AAPI Civic Engagement Fund Fellows Unveils Five Interdisciplinary Art Projects to Mobilize Critical Voting Base

The Surdna Foundation is proud to support the AAPI Civic Engagement Fund in sustaining Asian Americans and Pacific Islander (AAPI) organizations working to create a thriving, multiracial democracy.

Five AAPI Artists Unveil Interdisciplinary Art Projects to Mobilize Critical Voting Base for November Elections

Projects include a short comedic film, an interactive website for new voters, and traditional Native Hawaiian bark cloth art as part of AAPI Civic Engagement Fund’s Creative Catalyst Fellowship 

LOS ANGELES: The AAPI Civic Engagement Fund announced the release of five multidisciplinary art projects aimed to activate AAPI voters for the upcoming presidential elections as part of its Creative Catalyst Fellowship. The fellows’ work focused on one of three themes — Voting Together, Solidarity, and Belonging — in mediums that include short videos, music, poetry, and multimedia art.

“Art and social change starts at the personal level and each of our Creative Catalyst fellow’s powerful art projects speak to their audience,” said EunSook Lee, Executive Director of AAPI Civic Engagement Fund. “Every vote counts this November and AAPIs are a critical voting bloc that will likely be determinative in deciding who the next president will be.”

The fellows and their projects are:

• Kat Evasco (Voting Together) is an award-winning writer, theater maker, filmmaker, and cultural strategist, who produced “Get Your Tita”, a short comedic film that tells the story of a Filipino American family. Against the backdrop of a birthday party, family members talk about issues that have a personal impact on their communities.
• Lehuauakea (Belonging), a Native Hawaiian interdisciplinary artist and kapa maker from Pāpaʻikou, Hawaiʻi, with a particular focus on the labor-intensive making of kapa (traditional bark cloth), created a series of fine art illustrations and educational posters that include ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi (Native Hawaiian language); as well as digital posters that is being shared free of charge with educators.
• Safwat Saleem (Belonging), a multidisciplinary artist working to give visibility to Asian American and immigrant narratives, with a focus on cultural loss resulting from assimilation, created the multimedia project, “Anxieties of an Immigrant Father”, which includes unique charts that map Safwat’s anxieties as an Asian American and immigrant father, drawings that chart the anxieties contributed by the larger AAPI community, and an audio component about the community’s anxieties going into an election year.
• Sonny K. Mehta (Solidarity), a Houston-based musician and founder of Riyaaz Qawwali who performs folk music rooted in South Asian traditions, collaborated with Housotn’s Poet Laureate Aris Kian Brown to create “Sounds of Solidarity”, a series of short videos that showcase the shared experiences of Asian American and Black communities. The series integrates poetry in both English and Urdu/Hindi; and an educational toolkit, facilitating critical conversations about solidarity, anti-Blackness, and allyship.
• GB (Gia-Bao) Tran (Voting Together), a publishing cartoonist for 20 years who is best known for his work Vietnamerica, a memoir of his family’s trauma, tragedy, and triumph as war refugees, creates an interactive website that engages Gen Z and first-time voters to actively participate this November.

Past projects in similar programs of the AAPI Civic Engagement Fund include The ABCs of AAPI Coloring Book by the Asian American Advocacy Fund in Georgia; the South Asian American Digital Archive’s anthology, Our Stories: An Introduction to South Asian America; and VietLead’s documentary film, Taking Root, which premiered in June of 2023 at Tribeca Film Festival in Philadelphia.

The Creative Catalyst Fellowship projects can be viewed at: https://movementhub.org/create/

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ABOUT THE AAPI CIVIC ENGAGEMENT FUND

The AAPI Civic Engagement Fund is one of the largest funders of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) movement building organizations and the only one of its kind that focuses investment in state and local organizations doing on-the-ground work. The AAPI Fund’s mission is to foster a culture of civic participation in AAPI communities through grantmaking, building movement capacity, and conducting research. The AAPI Fund’s grantees serve over 57 ethnic groups and constituencies that include women, youth, seniors, multi-status immigrants and families and low-income, queer and trans, and faith-based communities. Over ninety percent of the groups are led by AAPI women. For more info: https://aapifund.org/

Contact: Kyung Jin Lee, kyungjin@change-llc.com