Save the date - War Baby/Love Child opens @ the Wing Luke on August 8th

Jenifer Wofford, MacArthur Nurses VI, 2013 will be on view at the Wing Luke Museum.

War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art

curated by Laura Kina and Wei Ming Dariotis

This exhibition brings together works by 19 artists, highlighting different approaches to the identities and experiences of mixed Asian Americans, mixed Pacific Islander Americans and Asian transracial adoptees. While their biographies are varied and often diverge from the dominant stereotypes of mixed Asian identities, their lives are shaped by the specific histories of Asian Pacific-U.S. collisions: narratives of war, economic and political migration and colonization. As an ethnically ambiguous Asian American generation comes of age in a world fixated on post-racial politics and moving beyond issues of identity, War Baby | Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art examines how artists engage various facets of hybridity in their artwork.

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

Major funding for this exhibition was awarded through The National Endowment for the Arts Art Works Museums grant to DePaul University. The exhibition is curated by Laura Kina, associate professor Art, Media, & Design DePaul University, and Wei Ming Dariotis, associate professor Asian American Studies San Francisco State University. It opened at DePaul University April 25 - June 30, 2013 and will travel next to Seattle to the Wing Luke Museum.

Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience

August 9, 2013 - January 19, 2014
719 S. King Street Seattle, WA 98104
206-623-5124
http://www.wingluke.org/

Opening Reception: Thursday, August 8, 2013 @ 6-8pm
6-7pm: Special preview for Museum members and invited guests. Light refreshments will be served
7-8pm: Open to the public, free admission, no RSVP required
 Read more about the exhibition - http://www.warbabylovechild.com/exhibition/

Curators Laura Kina and Wei Ming Dariotis will be in attendance, as well as featured artists Stuart Gaffney, Louie Gong, Lori Kay, Richard Lou and Jenifer Wofford.

If you’d like to attend the special preview from 6-7pm, please contact mmartinez@wingluke.org or 206.623.5124 ext 107.

Related Programs at the Wing Luke Museum:

Saturday, August 10, 1pm

Curator lecture with Laura Kina and Wei Ming Dariotis

Get an inside look at War Baby/Love Child with curators Laura Kina and Wei Ming Dariotis. Learn about their process in producing their multi-platform project (book, traveling exhibit, website, and blog) Book signing to follow. $10 General (includes gallery admission), $7 Members.

Saturday, August 17, 4pm

Book reading with Cathy J. Tashiro

Cathy J. Tashiro discusses her latest book Standing on Both Feet: Voices of Older Mixed Race Americans, which highlights the voices of older Americans of mixed race whose very existence broke the steadfast rules of the color line. Free.

Saturday, September 28, 2-5pm

MIX IT UP

This workshop for artists includes a Q&A session and reception with Maria Villafranca from the New York Foundation of the Arts. She will discuss strategies for sustaining your artistic practice, including an overview of opportunities available to artists in Washington and nationwide. Geared toward individual artist across disciplines at all stages in their careers. $10 General, $7 Members and students. To purchase tickets, call 206-623-5124.

Saturday, October 12

Film screening of The Woman, The Orphan and The Tiger by Jane Jin Kaisen

Saturday, October 26

Teacher workshop on how to talk about race

And more programs TBA!

Book interview with DC blogger Deborah Kalb

Book Q&A

Deborah Kalb is the co-author, with Marvin Kalb, of "Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama" (Brookings Institution Press, 2011). She also keeps a blog where she interviews authors she is interested in and offers "daily historical factoids about books." Check out our July 11, 2013 author/artist Q&A about the book I co-edited, with Wei Ming Dariotis, War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art (University of Washington Press, 2013).
 
http://deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com/2013/07/q-with-artist-and-author-laura-kina.html?spref=tw

If you live in Chicago, please join me in person for a book reading this coming Sunday:

WOMEN & CHILDREN FIRST in CHICAGO presents
A Reading with Janet Stickmon & Laura Kina
Sunday, July 14, 4:30-6pm 
5233 N. Clark St. Chicago, IL 60640
773-769-9299
 
Janet Stickmon is a professor of Humanities at Napa Valley College and founder of Broken Shackle Developmental Training. Stickmon is the author of Crushing Soft Rubies—A Memoir and Midnight Peaches, Two O’clock Patience—A Collection of Essays, Poems, and Short Stories on Womanhood and the Spirit.

Laura Kina addresses Asian American and mixed race history and identity in her artwork and writing. She is a Vincent DePaul Associate Professor of Art, Media, & Design at DePaul University and the coeditor of War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art.

Ragdale/3Arts Residency Fellowship

I just got back from a Ragdale/3Arts Residency Fellowship in Lake Forest, IL June 17-July 5, 2013.  It was a little slice of heaven to be out on the open prairie for three weeks in the Meadow Studio, a magnificent modernist structure. The program is set up so you just have time and space to make your work completely undisturbed. The only scheduled things is that each night M-F at 6:30pm chef Linda Williams cooks up an amazing dinner. Our group ended up meeting for 9:30pm for night caps, ghost stories, and gossip. Minus the s'mores and camp fires, it was adult summer camp. I was able to get nine 30x45 in. new oil paintings done. See a sneak peek of one of them below. There were 13 of us in our cohort - 3 visual artists, 1 music composer and the rest were writers.

The main Ragdale House where residents sleep and writers write.

The Meadow Studio. If you go, say hi to "Iggy" for me. You'll know what I'm talking about when you get there.

Inside the Meadow Studio. Amazing high ceilings, the best light ever, great ventilation, a huge counter/bar, a private patio and living room.

A sneak peek at my new work - Laura Kina, Family Portrait 1, 30 x 45 in., Oil on canvas, 2013.

Right outside the Meadow Studio is 50 acres of open prairie. It was incredible to watch summer storms roll in. Every day the prairie has something new to offer.

Deer, bunnies, birds, bees, and all sorts of insects walk, hop, fly, and crawl by the Meadow Studio.

DC Days - White House art reception and Smithsonian exhibition and book of the week

I was honored to be invited by First Lady Michelle Obama to attend the White House Historical Association Arts Reception on June 5, 2013 in celebration of American art. DC has been good to me this spring and summer. I also got to see my 2011 "Issei" painting reproduced in a traveling banner Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center exhibition at the National Museum of American History AND my coedited book with Wei Ming Dariotis War Baby / Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art was selected as a staff pick book of the week at the book store in the Smithsonian American Museum of Art.

On my way to the White House

I brought my brother Sam as my guest.

First Lady Michelle Obama at the June 5, 2013 Historical Association Arts Reception in celebration of American art. Photo by artist and fellow attendee Clare Rojas.

Franklin Odo (retired founding Director Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program), Laura Kina, Margo Machida (Professor Art History and Asian American Studies, University of Connecticut), Theodore Gonzalves (Associate Professor and Chair American Studies, University of Maryland), Trisha Lagaso Goldberg (Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts commissions project manager, independent curator, and artist), and CYJO (artist).

Curatorial Assistant Noriko Sanefuji and me in front of my banner image at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History exhibition "I Want the Wide American Earth: An Asian Pacific American Story."

My coedited book with Wei Ming Dariotis War Baby / Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art (University Washington Press, 2013) was selected as the staff pick book of the week at the end of June in the book store of the Smithsonian American Museum of Art. Thank you Joann Moser, Senior Curator Graphic Arts, for suggesting our book.