Endings and Beginnings

This past weekend I attended a portfolio review at the Asian American Arts Alliance to meet with and receive feedback from various NYC arts organizations about my work. The review was a "speed-dating" event of sorts in which I met with organization after organization, each for 20 minute spurts, beginning at 10am and ending at 1:30pm with no breaks in between. The results?: my research and time spent at Fleisher developing relationships with Aunty Kim at Tweedy's Nails, meeting with VietLEAD, and speaking with CAAAV organizer, Cathy Dang about her experience growing up in and organizing with nail salons, will propel me into coming projects in New York.

I gave them a bit of context for how I developed the project idea through research during the fellowship at Fleisher, and remarkably, all of the organizations that I met with seemed to be interested in seeing or supporting the development of a project like Free to Care / Care to be Free. Not only is social practice / socially engaged work becoming more and more prevalent and desired in residency and grant applications, but even for organizations like the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, which doesn't typically accept social practice projects that step too heavily across the line distinguishing art from organizing, expressed to me during the review that perhaps their organization needs to change their policies so that they can support meaningful social practice projects like mine. It was quite an encouraging thing to hear.

It makes me think that it is looking more and more possible that I will be able to launch Free to Care / Care to be Free in New York sometime in the future.

The feedback I received during the review also made me reflect on how, through my museum education work at the Rubin I have been able to develop key relationships with Nepalese organizers at Adhikaar. They have done a fair amount of nail salon organizing with their Nepalese refugee community and could be a potential partner for the project. Additionally, through my work with Chinatown Art Brigade and CAAAV I am sure that I can connect with Vietnamese nail salon organizers with Mekong NYC. Mekong is already in the practice of gathering community members to hold conversations and storytelling gatherings, which could make collaboration a bit easier.

The piece of the puzzle that I felt was missing towards the end of the fellowship was consistent contact with the newer populations of refugees. My hope is that I can reach out to some of the organizations in NYC that support refugees in the coming months to volunteer, and otherwise be present to make connections with that side of the community. In that way, I'll bet that Free to Care / Care to be Free will become much more feasible as an endeavor.

I guess that endings really are just new beginnings.

How to know a place

Every time I've executed a successful socially engaged artwork I have also had an intimate connection with the local vicinity, it's people, it's politics, and its geographies both real and imagined. In California, I had the privilege of spending four years getting to know its landscape. Then, I lived in Baltimore for two years, immersing myself in the culture and people of West Baltimore through my work.

My time in Philadelphia prior to the fellowship at Fleisher was much shorter-lived than either Los Angeles/Claremont, California or Baltimore--only six months actually. Yet, the advantage that I had that enabled me to successfully create CONSUMPTION and Kitchen of Corrections with the men at Sunday Breakfast Rescue Mission, was the two years of local knowledge that Rick Lowe had acquired and subsequently imparted to Aletheia and me. My six months in residence was actually, in a way, two and a half years of work learning about the people and politics of Chinatown North.

In many ways in this residency, time was my main enemy. Aside from the concerns I had developed at the idea of partnering with Aunty Kim and Tweedy's, my ability to only be in Philadelphia for four days a week limited the amount of concentrated time I had to get to know the community, its needs, its wants, and more. Although I was able to build a strong connection with Aunty Kim and Tweedy's, I still don't believe it was strong enough to carry out the project successfully.

To get to know the neighborhood, in the four days of the week that I had, I would try to eat out locally and walk around the neighborhood as much as I could. However, I also tried to split that time in the studio where I either conducted research on nail art, nail salons, and refugee communities or I worked on some studio works that I have been wanting to complete for a while.

Then, when the day was through, I would head out of the neighborhood and up to Old City to the apartment to sleep. With how tough it was to find parking in that area, I often ended up leaving Fleisher for the apartment around six in the evening, which cost me some valuable hours of the day to explore and become more familiar with Southeast Philly.

In the end, I don't think I had an adequate familiarity of the community area where I was working.

That is all to say that moving forward I doubt I will take on a community based project anywhere unless I already have a strong connection to that place or location. Or at least a lot of support to  learn about the area and synthesize that knowledge into a project quickly.

Learning to live the practice

Every now and then, when I begin to feel restless and aimless in my creative endeavors, I google "social practice." Typically when I do so, I read and re-read articles about socially engaged art projects, social practice as an artistic medium, as well as text about community art and new innovative projects taking place in the field that I might want to know about. I do this to help keep myself up to date on the goings on in the field, but also to keep myself grounded.

The last time I did my search, I stumbled upon a wikipedia article called "Social Practice," but it was about a theory in psychology--not the arts world. Despite searching these terms over and over again in the past, I wondered how I had possibly missed this article. In any case it piqued my interest.

Social practice, as defined in the field of psychology, is a theory that "seeks to determine the link between practice and context within social situations," thereby cultivating a commitment to transformative change between the practitioner and the community/patients that is manifests in the forms of "activity and inquiry."

As I read on, I found that this type of Social Practice in psychology clearly outlined the steps that I had always intuitively taken when embarking on a new community-based art project.

1. Social practice as activity: "Social practice involves engagement with communities of interest by creating a practitioner-community relationship wherein there remains a focus on the skills, knowledge, and understanding of people in their private, family, community, and working lives." The idea is to work with "a system of participants [who] work toward an object or goal that brings about some form of change or transformation in the community."
2. Social practice as inquiry: "Within research, social practice aims to integrate the individual with his or her surrounding environment while assessing how context and culture relate to common actions and practices of the individual."

In thinking about my own practice, I'm realizing that my community organizing experience has given me a great deal of comfortability with embedding myself in community and building relationships through which I can learn more about the skills, knowledge, worldly outlook, and experiences of the community. However, it is translating this knowledge that I gain and the relationships that I build into collective action that is consistently the most difficult part of my work.

For example, in my residency at Fleisher Art Memorial, I have been able to build trust and consistent presence with the workers at Tweedy's Nail Salon and the owner, Kim, and her family. But every engagement with her oscillates between giving me the impression that we are on the same page about collaborating, to then in the next visit thinking that we are not on the same page. Aunty Kim expresses that language is likely the barrier when we misunderstand each other, which I can understand. However, I often wonder if I am not using language the most effectively too. Am I asking the right questions? Am I framing my desire to collaborate in the right ways? Alternatively, perhaps the collaboration is not a right fit, but it's hard to say.