Art, Curation, and the Creative Process

Art, Curation, and the Creative ProcesS

Curatorial Projects from My time at The SMithsonian Asian Pacific American Center (2016-2023)

creative Practice

“Art is the most effective mode of communication that exists.” - John Dewey
“The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is-it's to imagine what is possible.” - bell hooks

Creativity is a practice of freedom and empathy. It allows us to express ourselves authentically and find enduring meaning in both the process and outcome. Through art, curation, and other creative practices, I explore methods of self-reflection, capacity-building, and placemaking, also finding ways to build community and connect with others through interactive or shared practice.

My creative process is also closely linked to my passion for education and storytelling. I often think about how storytelling can help us interrogate social norms and conceptions? How can the creation of art encourage deep learning and critical thinking? Creativity is an integral part of learning, growing, and healing, but often removed from formal learning environments. How might we make creativity a part of every educational curriculum? And how might creative, interdisciplinary approaches in education support learner engagement? The projects below showcase my attempts to curate, design, teach, and create at the intersection of art, the humanities, education, and social change.

Care Package is a collection of creative offerings by artists, writers, and scholars who we have collaborated with prior to 2020. In the Care Package you will find a range of approaches to addressing uncertainty, anxiety, and grief through vision, reflection, and healing. While this body of work may not hold the solutions for everything, we hope that it helped some find calm amidst the chaos.

Now You See Us: From Periphery to Presence was a music and poetry showcase presented in partnership with The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, taking place on the precipice of the anniversary of 1947 Partition. The performances explored Central and South Asian American narratives that are routinely marginalized within the broader cultural landscape of the United States.

A video series for classroom teachers and caregivers who teach. The Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center is proud to present We are not a stereotype, a video series for educators, by educators. This series explores and challenges the complexity surrounding the term Asian Pacific American, breaking it down into topics that span multiple timelines, geographies, and identities. I curated the videos on: Muslims and Islamophobia and Caste in the US.

Presented biannually by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, the Asian American Literature Festival (AALF) is the only festival of its kind: literature meets the museum, where literature comes off the page and takes full, multisensory life—from immersive poetry installations and mystery novel “Escape Rooms” to campfire-style queer ghost stories and workshops on refugee memory work.

‘Ae Kai is a thread which brings together elements stretching from mountain to ocean and serving as a gathering place for conversations and convergence to occur.
With this in mind, the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center was pleased to present — ‘Ae Kai is a thread which brings together elements stretching from mountain to ocean and serving as a gathering place for conversations and convergence to occur. With this in mind, the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center was pleased to present ʻAe Kai: A Culture Lab on Convergence on July 7-9, 2017 in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. ʻAe Kai explored the meeting points of humanity and nature in Hawaiʻi, the Pacific Islands and beyond.

A program and educational resource presented during Arab American Heritage Month in 2019 in collaboration with poet and hip-hop artist, Omar Offendum. Little Syria was a thriving neighborhood where thousands of Arab Americans from Greater Syria—a region now known as Palestine, Israel, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq—lived, worked, and created world-renowned poetry and literature in Arabic and English.

Cultivating Creative Practice

In this project I chronicle my creative process through journaling, photos, collages, and annotations. Referencing several sources, including Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, E.J. Coleman’s Creativity and Spirituality, and E.P. Clapp’s Participatory Creativity, I explore the connections between my spiritual, emotional, and cognitive self within the creative process.
I created a series of seeded prayer objects to represent the power of intention and action in dialogue with an environment or space, eventually burying them in an act of creative destruction and nurture. As a gardener, I sought to connect art to something I love doing every day (tending to my garden) and a practice I want to do every day (prayer). One of these seeded objects was a prayer rug made from organic materials. By studying the artistic motifs in my everyday life I discovered an appreciation for prayer rugs in Islam as well as the importance of nourishment in both my spiritual and creative practice.

Creativity x Learning

Legacies: a two Part Workshop

I created this workshop as a learning engagement for the brilliant play, Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski. “In a virtuoso solo performance, Academy Award nominee David Strathairn (Good Night, and Good Luck, Lincoln, Nomadland) portrays Jan Karski in this genre-defying true story of a reluctant World War II hero and Holocaust witness.” https://globallab.georgetown.edu/projects/remember-this/
How might reseaerch and curation be represented through art? Inspired by art therapy and mindfulness practices for a trauma-informed approach in formal and informal learning spaces.

Grandma’s Creativity

Why is it radical to teach and practice the creativity we learned from our matriarchs?
What does it mean to care? What kinds of work and creativity hold value in society? How might we interrogate these norms to heal and unlock our own creative potential?