Hawai‘i is not the United States, but it is your Future

A solo exhibition by Sean Connelly (2025 Artist-in-Residence, A/P/A Institute at NYU), “Hawai‘i is not the United States, but it is your Future” invites viewers to consider the built environment as oceanic, an interconnected system requiring collective cultural efforts to sustain.

The exhibition will be on view October 30-December 12, 2025, Tuesday-Friday, 12:00-6:00 p.m. Please see our website to plan your visit.

Fifteen years ago, Hawaiʻi Futures (2010) proposed a different ground for living in place: an ocean-earth-island-cosmos scale framework of recovering ahupuaʻa, a unit of land in the original system for organizing realities encompassing water, soil, wind, and people as an interconnected and attuned networks for creating and regenerating sustenance. That early project by the artist, embedded and inspired within a community of Native resurgence in the decades long recovery of Hawai‘i, set a course of advocacy and implementation the artist has followed with concepts and actions across media and terrain: earthen monoliths and thatched, lashed assemblies; videographic studies of navigation and electromagnetic waveforms; community-led efforts to restore ʻāina (that which feeds) across the Pae ʻĀina Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian Islands). The artist’s practice is both speculative and applied, equally at home in the gallery and in the field, mapping the metrics of ecological repair while modeling forms for a culture of reciprocity.

Hawai‘i is not the United States, but it is your Future marks Sean Connelly’s / After Oceanic’s first solo presentation in New York City. It follows a presentation of ongoing and collaborative projects which have been exhibited at ii Gallery and Honolulu Museum of Art (Oahu, Hawai‘i) and most recently at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (Manhattan, New York). Here, Connelly, who describes their relationship with New York as “a complicated long distance” over the past eighteen years, invites people living in cities to consider daily life from an oceanic vantage: a living archipelago; interdependent, navigated, and sustained by collaborative care.

Accessibility note: The gallery is on first floor and is accessible to the public. All gender restrooms are available. For accessibility needs, please email apa.rsvp@nyu.edu.

Group and class visits: Please email apa.rsvp@nyu.edu to schedule a group or class visit with a list of preferred dates and times, and the size of your group.