Presented by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.
A solo exhibition by Sean Connelly (2025 Artist-in-Residence), 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.
Join us for the opening, which will feature remarks from the artist, on Wednesday, October 29.
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
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. He is the 2025 Artist-in-Residence at the A/P/A Institute at NYU.
