Archive as Memorial: Documenting A/P/A Voices During COVID-19

January 21, 2023 – March 25, 2023
Storefront for Ideas

127 Walker Street
New York, NY

Image courtesy of the event organizer.

Image courtesy of the event organizer.

Lead Curators and Community Amplifiers-in-Residence: Tomie Arai and Diane Wong

January 21 – March 25, 2023

Communities are complex. That’s why we need ideas and solutions that work across disciplinary boundaries to support a healthy and thriving community. Through our inaugural Community Amplifiers-in-Residence program (CAiR), Archive as Memorial: Documenting A/P/A Voices During COVID-19 is helping ISS explore what is possible by leveraging creativity, curiosity, and critical thinking, and inviting visitors to explore community issues together.

Led by Curators and Community Amplifiers, Tomie Arai and Diane Wong, Archive as Memorial is an exhibition organized by members of A/P/A Voices: A COVID-19 Public Memory Project, a volunteer team of Asian American and Pacific Islander cultural workers, oral historians, educators, caretakers, and activists who have worked collaboratively since lockdown in March of 2020 to document the COVID-19 pandemic and the myriad ways it has impacted Asian/Pacific/American communities in New York and beyond. Included in the exhibit are recorded interviews, shared stories, and artifacts documenting the themes of mutual aid, community care, economic impacts, interracial solidarities, disability politics, and experimentations in mourning, both for our futures and our pasts.

The project was developed in partnership with the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU and the NYU Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives; and the exhibition is hosted in the Storefront for Ideas, an initiative of Immigrant Social Services (ISS), made possible in part by the support of Chung Pak Local Development Corporation and the NYC City Council AAPI Community Support Initiative. Funding for the exhibition was provided by the Asian Women Giving Circle, a donor advised fund of the Ms. Foundation for Women, and the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.

Curatorial Committee: Laura Chen-Schultz, Preeti Sharma, Vivian Truong, and Mi Hyun Yoon