Table Dish: Public Art

Join Asian American Arts Alliance (A4) for the latest workshop of our professional development series, Table Dish, to help further the careers of AAPIs in public art.

Table Dish: Public Art is a roundtable event where professionals in the field meet with emerging and mid-career professionals to “dish” career advice and lead candid discussions about tips to succeed in the industry.

The career roundtable aims to provide facilitators and participants the opportunity to network and build relationships with peers and mentors, offer a genuine way for AAPI community members to give back, engage arts leaders and professionals in a meaningful way, and help build a pipeline of AAPI arts leaders, role models, and experts.

Table Dish: Public Art will be composed of three 30-minute networking sessions. Individual participants rotate every 30 minutes to meet with a total of three different leaders. Participants will indicate their preferences for leaders when they register. We will try our best to match you with at least one of your top choices. After the breakout sessions, we’ll come together to share tips and follow up on unanswered questions.

PARTICIPATING LEADERS:

• Sook Jin Jo, Multidisciplinary Artist
• Ross Keong, Founder & Director, Shongololo
• Hussain Khanbhai, Project Manager, The Public Art Fund
• Lisa Kim, Director, Ford Foundation Gallery and former Director of the New York City Percent for Art Program
• Hansi Liao, Director, Pace Gallery
• Richard Joon Yoo, Artist, Writer, and Architectural Designer

Read bios of participating leaders below.

There is a $15 nonrefundable fee to register and hold your spot. If the fee presents an obstacle to your participation or if you have any accessibility needs including ASL interpretation, language translation, or large print, please email: jlee@aaartsalliance.org at least one week before the event. We will try our best to make accommodations.

Registration is capped at 30 attendees.

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS NOT A PORTFOLIO REVIEW SESSION.

BIOS:

About Sook Jin Jo
Korean-born, New York-based artist Sook Jin Jo is a multidisciplinary artist. Over the past 35 years, Sook Jin Jo has produced drawings, collages, photographs, sculptural assemblages, performances, installations, public works, and architectural design works. She often chooses marginalized sites for her outdoor installations and public artworks. Most of them are site-specific and collaborative, working with professionals and local people from diverse communities in many countries, including Sweden, India, Poland, Switzerland, Korea, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Brazil, and the United States.

Jo has exhibited internationally and has been the subject of 38 solo exhibitions in the United States, Europe and Asia. Jo’s works can be seen in numerous public collections, including the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Korea; the Seoul Museum of Art in Korea; Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Ansan, Korea; the Erie Museum of
Art in Pennsylvania; the Huntington Museum of Art in West Virginia; the Housatonic Museum of Art in Connecticut; the LA Metro Detention Center in Los Angeles; and the Margulies Collection at the Warehouse in Miami. She also designed and built three Art House Chapels; in Tipitapa, Nicaragua (2018); in San Andres Itzapa, Guatemala (2021); and in Quezaltepeque, El Salvador (2023).

About Ross Keong

Ross Keong is Founder and Director of Shongololo, a NYC-based sourcing and fabrication consultancy for fine artists, designers, and creative agencies. Keong founded Shongololo in 2019 to demystify the production process for creators and open access to manufacturing capabilities generally out of reach from most artists. He connects top-tier artists with the right collaborators, technologies, and fabricators to execute complex physical and digital projects. During his time at Shapeways and Hubs (industry leaders in digital fabrication), Keong previously consulted Fortune 100 CPG companies, fashion houses, and engineering firms in selecting and implementing emerging manufacturing technologies and materials. Past clients include Joe Doucet, Google, Disney, P&G, Madison Square Garden, Ogilvy & Mather, Calvin Klein, Architecture Van Brandenburg, and Nikhef (Dutch National Institute for Subatomic Physics). Shongololo currently focuses on sculptural fine arts projects, with recent collaborators including Frank Stella, Shahzia Sikander, Carla Gannis, and Yuge Zhou.

Keong is also the Founder and Creative Director of FATES new york, a gender-free jewelry studio, exploring the intersections of person, body, and culture. He currently serves as a Mentor at The New Museum’s NEW INC, the world’s first museum-led incubator for art, technology, and design.

About Hussain Khanbhai

Hussain Khanbhai is a project manager at Public Art Fund in New York, where he works with artists, galleries and fabricators to help realize creative visions. Prior to joining Public Art Fund in 2021, Hussain managed Tschabalala Self Studio where he administrated the artist’s participation in multiple public art projects. Engaging with artists in an organizational capacity has been a continuing passion for Hussain. As Associate Director of Aicon Art, from 2017 to 2021, he helped drive and shape the gallery’s mission of fostering and showcasing non-Western art practices in New York. In his tenure, he organized notable exhibitions by Rasheed Araeen, Rina Banerjee, Mequitta Ahuja and Salman Toor.

Hussain holds a Bachelor of Commerce in Accounting and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Indian Aesthetics and Art History from Mumbai University. He moved to New York to earn a Master of Arts in Art Business from Sotheby’s Institute in 2016. He currently resides in Queens, New York where he continues to explore the vibrant community art initiatives on offer.

About Lisa Kim

Lisa Kim is the inaugural director of the Ford Foundation Gallery, an exhibition space within the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice in New York City. Since 2018, she has led the development of the gallery’s exhibitions and public engagement programs to advance the mission and values of the Ford Foundation. Prior to her appointment at the Ford Foundation, she was director of cultural affairs at Two Trees Management Company, a real estate development firm in Brooklyn, NY. There she fostered artistic and creative community development through overseeing the company’s arts philanthropy and public art initiatives, producing the annual DUMBO Arts Festival from 2011 to 2014, and managing the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program. Lisa served as the director of the New York City Percent for Art Program from 2006 to 2008, supporting the commissioning and installation of public artworks, and for 12 years she oversaw the exhibitions, collections, construction, expansion, and facilities management for Gagosian Gallery in New York. Lisa holds a Bachelor of Arts in Art History with a concentration in Visual Arts from Barnard College and a Master of Industrial Design from Pratt Institute.

About Hansi Liao

Hansi Liao was born in Wuhan and currently based in Brooklyn. She received her B.A. in psychology (2013) from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and decided to further pursue arts by completing a master’s degree in visual arts administration (2016) at New York University.

In addition to academic works, she has assumed responsibilities in reputable art institutions such as the Whitney Museum, David Zwirner Gallery and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs since 2012. She wrote about public art and its relationship with audiences for her master’s thesis and firmly believes that arts and culture are the keys to meaningful modern urban landscape. As a native Chinese, she cares deeply about Asian culture and their presence across the Pacific, and remains active in New York’s local art scene. She joined Pace Gallery in 2017 and is a Director in the New York headquarter, working with artists such as Yoshitomo Nara, Lee Ufan, Torkwase Dyson among others. In her spare time she likes to spend time with her cat, cooking, and thrifting in vintage stores.

About Richard Joon Yoo

Richard Joon Yoo is an artist, writer, and architectural designer. He studied art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and architecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI_Arc). His past professional experience is with the progressive and experimental practices of Eric Owen Moss and Sarah Oppenheimer. He has taught as SCI_Arc and Woodbury University in Los Angeles, Center for Architecture Science and Ecology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and currently teaches architecture and memory at Pratt University in Brooklyn.

His work focuses on memory —memorials and monuments— specifically the ability of the built environment to heighten the present and provoke the future through the careful positioning of memory, context, and material. He is co-designer of the Triangle Fire Memorial, which is under construction near Washington Square Park, where the Triangle Fire occurred in 1911. In March 2019, in collaboration with the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition, he and his design partner Uri Wegman hosted the Collective Ribbon project at FIT, which was the first step in the fabrication of the Triangle Fire Memorial.