ABOUT THIS EVENT
Join established artist, organizer Nancy Hom and emerging artists, Menaja Ganesh and Greer Nakadegawa-Lee, for a conversation moderated by Laura Fantone, author of Local Invisibility, Postcolonial Feminisms. This intergenerational panel will explore the experiences of Asian American women artists and highlight the impactful contributions they are making in contemporary art, culture, feminism and society at large.
WHERE
Online via Zoom
WHEN
REGISTRATION
FREE
Accepting $20 Donations to Support the Artists
March 20, 2021 @ 2PM PST
THE ARTISTS
nANCY hOM
Nancy Hom is an award-winning artist, writer, curator, and arts consultant. Born in Toisan, China and raised in New York City, she has been an influential leader in the SF Bay Area art scene since 1974. Over the years, she has created many iconic images for community cultural events as well as political and social causes. Through her posters, poetry, illustrations, installations, large-scale mandalas, and curatorial work, Nancy has used the arts to affirm the histories, struggles, and contributions of communities of color. In addition to pushing artistic boundaries, she has also nurtured the creative and organizational growth of over a dozen Bay Area arts organizations, including Asian American Women Artists Association. In her long involvement with Kearny Street Workshop, an Asian American arts organization, Nancy served as its Executive Director from 1995 to 2003.
mENAJA gANESH
Menaja Ganesh’s work explores language, identity, ritual, and belonging through the macro and microcosmic socio-political lens of India. Rooted in a practice of ceremony, Menaja critiques hegemonic structures and institutions, and on a more personal level, their relationship to their skin and multiple homelands, through the telling of histories inherited from their family. Menaja combines the curatorial practice of bookmaking, with printmaking, photography, and writing.
Menaja is also an exhibiting artist in POPADUM! (as part of the Emerging Curators Program)
gREER NAKADEGAWA-LEE
Greer Nakadegawa-Lee is 16 years old and a junior at Oakland Technical High School. She has written a poem every day for over two years now, and she is the 2020 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate. Her first chapbook , "A Heart Full of Hallways" is out now with Nomadic Press. Greer writes poetry that is both a demand for us to all critically examine the world around us and an intimate personal exploration of her own deepest thoughts and experiences.
Greer is also a participating artist in Political Inheritance (as part of the Emerging Curators Program).
THE AUTHOR & PANEL MODERATOR
ABOUT THE BOOK
Laura Fantone is an Italian political and social scientist. She holds an M.A. in Gender and Women' s Studies and a Ph.D. in Social Research. Her research and activism revolve around immigration, forced migration and refugees and urban issues, gender equality, technology, and diversity. She teaches at the University of California Berkeley. Her recent publications include Local Invisibilities, a book on Asian American feminist artists in California,(Palgrave, 2018) Queer and PostColonial feminisms, with Paola Bacchetta (2016) two documentaries on globalization and anti-fascism. Re-sisters and R/Esistenze, both available online.
Local Invisibility, Postcolonial Feminisms offers gendered, postcolonial insights into the poetic and artistic work of four generations of female Asian American artists in the San Francisco Bay Area. Nancy Hom, Betty Kano, Flo Oy Wong, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Theresa H.K. Cha, and Hung Liu are discussed in relation to the cultural politics of their time, and their art is examined in light of the question of what it means to be an Asian American artist. Laura Fantone’s exploration of this dynamic, understudied artistic community begets a sensitive and timely reflection on the state of Asian American women in the USA and in Californian cultural institutions. The book also features a chapter on the Asian American Women Artists Association, entitled, “AAWAA: Visibility, Pan-Asian Identity and the Limits of Community.”
