Closing Artist Talk: Hawai‘i is not the United States, but it is your Future

Presented by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU. Co-sponsored by the Center for Collaborative Indigenous Research with Communities and Lands.

The artist Sean Connelly reflects on his year-long residency at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, and shares his curatorial process and vision for Hawai‘i is not the United States, but it is your Future. The installation, on view at 20 Cooper Square Gallery, invites viewers to consider the built environment as oceanic, an interconnected system requiring collective cultural efforts to sustain.

Doors open at 5:30 p.m. and selections of Connelly’s video work will screen before the talk begins.

NYU campus access guidelines: This is an in-person event, open to the public. Registration is required.

Accessibility note: This venue is accessible for wheelchair users. There are all gender restrooms. If you have any access needs, please email apa.rsvp@nyu.edu

About the Artist

Born and raised in Honolulu, Sean Connelly is an artist and building practitioner working collaboratively across sculpture, architecture, film, and cartography. Connelly’s practice engages deeply with grassroots interventions and supports Native liberation, food sovereignty, land justice, and cultural resurgence centering ‘āina (Land / That Which Feeds).

As founding director of After Oceanic Built Environments Lab and the nonprofit Hawai‘i Nonlinear, Connelly actively cultivates ancestral knowledge, ecological insight, and social justice to transform built environments into living archives of intergenerational healing. Collaborating closely with cultural bearers, creative practitioners, and Indigenous experts across Pae ‘Āina Hawai‘i (Hawaiian Islands), Connelly’s work contributes to a grassroots community of care, actively shaping liberated oceanic futures.

Photograph ©Creighton: Courtesy of NYU Photo Bureau.