Nourishing Our Roots: Seeding Our Rituals

Artist and activist, Tomie Arai, unveils her collaboration with The W.O.W. Project as part of our Met Museum Civic Practice Partnership Residency. Tomie has created ritual ceramic vessels adorned with imagery of a parade of Asian women, queer, and trans people depicting a world where we are celebrated. Nourishing Our Roots: Seeding Rituals, will activate these vessels and invite the Chinatown community and greater public to create our own parade, celebrating the women, queer, and trans-led space The W.O.W. Project has cultivated and nourished in its 5 years.

All of our programming is made possible by W.O.W team members and volunteers, and we welcome and appreciate any donations to help sustain our future. If you enjoy our programming, please consider donating to our 5 Year Anniversary fundraiser. All of our in-person events and programs will follow NY’s social distancing guidelines and will take place outside as much as possible. For more information on our Covid-19 safety procedures, or to learn more about our fundraiser, please visit our website:https://www.wowprojectnyc.org

ABOUT TOMIE ARAI

Tomie Arai is public artist who lives and works in NYC. She has designed both temporary and permanent public works of art for Creative Time, the US General Services Administration Art in Architecture Program, the NYC PerCent for Art Program, the Cambridge Arts Council, the MTA Arts for Transit Program, the New York City Board of Education and the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Tomie’s work has been exhibited nationally and is in the collections of the Library of Congress, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Japanese American National Museum, the Williams College Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has been a recipient of two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in Printmaking for 1991 and 1994; a 1995 Joan Mitchell Visual Arts Grant, a 1994 National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship for Works on Paper and three MidAtlantic Arts Foundation Visual Artists Residency Grants. In 1997, she was one of ten women nationwide to receive an Anonymous was a Woman Grant for achievement in the visual arts. In the year 2000, Tomie Arai was one of 50 artists nationwide to participate in the Artists & Communities: America Creates for the Millennium Project, sponsored by the MidAtlantic Arts Foundation and the NEA. Tomie received a National Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women's Caucus for Art in 2016.

In 2015, she co-founded the cultural collective, The Chinatown Art Brigade with artists Betty Yu and ManSee Kong. The Brigade has received past support from A Blade of Grass, The Rubin Foundation, the Asian Women's Giving Circle and Culture Push. CAB is a recent recipient of a 2018 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Creative Engagement grant, a Laundromat Project Creative Engagement Residency and a FABnyc Storefront Residency.

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