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.

How to disperse power

I visited Aunty Kim again today to reaffirm my desire to host a community event at her salon on Tuesday, May 23rd. She continues to seem open to the idea, though I think she has major concerns about potentially closing the shop--even if by closing the shop she is well paid. She told me "Emily, it's not about the money, it's about the customers. If I close, the customers might go away and not come back. Most customers come in without appointment."

This I understand. It seems that the customer traffic ebbs and flows with the seasons. Frankly, sometimes I'm not sure how she sustains her business given how many times I have seen it very empty for almost half a day. I understand that given the precarious and unreliable nature of her business, it perhaps is not so helpful to bring in a bunch of customers for one day as a part of an event only to not be able to count on those customers returning again in the future.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how to disperse power and cultivate greater agency and authority with Aunty Kim in her participation in this project. She is clearly a very compassionate woman who cares about the well being of the people around her. I asked her if she believed there was any way to use the nail salon to help other people like refugees and those less fortunate. She responded with a sigh and said, "I can only help so many people. I want to help, but I cannot hire everyone. And you have to trust the people you help. Some people just are not good people."

I continue to fall back on the idea that maybe my words and my questions are getting lost in translation. Perhaps because she is a very practical and pragmatic person, she is not thinking broadly and creatively in that way about her business, but perhaps I am still not able to voice my questions in a way she will understand. I asked her if she had ever thought of hanging artwork on the walls of her salon. She laughed, "Emily! Where would I hang them? The walls are completely covered!"

What is the goal of time?

What is the goal of socially engaged art? Since we cannot presume to be able to completely change society from singular gestures of aesthetic (albeit community-based) forms, what is the significance of poetic expressions? When deciding upon which communities to work with, is it most important to work with those who have some modicum of positional power? Or is it more important to work with those in a more precarious position? How important is co-creation in the process of developing socially engaged art forms? How important is the artist themself and their visual markers?

I have been submitting all of my efforts into engaging Aunty Kim and her employees at Tweedy's for Nails. Aunty Kim has some positional power; she owns her nail salon, she employs others in the Vietnamese and Latinx community. She is also older, wiser, and more proficient in English than most of her employees. In Free to Care / Care to be Free I want to bring together contemporary refugees from nations in West Asia (Middle East) and Latin and South America to build community with former refugees primarily from Vietnam. Doing this through the vehicle of "care" or "body labor" is significant in how refugees should be cared for on a human level, and how body labor is arguably inherently more intimate than other forms of labor.

Additionally, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean diasporic communities are known for their hui/kye loans, which essentially pool money to allocate to one community member's business or other financial objectives to provide a greater monetary impact in one swoop. I have this dynamic in mind when I wish to bring new refugees together with previous refugees. Without assuming that either party would be welcomed into hui/kye with the other, I do believe that your network--who you know--is how immigrant communities (and all communities for that matter) can succeed in the U.S.

I figured it would be the most manageable to work with communities who are already organized--in this case, previous refugees at nail salon hubs. Then, once trust was built, I could branch out to bring new refugees over to receive and partake in care work with the previous refugees. But now I'm wondering if I should have spent more time reaching out to the new refugees, building rapport, so that when the two groups are brought together they will be more open minded and trusting of a facilitated experience.

This thought has weighed me down as I reflect on how much time remains in my residency. I frequently oscillate between thinking that I need more time to wondering whether my objectives are actually able to be accomplished in a meaningful way that is impactful, ethical, and poetic.

Confidence in documentation

At what point does my relationship building process become a part of the product of my work? I don't yet believe that my conversations and interactions at the salon are ready to be documented. But perhaps that is the point all of it should be documented and the key moments to highlight can be chosen later.

I still worry about how to broach that topic with Aunty Kim.

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.