ARTS INITIATIVE PROGRAM
The Arts Initiative Program is an incubation program where AIRMW provides organizational structure, financial support and other resources to Asian and Asian American artists and smaller organizations outside of AIRMW; with the ultimate objective being to increase the capacity of both partners to create and produce work in a sustainable manner.
SELECTED PROJECTS:
2023: Jackie Andres, Inangbayan / Motherland
AIRMW presents Jackie Andres's debut solo show Inangbayan / Motherland at Hairpin Arts Center. In the exhibition, we are given the unique opportunity to follow a gentle and restless investigation of the ‘inbetween’. Motherland offers insight into drawing the lines and making connections for ourselves. To be both outside and inside, to be at home and far away, but more than anything, to chase a feeling that feels so close, yet is unreachable. Andres reaches from her own experience as a child of Filipino immigrants and as a young person in the world experiencing a primitive desire to belong. The show features hand manipulated film, Super 8 footage, and print media to lead her audience with care to an intimate look into the peripheral details of the Asian American diaspora. More about this event HERE.
2022: Nancy Wong NOBLE Exhibition
AIRMW hosted Nancy Wong's solo exhibition at the Hairpin Arts Center, featuring her ongoing photo project titled Noble. This work seeks to build a diverse, multigenerational archive of contemporary Asian America through portraits of its constituents. Each portrait acts as a visual acknowledgement of the vast and varied stories – the dreams, the fears, and everything in between – that constitute the Asian American community. Wong’s subjects are invited to select the clothing in which they are photographed, and to bring an object of significance to their Asian American identity to be photographed with as well.
2019 – 2021: Our Perspective with Mia Park
Mia Park is a Chicago actress, TV show host and co-founder of A-Squared Theater Workshop. Mia’s project is the Our Perspective: Asian American Play Readings, which is a staged play reading series intended to provide inspiration, space, and audiences for Midwest Asian Pacific American playwrights, directors, and actors. They are script-in-hand concert readings where actors read plays written and directed by Asian Americans, and is the first ever Asian American play reading series in the Midwest. As the sponsored artist, Mia is given full curatorial and creative agency to organize event proceedings.
2018 – 2022:
Chicago Obihiro Exchange Project | 思考回路 • Shikoukairo: Patterns of Thought
Initiated in 2018, the Chicago Obihiro Exchange Project is a program produced by Asian Improv aRts Midwest that facilitates an immersive exchange between Japanese-American artists in Chicago and artists from the Obihiro & Tokachi region of Japan. The exchange began in 2018 with AIRMW artist Kioto Aoki's residency and exhibition in Obihiro City, then a series of exhibitions titled 思考回路 / Shikoukairo: Patterns of Thought between 2019–2021. The 2022 programming realized the release of Hiroshi Mehata’s solo album through Asian Improv Records, recorded during his visit to Chicago in 2019 as part of the first 思考回路 • Shikoukairo presentation.