Tomie arai biography of william hill
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Photography & Intermedia
Portrait/Young Woman
Lithograph, 22 x 30″, printed at Brandywine Workshop, PA, 1999
Tomie Arai is public artist who lives and works in NYC. She has designed both temporary and permanent public works of art for Creative Time, the US General Services Administration Art in Architecture Program, the NYC PerCent for Art Program, the Cambridge Arts Council, the MTA Arts for Transit Program, the New York City Board of Education and the San Francisco Arts Commission.
Tomie’s work has been exhibited nationally and is in the collections of the Library of Congress, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Japanese American National Museum, the Williams College Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has been a recipient of two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in Printmaking for 1991 and 1994; a 1995 Joan Mitchell Visual Arts Grant, a 1994 National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship for Works
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PROGRAM
The mass incarceration of nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II is a powerful but often occluded illustration of the fragility of US citizenship and civil liberties. As such, this event demands frequent reexamination in relation to ongoing conversations regarding post-9/11 special registration, detention, and deportation, as well as long-standing formal and informal practices of profiling and surveillance of communities of color. This daylong conference presented a three-part program examining: 1) the history of the Japanese American incarceration and how it is made meaningful to multiple publics in different locations – higher education, museums, and our national landmarks; 2) artists who deploy this history as relevant to their artistic and political practices in the present; 3) the legal significance of the incarceration to contemporary local and national state policies directed against communities of color.
Conference Program
1. 9:00AM – 10:0
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A few years ago, my mother, my sister, and I went to Hong Kong in search of our ancestral roots and routes. We were looking for the home of my mother’s deceased father. Born in Jamaica in the late 1920s to a Chinese father and Afro-Jamaican mother, he was taken to live with his stepmother in Hong Kong at the age of seven.[1] In search of traces of his life in Hong Kong’s New Territories, on our first visit to Asia all we had was the name of his village and old family photographs collected over the years. With the help of a new friend who was able to interpret and introduce us to the by chief, we were led to the house where my grandfather grew up. Tang-kwong, a man we later discovered was my mother’s half-cousin, greeted us at the door.[2] We were surprised that he was unsurprised to see his black relatives. Whether he knew it fully or not, he had a black Jamaican grandmother too. It was as if he had been expecting us. We had fancifully dreamed of but had not known if there were