Tomie Arai
Tomie Arai (she/her) is a public artist, born and raised in NYC. The stories of displaced and dislocated communities across the globe form the basis for her collaborations with historians, activists and cultural organizations. Through the framework of community-led collaborations, Arai uses public art, mixed media installations, and large-scale light projections as platforms to amplify issues of race, gender and social justice. Arai has designed both temporary and permanent public works of art for Creative Time, the US General Services Administration Art in Architecture Program, the NYC PerCent for Art Program, the MTA Arts for Transit Program, the San Francisco Arts Commission and the Pew Charitable Trust. She is a co-founder of the cultural collective, The Chinatown Art Brigade and is an artist-in-residence with CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities on NY’s Lower East Side.
Laundryman's Daughter
1988
screen print
edition size: 30, 2 HC
6 colors on Rives BFK
with white border
30"h X 22"w
As the Museum of Chinese in Americas first artist-in-residence in 1988, a grant from the
NYSCA enabled me to research and create the Mother/Daughter Project, a portfolio of
silkscreened prints based on interviews with Asian women living in New York.
The inspiration for these prints came from Toni Morrison’s essay, The Site of Memory, in which she says of her family: “these people are my access to me; they are my entrance to my own interior life. Which is why the images that float around them—the remains, so to speak at the archeological site—surface so vividly and so compellingly that I acknowledge them as my route to the reconstruction of a world, to an exploration of an interior life that was not written and to the revelation of a kind of truth”.
I have used portraiture as a way to build community, reconstruct new narratives about Asians in America and illuminate larger visions of world events. Laundryman’s Daughter was based on interviews with immigrant Chinese families who once operated hand laundries in New York. The Pennell Print Collection of the Library of Congress purchased Laundryman’s Daughter. Further, it was presented as gifts to the families who were interviewed.
Tomie Arai 2023