Support "Okinawan Princess: Da Legend of Hajichi Tattoos"

3Arts Foundation 3AP crowdfunding campaign for Laura Kina, Okinawan Princess: Da Legend of Hajichi Tattoos

Crowdfunding with a Match

3AP (3Arts Projects) is a unique crowdfunding platform with a built-in match that helps Chicago artists finance new creative work. 3Arts matches 1/3 of each project goal, charges no fees to artists, and offers mentoring and technical support.

• The campaign is running from March 23–May 7, 2018.
• Visit the 3AP site to learn more about my project and make a tax-deductible donation to support "Okinawan Princess."
  
  

https://3arts.org/projects/okinawan-princess/

STRETCH GOAL! I’m overwhelmed by the amazing response to this campaign! Thank you to everyone who helped me reach my initial goal in record time. This has opened up so many more possibilities for this book that I’m excited to announce that we’re going for a stretch goal of $10,000! With continued support, we will be able to expand the project to hopefully include things like a Spanish translation, an annotated glossary of the hajichi symbols and their meaning, an e-book and/or an audio book, and targeted outreach to Okinawan ethnic communities in the diaspora.

I am illustrating my first children’s book, Okinawan Princess: Da Legend of Hajichi Tattoos. This is a bilingual feminist fairy tale set in Hawai‘i and Okinawa that illuminates an ancient tradition and pushes back against white normative standards of beauty. Growing up mixed-race in the rural Pacific Northwest, I didn’t know much about my own Asian culture or our family history as Okinawan migrant sugarcane plantation workers on the Big Island. For the past decade, I have been making paintings inspired by my travels back to Hawai‘i and Okinawa, Japan to reconnect family roots that were severed during World War II. Over the years those roots continued to drift apart as we assimilated into our respective American and Japanese cultures. This book is part of that reclamation journey. Okinawan Princess is written in Pidgin (Hawai‘i Creole) by Lee A. Tonouchi (aka Da Pidgin Guerrilla) and translated by Dr. Masashi Sakihara into a mix of Japanese and an Okinawan language called Uchinaaguchi. The book will feature over 35 of my original watercolor illustrations. Your contributions to this campaign will help cover costs of production and printing and ultimately enable us to share this little-known indigenous custom with future generations.

Asian Arts Initiative’s 25th Anniversary Celebration

Asian Arts Initiative’s 25th Anniversary Celebration

https://www.asianarts25.org/25th-anniversary-season

“Then and Now”
May 4, 2018–August 17, 2018
Opening Reception: Friday, May 4, 2018 5pm
Featuring live interactions with artists Saya Woolfalk and Shelly Bahl

Asian Arts Initiative
1219 Vine St
Philadelphia, PA 19107

Curated by Alexandra Chang, Curator of Special Projects and Director of Global Arts Programs at Asian/Pacific/American (A/P/A) Institute at New York University.

I will have three works on display in the show.

Speaking at UCONN - Transpacific Imaginations & Unsettled Visions Contemplating and Celebrating Margo Machida

Lecture:

University of ConnecticutTranspacific Imaginations & Unsettled VisionsContemplating and Celebrating Margo Machida (Professor Emerita, AAASI)

April 13-14, 2018

This two-day symposium, which opens with an evening keynote address by Professor Lisa Yoneyama (University of Toronto), is inspired by Margo Machida’s foundational work within the fields of Asian American art, diasporic Asian visual culture, and transpacific studies. As the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute celebrates its 25th anniversary, this symposium considers, contemplates, and celebrates one of its own.

All talks will take place in the Humanities Institute Reading Room, located on the 4th Floor of Homer Babbidge Library.369 Fairfield Way, Unit 1005
Storrs, CT 06269

April 13, 2018 / 630 PMKeynoted Address: Lisa Yoneyama (University of Toronto)

April 14, 2018 10:30 AM – 4:30 PM (SYMPOSIUM)

1030 – 1130 AM

HAWAI’I, TRANS-PACIFIC LABOR FLOWS, AND HISTORIES OF PLACE
Franklin Odo, Amherst College 

1130 – 1230 PM         LUNCH 

1230 – 130 PMQUEERING CONTEMPORARY ASIAN AMERICAN ART:  The Optics of Queer Studies and Critical Mixed Race Studies
Laura Kina, DePaul University

130 – 145 PM COFFEE BREAK

 145 – 245 PMWAR, GENOCIDE AND JUSTICE: MEMORY WORK IN ASIAN AMERICAN ART
Cathy Schlund-Vials, UConn 

245 – 3 PM                 COFFEE BREAK

3 – 4 PM PACIFIC ITINERARIES: ISLANDS, OCEANIC IMAGINARIES, AND SITES OF CONVERGENCE IN CONTEMPORARY ASIAN AMERICAN ART
Margo Machida, UConn

4 – 430 PM                 FINAL THOUGHTS

Swarthmore College - Laura Kina artist talk and exhibition "Champuru"

Artist talk and solo exhibition “Laura Kina: Champuru”

Swarthmore CollegeFriday, April 13, 2018, 3 – 5PM
McCabe Library 100 Atrium
500 College Avenue
Swarthmore, PA 19081

https://swatcentral.swarthmore.edu/?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D282821344

This event is part of Compass: Navigating Multiness, an undergraduate three-day conference, to bring together people both personally and academically interested in the Multi experience.

The talk will take place in the McCabe atrium, followed by a reception in the 2nd floor exhibition space.

Poster design from Swarthmore College

2018 Association for Asian American Studies Conference

2018 Association for Asian American Studies Conference
March 29-31, 2018
Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, CA.
335 Powell Street, San Francisco, California 94102

Panel: Centering Legacies of Resistance: Asian American Visual Culture Strategies

Saturday, March 31, 2018 8:00am-9:30am in Bristol

Chair: Valerie Soe, San Francisco State University
Discussant: Tina Takamoto, California College of the Arts

Presenters:
Laura Kina, DePaul University
Collaborative Scholarship in Digital Humanities: Creating the Virtual Asian American Art Museum

Johanna Poethig, California State University, Monterey Bay

Legacies of Resistance and the Commodification of Art and Protest in Fossil Capitalism

Julie Thi Underhill, California College of the Arts
(Auto)biographical Persistence: Cham-American Filmmakers Defy the Rhetoric of Disappearance

Jenifer Wofford, University of San Francisco
Dearly Beloved/No Scrubs

Critical Mixed Race Studies 2018 at University of Maryland

2018 Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference
Resisting, Reclaiming, and ReimaginingUniversity of Maryland March 1-3, 2018
Adele H. Stamp Student Union 3972 Campus Drive, College Park, MD, 20742
#CMRS2018

This was the first CMRS I was able to attend just as a participant and not an organizer. Thank you to the new board and #CMRS2018 conference organizers Chandra Crudup and Naliyah Kaya for keeping CMRS alive and taking it into new directions. Despite the University of Maryland shutting down on 3/2 due to a wind storm, CMRS attendees and organizers found a way to hold panels at a nearby hotel on 3/2 and rearrange 2 days of programming on the fly. 

Chandra Crudup and Naliyah Kaya

CMRS 2018 organizer and CMRS VP Chandra Crudup with keynote speaker Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni.

On behalf of the Mavin Foundation, board member Kelly F. Jackson received the lifetime achievement award. Congratulations to the 2018 Paul Spickard Graduate Student Paper Awardee Haley Pilgrim.

Panel:  Canaries in the Race Mine: Global Mixed Race Cultural StudiesMarch 1, 2018 1:00-2:30pm in Banneker B

“Looking for Merle – Picturing US Globalization through Asian Female Stars”
LeiLani Nishime, University of Washington

“Resistance, Rage, and Resilience: QTPOC, disability, and mixed-race identity in the poetry of Kay Ulanday Barret”
Laura Kina, DePaul University

“As Above, So Between: Gazing at Miss Lala as a Mixed-Race Figure”
Elizabeth Fei, DePaul University

“Trevor Noah and Racial Liminality in Post-Apartheid South Africa”
Myra Washington, The University of New Mexico

CMRS "Canaries in the Race Mine" panelists:
Myra Washington, Elizabeth Fei, LeiLani Nishime, Laura Kina

College Art Association Conference Panel - The Virtual Asian American Art Museum

College Art Association Conference Panel
“The Virtual Asian American Art Museum: Postwar Japanese American Art in Chicago”
Wednesday, February 21, 2018, 2:00-3:30pm
Room 503, Los Angeles Convention Center

“Chicago: Someday, Somewhere – the Photography of James Numata and Yasuhiro Ishimoto”
Jasmine Alinder, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
John Tain, Asia Art Archive

“Ray Yoshida’s Museum of Extraordinary Values”
Karen Patterson, John Michael Kohler Arts Center

“Michiko Itatani: Painting the Cosmic Novel”
(Chair) Laura Kina, DePaul University

Abstract:
This panel focuses on the work and transnational lives of four Japanese American postwar artists—James Numata (1918–1997), Yasuhiro Ishimoto (1921–2012), Ray Yoshida (1930–2009), and Michiko Itatani (1948–)—featured in the “Chicago-Midwest” module of The Virtual Asian American Art Museum (VAAAM). VAAAM is a large-scale digital humanities project led by New York University Asian/Pacific/American Institute (A/P/A) and the New York University Division of Libraries in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution and the Getty Research Institute that features enhanced access to an array of art and tools for presenting new collaborative scholarship on Asian American art history.

The “Chicago-Midwest” module geospatially maps the careers of artists in Chicago against known social patterns and settlements in the city. The first portion of this scalable module is a series of submodules highlighting Japanese American artists whose biographies reflect immigration and migration paths of Japanese to Chicago including pre-WWII labor migration, post-WWII Japanese American internment camp resettlement, migration from Hawaii to Chicago, and post-1965 immigration from Japan. The role that institutions such as the Institute of Design and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago had in drawing artists from around the world is examined, as is the role of archives and collections, such as those of the Japanese American Service Committee and the Art Institute of Chicago, in recording and preserving their histories. These artists are historically and/or artistically significant, but have been underrepresented in the canon of art history and master narrative of the Japanese American experience.

UCSC group show and talk - Spoken/Unspoken: Forms of Resistance

Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery at University of California Santa Cruz presents:Spoken/Unspoken: Forms of ResistanceFebruary 8 – March 17, 2018

curated by Shelby Graham and UCSC students

Featuring work by Ruth-Marion Baruch, Laura Kina, Hung Liu, Yolanda Lopez, Yoko Ono, Jo Hanson, Irene Lusztig, with artifacts about Angela Davis and posters from the Guerrilla Girls and artists from Self-Help Graphics.

As part of Santa Cruz’s countywide SPOKEN/UNSPOKEN exhibition series, the Sesnon Art Gallery at the University of California, Santa Cruz highlights a collection of artists and activists engaged with forms of resistance. The term “resistance” can represent various profiles from opposition to struggle; it can also portray resilience, strength, courage, and standing up for basic rights. Many artists examine the strength behind resistance and challenge the status quo from politics to art making.

for more info:

Laura Kina UCSC artist talk – “Painting Okinawan Identity, Diaspora, and Resistance” Tuesday, February 20, 2018 1:30pm. Location details forthcoming.

Laura Kina, Orion, 2016

New book chapter and cover - Rethinking Postwar Okinawa: Beyond American Occupation

On the cover: Laura Kina “Flowers for your Heart” 2007.

Kina, Laura. “The Black Pacific through Okinawan Eyes: Photographer Mao Ishikawa’s “Hot Days in Camp Hansen!!” and “Life in Philly.” In Rethinking Postwar Okinawa: Beyond American Occupation, edited by Pedro Iacobelli and Hiroko Matsudo, 149–168. Lanham: MD, Lexington Books, 2017.

Video from Queering Contemporary Asian American Art book panel

Watch the video from our Oct 18, 2017 Queering Contemporary Asian American Art book panel at the A/P/A Institute at New York University featuring the editors Laura Kina and Jan Christian Bernabe and presentations by Greyson Hong (artist), Kyoo Lee (John Jay College), Zavé Martohardjono (artist), and Saya Woolfalk (artist):

American Studies Association Conference Panel - “Moving Bodies Towards Wonder: Asian American Aesthetics from Anger to Action”

American Studies Association
Sat, November 11, 12:00 to 1:45pm
Panel discussion: “Moving Bodies Towards Wonder: Asian American Aesthetics from Anger to Action”
Hyatt Regency Chicago, New Orleans, Ballroom Level West Tower

This event is for registered conference attendees only. For more information or to register for the conference, visit American Studies Association website.

Chair: Valerie Soe, San Francisco State University
Panelists: Mila Zua, Oregon State University
Laura Kina, DePaul University
Anita Chang, Independent Scholar
Valerie Soe, San Francisco State University

Abstract
The impulse to give in to despair, anxiety, pain, and anger hinders the ability of many of us to effectively respond to the increased inequities, challenges to civil liberties, and the illegal and unethical restrictions proposed by the current administration. Whereas such negative feelings can immobilize and stultify, wonder moves bodies towards action. As Sara Ahmed points out, “Wonder is what energizes the very hope of transformation, the very will to politics.” This roundtable looks at the ways in which Asian American aesthetics of dissent are involved in creative labors and affective productions which seek to un-learn and un-feel dominant epistemologies borne from hetero-patriarchal modernities, globalizing forces, and institutional aporia. How can we induce wonder and movement through a pedagogical engagement with visual culture? What can Asian American aesthetics of dissent in particular teach us about the wondrous affects and pleasures of transgression, undisciplinarity, and resistance? Bringing together activists, makers, curators, and educators, this roundtable explores the unmaking of the anger and pain through Asian American bildungsroman narratives, aesthetic genealogies, queer futurities, and critical cosmopolitanisms in film and visual arts. Mila Zuo examines the “cinematic aesthetics of wondrous pain” in her short experimental film, “Carnal Orient,” and the Asian American queer film, “Spa Night.” Jason Coe explores Ang Lee’s coming-of-age films in order to investigate other possibilities of global modernities through alternative masculine subject formations. Valerie Soe investigates how an instance of conflict at San Francisco State University’s College of Ethnic Studies reveals the need for a counternarrative to the fraught and dangerous times we are entering. Anita Chang looks at “critical cosmopolitanism” as a way of thinking through difference and interconnectedness in teaching transnational cinemas. Laura Kina’s discusses her work as a curator and editor to explore the importance of historicizing failure in engendering queer political and artistic dissent oriented toward the future. The goal of the roundtable is to discuss the critical relationships between everyday resistances, pedagogy, and visual arts. What new socialities and publics are forged through an aesthetic engagement with wonder? How can Asian American creative praxes of dissent help us imagine a more hopeful and inclusive future, even as Trump’s presidency threatens to hurtle us back to the the exclusionary racialized histories of the past? What tools can we as scholars, artists, and educators use to make the leap from anger to action?

NYU book panel - Oct 18, 2017

New York University
Wed, October 18, 2017 6:30-8:30pm
Queering Contemporary Asian American Art: Laura Kina, Jan Christian Bernabe, Greyson Hong, Kyoo Lee, Zavé Martohardjono, and Saya Woolfalk

New York University
19 University Place, Room 102
New York, NY 10003

This event is free and open to the public but please RSVP ahead of time HERE.

Saya Woolfalk, Chimera, 2013, from the Institute of Empathy projectDigital video and mixed media installation installed at MOCA Taipei, Taiwan
Courtesy of the artist and MOCA Taipei

Presented by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU. Cosponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.

Queering Contemporary Asian American Art (University of Washington Press, 2017), edited by Laura Kina (DePaul University) and Jan Christian Bernabe (Center of Art and Thought), brings together artists and scholars to challenge normative assumptions, essentialism, and methodologies within the study of Asian American art and visual culture. The featured essays, artist interviews, and artworks explore the multiple axes of race and identity, queer bodies and forms, kinship and affect, and digital identities and performances.

Kina and Bernabe met at the A/P/A Institute at NYU’s 2012 NEH Summer Institute, “Re-envisioning American Art History: Asian American Art, Research, and Teaching,” which was the genesis for their new book. We are excited to welcome them back to A/P/A alongside contributors Greyson Hong (artist), Kyoo Lee (John Jay College), Zavé Martohardjono (artist), and Saya Woolfalk (artist) to discuss and celebrate the publication.