A4 Celebrates 40 Years!

See what’s happening for A4’s 40th anniversary! Join us in celebrating four decades of supporting Asian Americans across all artistic disciplines.

The Gala

The Silent Auction

HONOREES

PRESENTERS

PERFORMERS

ARTISTS

HOST COMMITTEE

Join us for our 40th Anniversary Gala: Reflecting Forward!

Thursday October 12, 2023
6-9pm
Manny Cantor Center
197 E Broadway
New York, NY 10002

You’re invited for an evening of artistic dedications and special performances, a cocktail reception, and dinner. Funds raised from this event will directly support the work of hundreds of AAPI artists and arts groups, as well as help A4 provide services throughout the year and beyond.

Bid in our 40th Anniversary Silent Auction

Click the link below to bid on visual art, once-in-a-lifetime experiences, and more from generous members of our community. You can be the lucky winner of a private knitting lesson by BD Wong or tickets to “Little Shop of Horrors” off Broadway starring Constance Wu. All proceeds will be split equally between the participating artists and A4’s 40th Anniversary Fund.

The online-only auction opens on October 2, 2023 at 10:00am ET and close on October 16, 2023 at 6:00pm ET.

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Bid

HONOREES

Joanne Kwong

Pearl River Mart

Joanne Kwong is the president of Pearl River Mart, the iconic NYC Asian emporium established in 1971. Today, under Joanne’s leadership, Pearl River is beloved by generations of New Yorkers and visitors alike, serving as a dynamic hub for the AAPI community and a springboard for emerging entrepreneurs and artists. Pearl River Mart’s community-based approach has been recognized by The Wall Street Journal as “the future of retail,” and by New York Magazine as one of its “Reasons to Love NY.”

Joanne is a product of the NYC public schools and holds degrees from Columbia and Duke. Joanne serves on the boards of multiple organizations and was recently appointed to the U.S. Congressional Commission To Study the Potential Creation of a National Museum of Asian Pacific American History and Culture. In 2021, she was honored as one of Gold House’s A100 “Most Impactful Asians and Pacific Islanders” and Time Out NY’s “9 Amazing Women Who Changed New York for the Better.”

Joanne is a proud resident of the Upper West Side, where she lives with her husband and two sons.

DJ Rekha

Basement Bhangra

DJ Rekha (born Rekha Malhotra) is a producer, curator, and educator, and founder of Basement Bhangra, one of NYC’s longest-running club nights (1997-2017). They perform in festivals, clubs, and community spaces worldwide and alongside artists such as M.I.A, Ali Sethi and AR Rahman. Their dynamic DJ sets incorporate South Asian Diasporic dance music with ears to a global sound that build inclusive environments of joy. They have been featured on Broadway, NPR, Taste the Nation, Obama’s White House, Celebrate Brooklyn, and Central Park SummerStage. They live in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York.

Kate Siahaan-Rigg

Artist Activist

Artist Activist Kate Siahaan-Rigg is a New York based Asian American actor, comedian, producer, and writer. She creates work for television, film, stage, and underground dive bars. Her award-winning shows about race and representASIAN have been to countless festivals and theaters including the Smithsonian Institute, The Comedy Central Theater, and the Edinburgh International Fringe. Her first touring show, Kate’s Chink-O-Rama featuring the Chinkorama dancers, broke ground in the discussion of representAsian, stereotypes, racial bias, and the erasure of AAPI communities. She has served as Creator and Executive Producer on 3 network TV shows and one pilot.

As a hostess and producer for many benefits and activist events she has worked with NY Heritage of Pride, CAPA, Time’s Up, The SAG Foundation, The Dolores Huerta Foundation the NYCLU, and A4. Kate has toured with her rock/ comedy/rap duo Slanty Eyed Mama all over the world. In response to the rise of violence against Asian Americans, she co-hosts and curates “DisOrientalism” quarterly at The Public Theater to uplift, amplify, and connect Asian American Artists. Kate is the Creative Director of the Over The Rhine International Film Festival, the nation’s premiere diversity film festival hosted by the disability community. She is also the professor emeritus of the first ever LGBTQ+ stand up comedy class at the Manhattan Comedy School and has begun teaching arts and activism at educational institutions around the country. www.katerigg.com

PRESENTERS

Arlan Huang

Presenter, Joanne Kwong

Arlan Huang is an artist based in New York. His work is characterized by its play with translucency and opacity, darting between a wide variety of mediums including acrylic paint, glass, and multimedia installations. His abstractions are informed by the conflation of recent and collective memory, as well as everyday life; for example, his freehanded paintings reference his mother’s cheongsams and grapes harvested at only certain times a year in Japan. Taken together, his work probes the possibility of Asian Americanness, or the feeling of belonging amidst feelings of placelessness. As an active member of Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network, Huang has been a key player in broadening opportunities for Asian Americans in the Arts and Asian American activism more broadly.

His most recent exhibit, Just Between Us, was in partnership with Pearl River Mart and Think!Chinatown, along with Corridor Glance, in partnership with Pearl River Mart, the Asian American Arts Alliance, and Chelsea Market.

Bushra Rehman

Presenter, DJ Rekha

Rehman’s dark comedy, Corona, was chosen by the NY Public Library as one of its favorite books about NYC. She’s co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism and author of the collection of poetry Marianna’s Beauty Salon. Her newest novel, Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion, is a modern classic about what it means to be Muslim and queer in a Pakistani-American community was noted as a Best Book and Editor’s Choice by The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, People Magazine, Good Morning America, Ms. Magazine and more.

Nicky Paraiso

Presenter, Kate Siahaan-Rigg

Nicky Paraiso is an actor, curator, singer, musician, writer, solo performance artist. He has been a fixture of the NY downtown performance scene for the last four decades. He is Director of Programming for The Club at La MaMa, and Curator for the annual La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival, having just completed its 18th season April 6-30, 2023. He has worked as a performer with vanguard artists Jeff Weiss & Richard C. Martinez, Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble, Yoshiko Chuma & The School of Hard Knocks, Anne Bogart, Laurie Carlos, Jessica Hagedorn, Robbie McCauley, among many others. Nicky is the recipient of a 1987 Bessie Award for Performance, a 2012 BAX (in Brooklyn) Arts & Artists in Progress Arts Management Award, a Movement Research Gala honoree in 2016, a 2018-2019 TCG (Theatre Communications Group) Fox Fellowship for Distinguished Achievement as a Resident Actor/Round 12, and the 2019 (NY Innovative Theatre) Ellen Stewart Award for Stewardship. Nicky’s most recent full-length performance, now my hand is ready for my heart: intimate histories, directed/designed by John Jesurun, was presented at Ellen Stewart Theatre in 2019.

Mia Yoo

Presenter, Kate Siahaan-Rigg

Mia Yoo was mentored by Ellen Stewart under the auspices of the New Generations Future Leaders Program, cooperatively designed by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Theatre Communications Group. Since 2009, she has been Artistic Director of La MaMa working alongside Ellen as Co-Artistic Directors until Ellen passed away in 2011. As a member of La MaMa’s repertory company, Great Jones Rep, Mia has performed and created/directed productions touring internationally with her colleagues since 1995. With La MaMa’s team, Mia has helped to develop La MaMa programming initiatives including the La MaMa Kids youth and family workshops, the Indigenous Collective, Squirts: New Voices in Queer Performance, CultureHub/Co-Labs, La MaMa Moves dance festival, La MaMa Umbria, and La MaMa Meet-Ups a bi-annual open sign up for artists to meet with La MaMa’s curators. These programs strive to support La MaMa’s vision to make space for art that transcends politics, promotes unity, and amplifies the human spirit.

PERFORMERS

Rob Chen

Emcee

Rob Chen is an NYC based actor and storyteller who has made appearances on shows like Law & Order: SVU, The Sinner, and Billions. He also wrote and self-produced the solo show, The Blu Room, to celebrate and empower AAPI identity. When he isn’t acting, Rob writes hip-hop, R&B, and pop music under the alias Blu Hyku. He enjoys eating dimsum with his friends and dancing bachata. You can follow him on TikTok and IG @robchenhere

Jainil Mehta

Performer

Originally from Mumbai, India, Jainil Mehta is a 24-year-old dancer, choreographer, and is currently freelance teaching, creating and performing across the United States, predominantly New York City. He is a former company dancer with Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company. He has choreographed and designed four dance productions: Ctrl Alt Delete in 2023, DECODED in 2018, Alankar in 2017, and Chimera in 2015. Before moving to Los Angeles for college, he trained at Shiamak Davar International in Mumbai, India, for 13 years. Jainil graduated Summa Cum Laude and received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance from the USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance with a Discovery Scholars Distinction.

Jainil has a current following of more than 300k on Instagram, trending on #Meninskirts
which breaks the barriers of gender categorizations. He has choreographed for Big
Wild’s music video “6’s to 9’s” and Falguni Pathak’s “Jode Rahejo Raaj.” While also
being a social media influencer, he has taught many dance classes online and in person
across India as well as Pakistan, China, Singapore, United Kingdom, Europe, Australia,
and the United States to over 10000+ students.

Helen Park

Performer

Helen Park is a Tony award and three-time Drama Desk nominee and recipient of the Lucille Lortel Award and the Richard Rodgers Award. Park wrote songs for Over the Moon, a Netflix Animated Feature musical film, which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Other notable work includes KPOP, the Broadway musical for which she wrote Music and Lyrics, Music produced and Orchestrated and was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Score. Park is the first and only female composer of Asian descent to be produced on Broadway. Park is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild.

OHYUNG

OHYUNG is an Asian American musician and film composer. Their most recent record imagine naked! was one of NPR’s top 50 records of 2022 and described by Popmatters as “one of the most thoughtful, cathartic ambient records of the recent era.“ They scored the upcoming A24 film Problemista as well as Bruiser on Hulu.

ARTISTS

Miya Ando

Artist of Honoree Awards

Miya Ando is a Japanese American artist based in New York. Her art is rooted in the dialectic coexistence of Eastern and Western cultures through the lens of natural phenomena. Her work is part of many public collections such as: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, NY; amongst others, as well as in numerous private collections. Solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at the Bolinas Museum, Bolinas, CA; the Asia Society Museum, Houston, TX; the Noguchi Museum, New York, NY, to name a few. Her work has been included in recent group exhibitions at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, LA; amongst others. Ando has been the recipient of several grants and awards including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant Award, and has produced several public commissions, most notably a thirty-foot-tall sculpture built from World Trade Center steel for Olympic Park in London to mark the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, for which she was nominated for a DARC Award in Best Light Art Installation. Most recently, Ando received the 2023 Brookfield Place New York Annual Arts Commission. The artist holds a BA in East Asian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, studied East Asian Studies at Yale University, and apprenticed with a Master Metalsmith in Japan.

Rujuta Rao

Artist of Coasters, created specifically for the Gala Evening

Born in Goa, India in 1989, Rujuta Rao completed her MFA in interdisciplinary art from Parsons School of Design, New York, and her BFA in sculpture from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, India. Rao’s work spans sculpture, installation, performance, video, and sound art, alongside a parallel practice of conceptual and functional garments, which has grown into the company RUGA. Her practice is at once research-led and intensely personal, including themes and topics that she returns to cyclically. Rao’s research of alcoholic beverages has led to her becoming a certified sake adviser. Rao lives and works in Jersey City, NJ. rujutarao.com / @rujutarao

HOST COMMITTEE

Tariq Ahmad
Theodore & Asya Berger
Elena Chang
Xhingyu Chen
Rockwell “Rocky” Chin
Claire Chung
JiaJia Fei
Amy Hau
Steven Hsiao
Reena Jana
Leslie Kuo
Risha Lee
Ronald Lee

Joanna Lee & Ken Smith
Kelin Li
Alan Lo
Andrea Louie
Lily J. Lu
Elliot Lum
Michelle Pham
Ravi Rajan
Athena Robles
Tiffany Tay
Angela Wei
Perry Yung

Our Vision for 40 and Beyond

A thriving society in which art and culture are highly valued and the AAPI community is an integral part of the cultural fabric
A shared understanding of and appreciation for our rich past rooted in open dialogue
Bridges built between communities that ensure visibility, understanding, and opportunities for all
Robust economic support that is backed by resources, funding, promotion, and feedback loops
Ongoing mentorship programs that engage artists and ensure dialogue among artists across disciplines, generations, and stages of their career
Established AAPI leadership in previously white-dominant institutions that ensure authentic representations of our multi-faceted, multi-cultural and diasporic communities

Donate to the 40th Anniversary Fund!

If you can’t attend the gala but would still like to contribute to Asian American futures, make a donation to our 40th anniversary fund! All donations will receive an appreciation letter that states the tax deductible amount.

Special thanks to donors who have contributed already:

Rocky Chin & May Ying Chen
Alan & Merle Okada

Donate Now

FAQs

Accessibility
Accessibility features of the space are forthcoming.

If you require any accommodations including ASL interpretation, CART captioning, language translation, or large print, please email events@aaartsalliance.org at least one week before the event. We will do our best to accommodate.

Dress Code
Creative cocktail attire!

Any other questions?
Please email events@aaartsalliance.org.