Ghost Stories x Asia Art Archive in America: A Conversation with the Asianish Collective

Art at Americas Society and Asia Art Archive in America are pleased to present "Ghost Stories x Asia Art Archive in America: A conversation with the Asianish Collective." Join us in person on Wednesday, October 2, at 6:00 pm for a panel conversation with founders of the Asianish collective Cecile Chong, Gabriel de Guzman, Sara Jimenez, and Maia Cruz Palileo, who will discuss the origins of the collective and their upcoming projects. 

The conversation will be moderated by Claire Kim, manager of Programs and Collections at Asia Art Archive in America, and Tie Jojima, former associate curator and manager of Exhibitions at Americas Society in New York and curator of The Appearance: Art of the Asian Diaspora in Latin America & the Caribbean. A reception will close the event. The program's recording will be available on this website and on the Art at Americas Society YouTube channel.

Join us on Wednesday, October 2, 2024, from 6:00 to 8:00 pm ET  
Americas Society  
680 Park Ave. New York, NY  
Register

This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required. 

This program is organized in conjunction with our current exhibition, Ghost Stories: Highlights from Asia Art Archive in America.

About Asianish

In March 2018, Cecile Chong, Gabriel de Guzman, Sara Jimenez, and Maia Cruz Palileo formed Asianish, an informal group of AAPI artists and art professionals, to create a safe space for a community of varying Asian identities. Since then, they have continued to gather around conversation, art, and food to share vulnerably and openly about code-switching in art contexts. Asianish assembles for connection, visibility, and a place for their experiences and voices to be heard.

Speakers

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Cecile Chong was born in Ecuador to Chinese parents and grew up in Quito and Macau. She is a multimedia artist working in painting, sculpture, installation, public art, and video, layering materials, identities, histories, and languages. Her public art installations include Art in Buildings/125 Maiden Lane (2024), Makerspark (2024), EL DORADO – The New Forty Niners was installed in five boroughs of NYC (2017-2022). Solo exhibitions include Kates-Ferri Projects, Smack Mellon, Kenise Barnes, The International Chinese Fine Arts Council, among others. Fellowships and residencies include Art Omi, Marble House Project, Surf Point Foundation, Dieu Donné Workspace, Asian Women Giving Circle, NYSCA, LMCC Creative Engagement, The Hispanic Society’s Vilcek Artist Research Fellowship, Block Gallery/Bronx Museum, Joan Mitchell Center, Wave Hill Winter Workspace, and Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant. Chong’s work is in the collections of El Museo del Barrio, Museum of Chinese in America, The Rockefeller Foundation, Bryn Mawr Hospital, Citibank Art Advisory, and private collections internationally. She received an MFA from Parsons, an MA in Education from Hunter College, and a BA in Studio Art from Queens College. (Photo courtesy of the artist)

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Gabriel de Guzman is director of Arts & chief curator at Wave Hill, where he oversees the visual and performing arts program at the public garden and art center in the Bronx. This includes contemporary art exhibitions in Wave Hill’s galleries and on the grounds, as well as outdoor music, dance performances and indoor concert series. Previously, de Guzman held curatorial positions at Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, and The Jewish Museum, New York. As a guest curator, he has also presented shows at Site: Brooklyn, Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs, BronxArtSpace, Dyckman Farmhouse Museum, Rush Arts Gallery, En Foco at Andrew Freedman Home, the Affordable Art Fair New York, Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance, and the Bronx Museum's AIM Biennial. His essays have been published in Nueva Luz: Photographic Journal and in catalogues for the Museum of Arts and Design, the Arsenal Gallery at Central Park, Kenise Barnes Fine Art, and the art institutions mentioned above. He earned an M.A. in art history from Hunter College and a B.A. in art history from the University of Virginia. (Photo credit: Joshua Bright)

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Sara Jimenez (she/her) explores the material embodiment of deep transcultural memories. As a diasporic Filipinx-Canadian artist, she is interested in materializing invisible narratives around ideas of origins and home, loss and absence. She works in installation, sculpture, collage and performance, to create visual metaphors that allude to mythical environments and reimagined artifacts. Alongside her practice of researching intersectional histories, she also creates site specific installations that grapple with the legacies of their particular locations. 

Jimenez received her BA from the University of Toronto and my MFA from Parsons the New School for Design. Selected exhibitions include Rachel Uffner Gallery, El Museo del Barrio, Morgan Lehman Gallery, BRIC Gallery, The Brooklyn Museum, The Bronx Museum, and Smack Mellon, among others. Her work is part of the permanent collection of the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice. Selected awards and grants include NYFA’s Canadian Women's Artist Award, Canada Council for the Arts’ Explore and Create and Travel Grants, and BRIC’s Colene Brown Art Prize. (Photo credit: Lauryn Siegel)

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Maia Cruz Palileo (they/them) creates paintings, works on paper, installations, and sculptures that honor familial archives and imagined contemporary realities. Beginning from a space of personal inquiry around their family’s migration from the Philippines to America, Palileo quickly uncovered the immense connective points between individual histories and broader global systems, like colonization, displacement, assimilation, and the Philippine–American War. The artist’s research into overlapping historical timelines, paired with the transmutational effects of memory, provides a framework for their color-rich compositions.

Palileo has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Cummer Museum, Jacksonville, Florida; Kimball Art Center, Park City, Utah; Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; and American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, Washington, D.C. They have participated in recent group exhibitions at Moderna Museet, Skeppsholmen, Stockholm; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C., among many others. Their work is in the permanent collections of Cummer Museum, Jacksonville, Florida; San José Museum of Art, California; The Fredriksen Collection, The National Museum, Oslo, Norway; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky; and Chapman University, Orange, California. Palileo lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. (Photo credit: Mary Inhea Kang)

Moderators

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Claire Kim is a curator and writer based in New York City. She is currently the manager of Programs and Collections at Asia Art Archive in America. She also serves as the director of Curatorial Affairs at The Here and There Collective. Kim previously served as the special assistant to the president at BRIC, in Brooklyn, as well as a 2020–21 curatorial fellow at NXTHVN, in New Haven, CT. She has worked in museum education and programming with arts organizations, including the Asian American Arts Alliance, New Museum, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She has organized exhibitions at James Cohan Gallery, New York; Hessel Museum of Art, CCS Bard; Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York; Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, Brooklyn; and BRIC, Brooklyn. Kim completed her MA at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. (Photo credit: Jon Henry)

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Tie Jojima is curator of Global Contemporary Art at the Phillips Collection. Jojima is completing her doctoral dissertation at the Graduate Center, CUNY, where she has focused her research largely on postwar Latin American art. At Americas Society she has co-curated the exhibitions The Appearance (2024), El Dorado: Myths of Gold (2023–2024), Deep Marajó (2023), and Geles Cabrera: Museo Escultórico (2022) and worked as associate curator for Bispo do Rosario: All Existing Materials on Earth (2023). Jojima has worked on the organization of several publications, exhibitions, and public events, including Tropical Is Political: Caribbean Art under the Visitor Economy Regime and This Must Be the Place: Latin American Artists in New York, 1965–75. She has published academic and curatorial texts in Vistas: Critical Approaches to Latin American Art (ISLAA) and Arte & Ensaios, as well as for the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), El Museo del Barrio, and other institutions. (Photo credit: Elizabeth Leitzel)