The online panel discussion titled "The Art of Community-Based Mapping Practices and Storytelling" will feature artists Betty Yu, Cynthia Tobar, Tomie Arai, and Walis Johnson. These artists integrate community-based mapping, storytelling and archiving into their creative practices. They will share their strategies and approaches in storytelling that is rooted in principles of community resilience, collective agency and self-determination.

As community-oriented artists and storytellers we often ask ourselves - how do we amplify the voices of those most directly impacted in the most respectful and accountable manner? This event will also explore the critical questions around community-based collaborations, ethics of accountability and justice-centered framing.

This program is organized in conjunction with Betty Yu's Land and Environment artist residency with KODA.

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About Betty Yu

Betty Yu is a socially engaged multimedia artist, photographer, filmmaker, educator, and activist born and raised in NYC to Chinese immigrant parents. Ms. Yu integrates documentary film, new media platforms, and community-infused approaches into her artistic practice, Ms. Yu's documentary "Resilience" about her garment worker mother fighting sweatshop conditions screened at national and international film festivals including the Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival. Yu's multi-media installation, "The Garment Worker" was featured at Tribeca Film Institute's Interactive Showcase. In 2020, she worked with housing activists create "Resistance in Progress" a multi-media installation featured at Queens Museum. Betty recently had her first solo exhibition, "(DIs)Placed in Sunset Park" at Open Source Gallery in September 2018 in New York City. This work was also included in 2019 BRIC’s Biennial where her project received an honorable mention in the New York Times. She has also exhibited at Brooklyn Museum, Apex Art Gallery, Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center, No Longer Empty, Old Stone House in Brooklyn, and SPACE Gallery . Ms. Yu has been awarded artist residencies and fellowships with institutions such as the Laundromat Project, International Studio & Curatorial Program, Asian American Arts Alliance, En Foco, Skidmore College’s Documentary Storytellers' Institute, KODA Lab, and Santa Fe Art Institute, Stone Leaf, Pratt Institute, China Residencies, Flux Factory and the Intercultural Leadership Institute, and SPACE at Ryder Farm.

She is a co-founder of Chinatown Art Brigade, a cultural collective using art to advance anti-gentrification organizing, and also teaches video, social practice, art, and activism at Pratt Institute, Hunter College, and The New School.

www.bettyyu.net

About Cynthia Tobar

Cynthia Tobar is an artist, activist-scholar, archivist and oral historian who is passionate about creating interactive, participatory stories documenting social change.

A highly skilled and engaged producer, she is adept in oral history project design, digital project planning and management. Cynthia is an accomplished facilitator who brings together scholars, technologists, and artists to engage as a team to create compelling public history digital projects, humanities teaching and learning prototypes, socially-engaged art programming, and community-based archiving and storytelling projects. Cynthia has conceptualized and worked on a number of captivating public history digital exhibits, socially-engaged art projects, and community-based archives that document social movements and student activism. She has presented and published on several community-based oral history projects that have focused on social justice, student activism, and socially engaged art practices.

Cynthia’s current research interests are centered on using oral history methodology to understand issues of equity, inclusion, diversity and anti-racism in higher education. Her multimedia & storytelling work has been shown in solo and group exhibits throughout the city. Cynthia is an Assistant Professor and Head of Archives at Bronx Community College, where she creates captivating, socially-engaged art programming and leads community-based archiving and storytelling projects. She is also a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute, where she teaches courses on social justice in Colombia and arts activism.

A first generation Ecuadorian American, Cynthia was born in Jackson Heights, Queens and raised in several neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn. She lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Other current obsessions include running, traveling, and cooking at home with her son for family and friends.

www.cynthiatobar.net

About Tomie Arai

Tomie Arai is public artist who lives and works in NYC. She has designed both temporary and permanent public works of art for Creative Time, the US General Services Administration Art in Architecture Program, the NYC PerCent for Art Program, the Cambridge Arts Council, the MTA Arts for Transit Program, the New York City Board of Education and the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Tomie’s work has been exhibited nationally and is in the collections of the Library of Congress, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Japanese American National Museum, the Williams College Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has been a recipient of two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in Printmaking for 1991 and 1994; a 1995 Joan Mitchell Visual Arts Grant, a 1994 National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship for Works on Paper and three MidAtlantic Arts Foundation Visual Artists Residency Grants. In 1997, she was one of ten women nationwide to receive an Anonymous was a Woman Grant for achievement in the visual arts. In the year 2000, Tomie Arai was one of 50 artists nationwide to participate in the Artists & Communities: America Creates for the Millennium Project, sponsored by the MidAtlantic Arts Foundation and the NEA. Tomie received a National Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women's Caucus for Art in 2016.

In 2015, she co-founded the cultural collective, The Chinatown Art Brigade with artists Betty Yu and ManSee Kong. The Brigade has received past support from A Blade of Grass, The Rubin Foundation, the Asian Women's Giving Circle and Culture Push. CAB is a recent recipient of a 2018 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Creative Engagement grant, a Laundromat Project Creative Engagement Residency and a FABnyc Storefront Residency.

http://tomiearai.com

About Walis Johnson

Walis Johnson is an interdisciplinary artist/filmmaker whose work documents the experience and poetics of the urban landscape through oral history, ethnographic film, and artist walking practices. She is particularly interested in the intersection of documentary film, performance and socially engaged art. Walis explores hidden fissures of culture and history that upend our understanding of the political, economic and cultural structures we use to define the American condition and ourselves. Her practice consists of multiple works, in a range of different media, grouped around specific themes and meanings. Discussions that emerge are expansive and open-ended and grow richer over time. Her recent work - The Red Line Archive Project - activates conversations about the personal and political affects of redlining using her own family story growing up in Brooklyn, New York.

Walis holds an MFA from Hunter College in Interactive Media and Advanced Documentary Film and has taught a course in sustainable systems and design at Parsons School of Design. She has extensive experience in education policy and philanthropy, collaborating with community-based organizations citywide as a program officer for a Soros funded initiative and other national projects in New York and San Francisco.

About FiveMyles

Located in Crown Heights, FiveMyles is an exhibition and performance space where art and community connect. The organization was founded and incorporated as a non-profit in 1999. Its mission is to advance public interest in innovative experimental work; to identify and exhibit the work of under-represented artists, and to engage the local community through participation in the arts.

http://fivemyles.org

About KODA

KODA is a social practice nonprofit arts organization focusing on conceptual mid-career artists ingrained in social justice. KODA offers survey exhibitions as well as tailor-made and community-based artist residencies, through dedicated partnerships with socially engaged partners. The nonprofit serves the community with contemporary art events and outreach to strengthen arts education. In its overall mission to support the artistic and professional growth of artists, KODA acts as a laboratory for creative concepts, reflecting its core values of curiosity and collaboration.

www.kodalab.org

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Image Release

Participants attending the program agree they may be photographed, videotaped, and audio taped during the event. Photographs, videos, and voice recordings are the sole property of KODA Arts Inc., which reserves the right to publish attendees’ likeness online and use it in promotional materials.

Panel: The Art of Community-Based Mapping Practices and Storytelling

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