AAPI Voices, Past and Present

This recorded is presented in partnership by Princeton Public Library and Make Us Visible NJ. Artists Alison Roh Park and Angel Velasco Shaw lead an interdisciplinary exploration of Asian American and Pacific Islander experiences in the United States.

For centuries, dominant narratives of American history have obscured the experiences and perspectives of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) in the United States. This program features Alison Roh Park and Angel Velasco Shaw as they use cross-disciplinary lenses including poetry, multimedia, personal narrative and history to illuminate these stories, offering a platform for exploration of AAPI identity and representation over time. This event coincides with the anniversary of the earliest known arrival of Filipinx people on what is now known as American soil on Oct. 18, 1587. A conversation between the speakers and Q&A with audience members will follow the presentations.

Park has taught Asian American Studies at Hunter College and speaks and writes on issues of race in America. She is a visual artist working under the pseudonym MING and is a Pushcart-nominated poet and past awardee of the Poetry Society of America chapbook fellowship and Poets & Writers Magazine Amy Award. She is CEO and founder of Urbanity, LLC, a communications and organizational consulting firm, and recipient of the 2020 Voqal social enterprise fellowship for urbanitymag.com, a first-ever scraper for news, content and media for, by and about Asian Pacific Islander Americans with a community app currently in development.

Velasco Shaw is a visual and media artist, educator and independent curator living in New York City and Manila, Philippines. Her experimental documentaries, including "Inherited Memories," "Motherload," "Umbilical Cord," "Asian Boys" and "Nailed" have screened in America, Europe, and Asia and are in the collections of institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Manila and the Museum of Modern Art. Group exhibitions of Velasco Shaw’s artworks include galleries in New York, Manila, and Los Angeles. Curatorial visual art/film exhibitions and cross-cultural exchange projects include "Not Visual Noise, Provocations: Philippine Documentary Photography" (co-curator) and "Empire and Memory: Repercussions and Evocations of the 1899 Philippine-American War" (co-curator). Publications include "Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of An Imperial Dream: 1899–1999," co-edited with Luis H. Francia, (New York University Press, 2002) and the forthcoming "Markets of Resistance" anthology (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2022). Velasco Shaw was a recipient of a 100 Most Influential Filipina Women in the U.S. "Innovators & Thought Leaders" award by Filipina Women's Network in 2011. She has taught media, communication, art, and Asian/Pacific/American studies at Philippine Women’s University, New York University, Hunter College, Columbia University and The New School.

This event was recorded on October 18, 2021.