Opening for Hawai‘i is not the United States, but it is your Future

Presented by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.

A solo exhibition by Sean Connelly (2025 Artist-in-Residence), invites viewers to consider the built environment as oceanic, an interconnected system requiring collective cultural efforts to sustain.

Join us for the opening on Wednesday, October 29, which will feature brief remarks from the artist and special reading of creative works.

NYU campus access guidelines: This is an in-person event, open to the public. Registration is required.

Accessibility note: This venue is accessible for wheelchair users. There are all gender restrooms. If you have any access needs, please email [email protected]

Born and raised in Honolulu, Sean Connelly is an artist and building practitioner working collaboratively across sculpture, architecture, film, and cartography. Connelly’s practice engages deeply with grassroots interventions and supports Native liberation, food sovereignty, land justice, and cultural resurgence centering ‘āina (Land / That Which Feeds).

As founding director of After Oceanic Built Environments Lab and the nonprofit Hawai‘i Nonlinear, Connelly actively cultivates ancestral knowledge, ecological insight, and social justice to transform built environments into living archives of intergenerational healing. Collaborating closely with cultural bearers, creative practitioners, and Indigenous experts across Pae ‘Āina Hawai‘i (Hawaiian Islands), Connelly’s work contributes to a grassroots community of care, actively shaping liberated oceanic futures. He is the 2025 Artist-in-Residence at the A/P/A Institute at NYU.

Image: Sean Connelly, Spheric Oceania, 2024. Still from video work. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Arts of Oceania Gallery. Courtesy of the artist.

Host or Publisher A/P/A Institute at NYU