“Meet the Artist” with Pete Pin

On Thursday, December 18, we welcome Pete Pin to “Meet the Artist” night at CPW. Pin will discuss his long-term project, Migrations of Memory, and new work, That Was Then, This Is Now, with an emphasis on the role of photography in excavating and processing familial and communal trauma. Informed by nascent research on epigenetics, complex trauma, and rooted in his personal history – born in a refugee camp in the aftermath of genocide, estranged from a father who raised him alone while struggling with his mental health, and reunited with him nearly twenty years later shortly before his death as Pete began his own journey into fatherhood – the work reflects on how trauma reverberates across generations. It seeks to honor the past while affirming the possibilities of healing, repair, and transformation. This event will be live-streamed on CPW’s YouTube page at 6pm.

Join us every Thursday evening at CPW, when we host illuminating talks with local and visiting artists. “Meet the Artist” allows the public to get to know new work, to hear about artistic processes, and to meet friends and other local artists. The evening takes place at CPW’s gallery at 25 Dederick Street in Kingston, NY. It is free and open to the public. Coffee, tea, and snacks are served.

“Meet the Artist” is made possible by a generous grant from the Arnold and Augusta Newman Foundation.

​​Pete Pin was born in the Khao-I-Dang refugee camp on the border of Cambodia and Thailand in 1982. His family were resettled as refugees in Stockton, California in the 1980’s. Pin’s work explores themes of memory, migration, and inter-generational trauma among the Cambodian American community across the United States and among his own family in the U.S. and Cambodia. A high school drop-out, Pin is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, where he did Honors and was awarded the Louis and Charles Outstanding Honors Thesis Award, the International Center of Photography, and the University of Hartford’s MFA in Photography. He received fellowships and grants from the Magnum Foundation and Open Society Foundations Photography Project, among others, and his work has been featured in the New York Times, TIME Magazine, NPR, and VICE. Pin has exhibited at the International Center of Photography, Smith College, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, the Asian Art Museum, and the Library of Congress. His series on the Cambodian diaspora is in the permanent collection of the Library of Congress and is currently featured in the inaugural exhibition – Collecting Memories – at the Treasures Gallery at the Library. He lives in the Hudson Valley in a pre-Civil War farmhouse with his wife, writer Jane Rose Porter, their children and a house full of animals.