Empowering Immigrant Stories of Labor

This online panel discussion held on Zoom with Cynthia Tobar, current Racial Justice artist-in-residence at KODA, artist Julia Justo and cultural organizer/oral historian Rochelle Kwan will feature creatives who affect personal change through their socially engaged art and storytelling practices to center immigrant workers' stories of struggle for labor rights.

They will share how their collaborative approaches - across media and visual art - have revealed otherwise ignored and meaningful narratives from underrepresented Latine and Asian American groups across the city.

Panelists will showcase work that questions and deconstructs how labor issues are being dealt with locally, while creating space to honor stories of immigrant New Yorkers as they build power to win racial & workplace justice.

Cynthia Tobar

Cynthia Tobar is an artist, activist-scholar, archivist and oral historian who is passionate about creating interactive, participatory stories documenting social change. Her research interests and art practice focus on documenting stories of community and student activism, housing justice, arts activism in Latin America, and counter-narratives of historical exclusion in monument culture. A first generation Ecuadorian American, Cynthia was born in Jackson Heights, Queens and raised in several neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn. Cynthia is an Associate Professor and Head of Archives at Bronx Community College, where she creates socially-engaged art programming, community-based archiving and storytelling projects that incubate spaces of culturally responsive memory-building to further advance community engagement with the Archives.

www.cynthiatobar.net

Julia Justo

Julia Justo is an interdisciplinary artist born in Argentina with Indigenous-Italian ancestry. She currently makes her home in New York. She works across mixed media, textiles and social practice. She has exhibited extensively in the US and abroad including Asheville Art Museum, Hunterdon Art Museum, Smack Mellon, Bric Media, WhiteBox, American Folk Art Museum and Museo de Buenos Aires. She has been granted numerous awards and residencies including Robert Rauschenberg Foundation grant, LMCC Grant, Su-Casa Artist-in-Residence, Trestle Gallery residency, Creative Capital Taller artist, and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant among others.

www.juliajusto.com

Rochelle Kwan

Rochelle Hoi-Yiu Kwan (she/her) is a cultural organizer, oral history educator, and DJ whose work aims to equip communities with the tools to build multigenerational oral history projects. Based on Lenape land in New York City’s Manhattan Chinatown, she builds her practice around engaging communities as our classroom and amplifying the essential role of relationship building and the arts in storytelling and organizing. Headshot credit: Cindy Trinh (detail).

linktr.ee/rochellehkwan