The Past is the Present: with Christy Chan and Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya
About this Event
Please join us on Thursday, July 30th at 6:30pm for a program featuring artists and . Both Chan and Phingbodhipakkiya, while working in differing mediums, confront complex histories of violent power structures that have shaped and fractured personal and communal identities. As artists with roots in the American South, their work sheds light on the cyclical nature of societal amnesia through an often overlooked perspective.
This event will begin with a short screening of films by Chan followed by an artist talk by Phingbodhipakkiya. Afterwards, the two artists will join for a conversation moderated by Lisa Kim, Gallery Director of Ford Foundation.
Bios:
Christy Chan is a visual artist, film director, and community organizer. Informed by her early years in the rural South, her work uses both large-scale art interventions and tragic-comic approaches to question the social codes and everyday power structures that normalize racialized violence in the United States. Her projects and films have been presented throughout the U.S and Europe, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Mills Art Museum, and ICA SF in the Bay Area; Film Independent and New Filmmakers in Los Angeles; Interfilm-Kuki in Berlin, Germany; Bemis Center of Contemporary Arts in Omaha; and other institutions. Chan is the recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Creative Capital Award, and Kenneth Rainin Fellowship in Public Spaces. Her work has been profiled in the New York Times, NPR / PBS, Hyperallergic, and BOMB magazine. She is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. www.christychan.com
Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya is a sculptor based in Brooklyn, New York. Working through precarious amalgamations of found, made, and altered textiles, ceramics, objects, and fragments, she traces how forces of trade, conquest, and dispossession are pressed into bodies, land, and memory. Her work reconstitutes what persists in their wake: the weight of extraction and loss, and the care that made survival possible. Rooted in her Thai and Indonesian-Chinese heritage, her practice foregrounds the embodied knowledge of immigrant and rural communities and the often-invisible labor of women.
Her work has been exhibited at MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum, the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, where it also enters the permanent collection. Public commissions include a mosaic mural for Cambridge Arts and a three-story textile installation for the U.S. Embassy Bangkok. She is a 2025 Artists & Mothers Grantee, a 2024 New York City Artadia Awardee, and a 2023 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow in Visual Arts.
Lisa Kim is the inaugural director of the Ford Foundation Gallery, an exhibition space within the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice in New York City. Since 2018, she has led the development of the gallery’s exhibitions and public engagement programs to advance the mission and values of the Ford Foundation. Prior to her appointment at the Ford Foundation, she was director of cultural affairs at Two Trees Management Company, a real estate development firm in Brooklyn, NY. There she fostered artistic and creative community development through overseeing the company's arts philanthropy and public art initiatives, producing the annual DUMBO Arts Festival from 2011 to 2014, and managing the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program. Lisa served as the director of the New York City Percent for Art Program from 2006 to 2008, supporting the commissioning and installation of public artworks, and for 12 years she oversaw the exhibitions, collections, construction, and expansion for Gagosian Gallery in New York. Lisa holds a Bachelor of Arts in Art History with a concentration in Visual Arts from Barnard College and a Master of Industrial Design from Pratt Institute. She serves on the advisory board of A.I.R. Gallery and is a member of the board of directors of ICOM-US.
Light refreshments will be provided.
Image credit: Left: Where Sugar Bleeds, 2026. Assemblage installation. Photo: Chanel Matsunami. Courtesy of Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya. Right: Somewhere To Be, Film Still, Courtesy of Christy Chan Studio
The event is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Ruth Foundation for the Arts, and other foundations and individuals.
Where is it happening?
USD 0.00
