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.

Cover art for Voices from the Canefields: Folksongs from Immigrant Workers in Hawaii

I am very honored to have my 2010 "Kasuri" painting from my Sugar series gracing the cover of this forthcoming book by Franklin Odo. Place your orders now. The book will be coming out in August 2013:http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199813032.do#.UbsBFeu5fcE

“Historian Franklin Odo has parlayed Harry Minoru Urata’s decades of song-hunting into a spectacular, engaging, and eye-opening view of a seminal Japanese American regional tradition.”—Daniel Sheehy, Curator and Director, Smithsonian Folkways

“This is an outstanding contribution to the story of pioneer Issei and their lives and labor on the plantations of Hawai’i based on the poetic lyrics of their work songs. Franklin Odo’s masterful study of the lyrics of holehole bushi songs uncovers the deepest emotions of the Issei women and men as they labored and sang about their daily life on the plantations of Hawai’i.”—Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, George & Sakaye Aratani Professor and Endowed Chair, Asian American Studies, UCLA


“Odo rescues pungent voices of nameless Japanese immigrants from historical obscurity. His analysis of emotion-filled folk songs offers a rare glimpse into the culture of Hawai`i's plantation work accentuated by the daily struggle with racism, sexism, class exploitation, homesickness, and disrupted family life. This is prodigious scholarship!”—Eiichiro Azuma, Alan Charles Kors Term Associate Professor of History and Asian American Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Folk songs are short stories from the souls of common people. Some, like Mexican corridos or Scottish ballads, reworked in the Appalachias, are stories of tragic or heroic episodes. Others, like the African American blues, reach from a difficult present back into slavery and forward into a troubled future. Japanese workers in Hawaii's plantations created their own versions, in form more akin to their traditional tanka or haiku poetry. These holehole bushi describe the experiences of one particular group caught in the global movements of capital, empire, and labor during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Voices from the Canefields author Franklin Odo situates over two hundred of these songs, in translation, in a hitherto largely unexplored historical context.

Japanese laborers quickly comprised the majority of Hawaiian sugar plantation workers after their large-scale importation as contract workers in 1885. Their folk songs provide good examples of the intersection between local work/life and the global connection which the workers clearly perceived after arriving. While many are songs of lamentation, others reflect a rapid adaptation to a new society in which other ethnic groups were arranged in untidy hierarchical order - the origins of a unique multicultural social order dominated by an oligarchy of white planters. Odo also recognizes the influence of the immigrants' rapidly modernizing homeland societies through his exploration of the "cultural baggage" brought by immigrants and some of their dangerous notions of cultural superiority. Japanese immigrants were thus simultaneously the targets of intense racial and class vitriol even as they took comfort in the expanding Japanese empire.

Engagingly written and drawing on a multitude of sources including family histories, newspapers, oral histories, the expressed perspectives of women in this immigrant society, and accounts from the prolific Japanese language press into the narrative, Voices from the Canefields will speak not only to scholars of ethnomusicology, migration history, and ethnic/racial movements, but also to a general audience of Japanese Americans seeking connections to their cultural past and the experiences of their most recently past generations.

Franklin Odo was founding director of the Smithsonian Institution's Asian Pacific American Program and Acting Chief of the Asian Division at the Library of Congress. He was among the pioneering faculty involved in Asian American Studies at UCLA and taught Asian  American history at the University of Hawai`i, UPenn, Hunter, Princeton, and Columbia.

Cover art: Laura Kina

Women & Children First presents Janet Stickmon and Laura Kina

Women &Children First
Sunday, July 14, 2013, 4:30-6p.m.
5233 N. Clark St.
Chicago, IL 60640
Women & Children First presents
Janet Stickmon and Laura Kina

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. Learn more at: www.brokenshackle.wordpress.com

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. Learn more about the book: http://www.warbabylovechild.com/

Laura Kina and Janet Stickmon, July14, 2013 @ Women & Children First in Chicago.

Columbia College - group show "Word on the Street: Image, Language, Signage"

Join me for the opening reception of this group show at Columbia College in Chicago. I'll be showing three new paintings and one oldie (http://www.laurakina.com/newwork2013.html).

Laura Kina Okinawa - All American Food , 30 x 45 inches, Oil on canvas, 2013

Word on the Street: Image, Language, Signage

June 14 - August 10, 2013
Opening Reception: Friday, June 14, 5:00 - 7:00 pm

Columbia College Center for Book and Paper Arts

1104 South Wabash Ave. 2nd floor, Chicago, IL 60605

Gallery Hours: Monday - Saturday 10:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m.

Featuring work by Superflex, Laura Kina, Chris Dorland, Mark Dean Veca, Joel Ross (with Jason Creps), Jason Thomas Pallas, Jaclyn Jacunski, Peter Liversidge, Jeffrey T. Jones, Jonathan Monk, Eric May, Steve Lambert, Nicolas Lampert, Justseeds, and Howling Mob Society.

This exhibition considers the expressive potential of image and language through signage: how do artists use the visual and physical characteristics of signage, along with its often site specific cultural currency, to create realms of poetic or political meaning in public space or the gallery? With a focus on forms of permanent and ephemeral signage this exhibition will consider artists' billboards, marquees, street signs, banners and posters among other forms of infrastructural signage.

Held in association with the THIRD ANNUAL TYPOGRAPHY SYMPOSIUM, a four-day extravagana celebrating typography and design, featuring signmaking workshops, a lecture by John Downer, and a panel on Chicago street typography.

Word on the Street shows exactly how “show” tells: how things and contexts, old, new and remixed, can be structured to speak: how a Plymouth Road Runner hood can be coaxed into a nostalgic ventriloquism on American road culture; how, shorn of their textual anchors, corporate logos speak graphically of a movement and grace that is unavailable in their original designs; how authorized and “unauthorized” signs can speak a tale of resistance and counter-hegemony by their very presence or re-presentation; and how mundane phrases, objects and products find their poetic voice in a new rhetoric of display.  

—From Display and the Multivocal Rhetoric of Places and Things, a catalog essay by Ward Tietz

For more information contact:

P 312-369-6630

F 312-369-8082

E book&paper@colum.edu
http://www.colum.edu/Academics/Interarts/events/exhibitions/index.php 

My painting "Issei" is part of traveling Smithsonian banner exhibition and educational poster

Laura Kina "Issei" 2011, oil on canvas, 30 x 45 in. reproduction featured in Smithsonian banner exhibit and on an educational poster

A reproduction of my 2011 painting "Issei", which features a portrait of my Okinawan great-great grandmother with ghosts of sugar cane plantation workers in Hawaii behind her, is part of this traveling educational banner exhibition organized by the Smithsonian's Asian Pacific American Center. Thank you Konrad Ng and Lawrence-Minh Davis for including my work.

I Want the Wide American Earth: An Asian Pacific American Story
Smithsonian National Museum of American History
May 1 - June 15, 2013
1400 Constitution Ave., NW 3rd Floor, Corridors
Washington, DC

"This banner exhibition celebrates Asian Pacific American history across a multitude of incredibly diverse cultures and explores how Asian Pacific Americans have shaped and been shaped by the course of our nation’s history. Rich with compelling, often surprising stories, it takes a sweeping look at this history, from the very first Asian immigrants centuries ago to the complex challenges facing Asian Pacific American communities today."

It has also been turned into a poster that will go out to 10,000 schools across the U.S.  "to help educate school children about the many contributions of Asian Americans." 

Read more: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/aroundthemall/2013/05/from-the-civil-war-to-civil-rights-the-many-ways-asian-americans-have-shaped-the-country/#ixzz2SJxNUaA0

"Recommended" by Newcity - Check out the press for War Baby / Love Child

Michael Weinstein, "Review: War Baby/LoveChild:DePaulArtMuseum," Newcity Art, April 30, 2013.
(http://art.newcity.com/2013/04/30/review-war-babylove-childdepaul-art-museum/)
 

Review: War Baby/Love Child/DePaul Art Museum

Gina Osterloh, “Collapse,” 2006. Light jet print.

RECOMMENDED

The most recent and arguably the most diverse group to emerge on the crowded scene of contemporary identity politics is the “mixed-race Asian American,” which receives a rich visual reflection here by seven photographers who in portraits and staged scenarios concentrate on the confusions involved in determining with which larger group they should identify, or whether they should form a distinctive blended group all their own. Some of the artists, indeed, would not even consider themselves to be Asian, but European or Mexican, for example, and others are in flux. No wonder, then, that a persistent theme in the show is the condition of feeling that one is “hidden.” Gina Osterloh, the daughter of a German-American father and a Filipina mother, depicts herself in color lying on a mat on her stomach in a kitschy tropical setting; she has cut her head out of the frame and is clothed in a pants suit covering one leg and in military fatigues the other, in order to insure that the image is “unreadable.” The other artists are equally complicated and complex in their efforts to portray a particularly emblematic and problematic zone of globalization. (Michael Weinstein)

Through June 30 at the DePaul Art Museum, 935 West Fullerton.


More Press!

Renoir Gaither, "War Baby Love Child – Mixed Race American Art," MXDWELL, April 25, 2013.
(http://mxdwell.com/article.php?ID=51)

Maggie Dziubek, "War Baby/Love Child comes to DPAM." The DePaulia, April 28, 2013.
(http://www.depauliaonline.com/arts-life/war-baby-love-child-comes-to-dpam-1.3037229#.UX_dIoK5fcF)


Paul Niemi, 'War Baby/Love Child' Exploring the Mixed-Race Asian American Experience Opens at DePaul University Art Museum, Zimbio.com from Unclepauliesworld.blogspot.com, April 25, 2013. (http://www.zimbio.com/Art/articles/zO2r6pYLqwT/War+Baby+Love+Child+Exploring+Mixed+Race+Asian)

Monica Whitepigeon, "War Baby/Love Child" Debra Yepa-Pappan's Art Part of Exhibition Opening in Chicago, Native News Network, April 25, 2013. (http://www.nativenewsnetwork.com/war-baby-love-child-debra-yepa-pappans-art-part-of-exhibition-opening-in-chicago.html)

Zhiyu Wang, "Artists explore the image of mixed race Asian-Americans in DePaul exhibit," Medill Reports Chicago (Northwestern University), April 18, 2013. (http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=220315)

Under My Skin opens on May 9 @ the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle

Laura Kina "Gosei" oil on canvas, 30x45 in., 2012 on view in Under My Skin opening May 9, 2013.

I will have five new paintings in "Under My Skin: Artists Explore Race in the 21st Century" opening on May 9, 2013 at the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle, Washington.

Thursday, May 9th, public opening 7-8 pm
Wing Luke Museum
719 S. King St.
Seattle, Washington 98118

Check out my daughter Midori on the postcard! "Gosei" oil on canvas, 30x45 in., 2012.

Snapshots from opening night 4/25/13 of War Baby / Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art

On Thursday, April 25, 2013 War Baby / Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art opened at the DePaul University Art Museum. The exhibition will be on view through June 30, 2013. Below are some snapshots from friends and family from the opening reception. To see more photos and info, visit us on facebook or our project website www.warbabylovechild.com I'll post more pics soon. Thanks to all my friends, family, colleagues, and all of the artists who made this event so special.

On April 25, 2013, War Baby / Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art opened at the DePaul University Art Museum.

Opening reception April 25, 2013. Installation view second floor DePaul University Art Museum.

Screening Laural Nakadate’s video “Greater New York” (2005).

Artist Chris Naka talking about his video “The Tale of Selling the Tale” (2009). In the background, Mequitta Ahuja “Dream Region” (2009).

Installation view first floor gallery DePaul University Art Museum. In the background, Jenifer Wofford “MacArthur Nurses VI” (2013). Photo by Jordan Schulman.

Artists Debra Yepa-Pappan and Jane Jin Kaisen.

Artist Serene Ford talking about her series “I’m the Girl Who Survived the War: Photographs from Viet Nam” (1998-2003).

Artists, curators, and family at the DePaul University Art Museum April 25, 2013, opening reception for War Baby / Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art.

Opening Reception April 25th War Baby / Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art

Join me on 4/25 for the opening reception of War Baby / Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art at the DePaul Art Museum. We also have an exciting line up of events: 4/29 Jane Jin Kaisen discussion and film screening "The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger"; 5/15 Mequitta Ahuja artist talk; and join me on 5/29 for a mixed race panel discussion with scholar Camilla Fojas and artists Chris Naka and Debra Yepa-Pappan.

Laura Kina

 

WAR BABY / LOVE CHILD

MIXED RACE ASIAN AMERICAN ART

 

Opening Reception

Thursday, April 25, 6-8 p.m.

Member preview 5-6 p.m.

  

As an increasingly ethnically ambiguous Asian American generation is coming of age, War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art looks at how these identities are evolving. Working in traditional media as well as video, installation, and other approaches, artists explore a range of topics, including U.S. wars in Asia; multiculturalism and identity politics; racialization, gender and sexual identity; citizenship and nationality; and trans-racial adoption. The exhibition features works by emerging, mid-career and established artists who reflect a breadth of mixed heritage ethno-racial and geographic diversity: 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, and Debra Yepa-Pappan. War Baby / Love Child was curated by Laura Kina, Vincent DePaul Professor of Art, Media and Design, and Wei Ming Dariotis, associate professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University. A 304-page companion book has been published by the University of Washington Press and is available at the museum or from the publisher. More information, about the exhibition and related events, can be found at www.warbabylovechild.com and the DPAM website. Major funding for this exhibition was awarded through The National Endowment for the Arts. Art Works.