July Town Hall: Tracing Histories

Asian American Arts Alliance (A4) in collaboration with Asia Art Archive in America (AAAinA) welcome you to attend and participate in July’s Town Hall, focusing on tracing histories.

Understanding our histories is essential work as artists and cultural producers. The AAPI community has long been interrogating and challenging their personal, familial, and cultural lineages through art and/or as part of their practice. A4 is proud to partner with AAAinA, an organization committed to collecting, preserving, and making accessible information on contemporary art from and of Asia, to bring you this special Town Hall.

Learn about the diverse and exciting creative arts projects and opportunities coming out of the Asian American arts community at Town Hall’s rapid-fire line-up of pitches, and meet our featured presenters Tommy Kha and Ambika Trasi!

After the presentations, we’ll host a potluck, so please bring something to share; homemade or store-bought goods are welcome. Tell us what you’re bringing when you RSVP. A4 and AAAinA will provide drinks. Please note: The event will be recorded and some excerpts may be used in a film A4 is developing for our 40th anniversary.

Thank you to AAAinA for their collaboration and donation of their space! More about their organization below.

This event is FREE and open to the public. RSVP is required to pitch and/or attend, but note that you do not have to pitch to attend.

Accessibility: The building is completely ADA accessible. If you need ASL interpretation, large print, or any other accommodations for this event, please email jlee@aaartsalliance.org at least one week before this event.

To keep everyone safe and healthy, if you are not feeling well or have been exposed to COVID-19, please stay home. We will provide masks.

Interested in pitching? Please carefully read about the pitch process below.

About the Pitch Process
A4 Town Halls are a forum to share an upcoming project or exhibition, promote an event or opportunity, find collaborators and venues, or simply introduce yourself to the community. There are two ways to pitch at an A4 Town Hall: a two-minute pitch which requires pre-registering, and a 30-second pitch which you can sign up for at the event.

2-min pitch
Sign up ahead of time for a 2-minute pitch by completing the following steps:
1. Register for a “RSVP + Pitch” ticket via Eventbrite, and
2. Complete this pitch form with details about your pitch at least 3 days before the event.

If you do not complete the form by the deadline, you risk not being included in the line-up.

In your pitch form, please include any images, video, or slides you would like presented during your pitch. We encourage you to share your website and social handles so that we can promote on the event page and in the slides (which we share with all attendees after the event). Slides/images will be presented in the order in which they are uploaded. If you would like to ensure your slides/images appear in the correct order, please number them.

A4 Staff will be compiling and driving the master slideshow. Presenters will not be able to use their devices to present.

IMPORTANT NOTE: In the past, each presenter was allotted 1 minute to give a pitch. We have increased the allotted time to 2 minutes in response to audience feedback. To stay on time, we plan to cap 2-minute pitches to 14 total presenters on a ‘first come, first serve’ basis which we will manage through Eventbrite. If we reach capacity, and you would like to be put on the waitlist, please email jlee@aaartsalliance.org.

30-sec pitch
After the featured presentations and 2-minute pitches, we invite anyone from the audience to provide a 30-sec pitch. This requires signing up at the event via an online form we provide.

Community Safety Statement
We aim to create environments in person and online that are welcoming, inclusive, and safe – physically and emotionally – for our community members. If we observe actions or behaviors that can be interpreted as harmful or threatening, A4 retains the right to use our discretion and remove the offending party. For our community’s safety, we further reserve the right to suspend an offending party’s attendance at A4 events both in-person and virtual in perpetuity and removal from our online offerings (e.g. newsletter). When you register for an A4 event, you will be asked to agree to this community statement. If you have any questions about this, please email a4@aaartsalliance.org.

About A4’s Town Hall
Town Hall is A4’s bi-monthly community gathering event that features presentations, pitches, and power networking! We welcome artists of all disciplines, as well as arts organizations, to pitch upcoming projects, find collaborators, or discover new opportunities in a lively space.

About Asia Art Archive in America
Asia Art Archive in America (AAAinA), founded in 2009, is an independently established and operated U.S. 501©(3) organization and the first overseas hub of Asia Art Archive (AAA) in Hong Kong.

AAA’s mission is to act as a catalyst for new ideas that enrich our understanding of the world through the collection, creation, and sharing of knowledge around recent art in and of Asia. By collecting, preserving, and making accessible information on contemporary art from and of Asia, AAAinA facilitates public understanding and specialized research, instigates dialogue and critical thinking, and seeks to raise awareness of and support for the activities of Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong.

To achieve this goal, AAAinA maintains a reading room in Brooklyn Heights which is open to the public free of charge and comprises over 5,000 monographs, exhibition catalogs, reference books, periodicals, and audio-visual materials. AAAinA also organizes a regular program of talks, screenings, workshops, participatory projects, and panels with artists, curators, critics, and scholars in the field.

About Tommy Kha
Tommy Kha (b. Memphis, Tennessee) received his Photography MFA from Yale University. He is the recipient of the CPW Vision Award, Next Step Award, Foam Talent, Creator Labs Photo’ Fund, NYSCA/NYFA Photography Fellow, and a former resident at Light Work, the Camera Club of New York, Silver Arts, and the International Studios and Curatorial Program. He was one of 47 artists in the inaugural Silver List.

His work has been published in The New York Times, New Yorker, Foam, Dazed, Interview, McSweeney’s, Harper’s Magazine, Pitchfork, ArtForum, Hyperallergic, Butt Magazine, Miranda July’s “We Think Alone,” and Vice.

He’s been included in museum group shows at Ogden Museum of Southern Art (New Orleans), the High Museum (Atlanta), Leslie-Lohman Museum (NYC), and mostly recently, participating in the inaugural Tennessee Triennial at the Brooks Museum (Memphis). He has had solo shows at Higher Pictures Generation (NYC), Baxter St. at the Camera Club of New York (NYC), and Blue Sky Gallery (Portland), and presented, through Vasli Souza Gallery, at Paris Photo’s Curiosa section curated by Holly Roussell, as well as participating in the Hyères Festival and Unseen Festival. Other exhibitions include Billboard Creative (Los Angeles), Nathalie Karg Gallery (NYC), Launch F18 (NYC), Teen Party (NYC), and Yongkang Lu Art (Shanghai). He lives and works between New York City and Memphis.

About Ambika Trasi
Ambika Trasi is an artist, curator, and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. Her interdisciplinary research-based practice considers the coloniality of power within images and sites. She is interested in the roles that memory, language, and technology play in identity-making, community-building, and unlearning.

Trasi has exhibited recently at Asian Arts Initiative, Philadelphia and Heroes Gallery, New York; she has presented lecture-performances at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, and HANGAR - Centro de Investigação Artística, Lisbon. Her curatorial projects include Salman Toor: How Will I Know, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; A Space for Monsters, featuring works by Maryam Hoseini, Kaveri Raina, and Anjuli Rathod at Twelve Gates Arts, Philadelphia; and Maya Varadaraj’s second solo exhibition in New York, No Feeling is Final, opening on August 3, 2023 at Aicon Contemporary. Trasi’s writing has been published by the Whitney Museum of American Art; IBRAAZ Journal for Contemporary Visual Culture in North Africa and the Middle East; and Arcade Project Zine. She holds a B.F.A. from New York University with a
minor in South Asian studies.

Two-minute pitches:

Hannah Miao
Chinatown Photo Album
IG: @chinatownphotoalbum

Laura Lizcano
Lower Manhattan Cultural Council
Website: www.lmcc.net
IG: @lmcc_nyc

Sammy Yuen
Sharing Lines
Website: www.sammyyuen.com
IG: @sammynycart

Andy Lee
Asian American Film Lab, Inc.
Website: www.film-lab.org
IG: @AsAmFilmLab

Kathy Liu
Asian Cultural Council
Website: www.asianculturalcouncil.org
IG: @asianculturalcouncil

Tang Tian
Website: www.tianvideo.com
IG: @tian_tang_

Dongshin Chang
Website: www.kunqusociety.org

Lily Huang-Voronina
Mother Tongue Media
IG: @mothertonguemedia

Shirley Chen
Chinatown, My Chinatown
IG: @surelyimshirley

Jiaying Zhang
Website: www.jiayingzhang.com
IG: @ericaaaaa33

Eriko Tsogo
Mongolian Cultural and Heritage Center of Colorado
Website: www.erikotsogo.com
IG: @erikotsogo

30-sec pitches:

Ariel Urim Chung
The Kitchen Project
Website: www.kitchen.arielurimchung.com
IG: @a_real_a_riel

Rishabh Aggarwal
IG: @workinprogressnyc

Shannon Yu
Website: www.shannonyu.smugmug.com
IG: @hsiangru.yu

###