBLIC ART
Comfort Women Wanted • $15,000
Chang-Jin Lee
Korean-born visual artist Chang-Jin Lee’s Comfort Women Wanted is a public art project incorporating interviews with Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, Indonesian, Filipino, and Dutch women survivors of Japanese WWII “comfort stations.” The project is intended to create awareness of the 200,000 “comfort women,” who were systematically exploited as sex slaves in Asia during World War II, and to connect this historical atrocity to the continuing sexual exploitation and trafficking of Asian women today. The grant will support installation of ad-like art displays, in collaboration with the NYC Department of Transportation’s Urban Art initiative, as well as kiosk phone booth posters at major sites in NYC and a screening and panel discussion at Columbia University.

• DOCUMENTARY FILM
Claiming Our Voice • $5,500
Jennifer Samuel and Fine Grain Films
Fine Grain Films will create a website, companion curriculum, and score for Claiming Our Voice, a short documentary following female South Asian immigrant domestic workers as they create an original theatrical production that sheds an intimate light on their struggles and survival strategies.

• DOCUMENTARY FILM
License to Pimp • $5,000
Hima B.
If your workplace were engaged in illegal labor practices, would you adapt, fight, or quit? Filmed over ten years, this feature documentary depicts three strippers reconciling themselves to this dilemma as strip clubs nationwide refuse to admit that strippers are employees, pay them wages and build workplaces that facilitate prostitution. The grant will support production of a fine cut of this film.

• SUMMER ARTS PROGRAM
Culture and Arts as Resistance • $15,000
Chhaya Chhoum of Mekong
Mekong, a community based organization serving the SE Asian community in the Bronx, will build its Culture and Arts as Resistance project through an eight-week intergenerational summer program where young women and elder women will work together to hear and tell each others’ stories. The program will culminate with a photography exhibit that will be shared among the Cambodian community as well as with the Bronx Museum. The program will provide a space for participants to engage in community building and community healing, dealing with traumas of the past as well as current distress around immigration.

• MUSEUM EXHIBIT
Portraits of New York Chinatown • $5,000
Tomie Arai and the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA)
Portraits of New York Chinatown is a collaborative arts project  led by artist Tomie Arai. By engaging the Chinatown community, the project will open a public lens into diverse cultures, shifting boundaries and gentrification. This is a continuation of the AWGC-supported project Archeology of Change, in which Arai conducted 27 interviews about neighborhood gentrification. She will conduct 12 new interviews and explore community participation in this project, including inviting the public to bring objects from their personal collections. The project culminates in a mounted exhibition in the MOCA galleries in September 2013 that will include portraiture, interview excerpts, photographs and objects.

• STORYTELLING AND THEATER WORKSHOP
Q Up • $3,500
Farah Bala and Nancy Kim of the Rising Circle Theatre Collective
Q Up is a free, out-of-school, four-day program in which 20-24 Asian American/South Asian high school and college-aged young women from Queens, NY, will create and perform their own stories after working alongside professional Asian American and South Asian female artists. The girls will participate in a staged reading of their own original work at Queens College. Requested funds will be applied towards program staff fees for two lead teaching artists, three guest artists, a technical director, and a videographer/editor.

• PUBLIC ART AND THEATER PERFORMANCE
Freedom. Safety. NOW! • $10,000
Jaishri Abichandani, Parijat Desai, and Shruti Parekh of the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective
SAWCC developed Freedom. Safety. Now! with Parijat Desai and Jaishri Abichandani in response to the 2012 fatal rape of Jyoti Singh Pandey in Delhi, India. Movement to Power, which emerged as part of that response, address issues of women’s sexual freedom and safety, specifically addressing violence in Asian American communities. SAWCC will take the Movement to Power performance to NYU for Gender Violence Awareness Week and API Heritage Month, and the project leaders will speak on a panel with SAKHI and the NY Asian Women’s Center.