"Working Stories" Part of "Invisible Hands" Exhibition at 601 Artspace (July 22 - Sept. 17th, 2023)

Please check out some of my work, on view now that is part of 601Artspace (at 88 Eldridge St. in Chinatown/LES) current group exhibition 𝙄𝙣𝙫𝙞𝙨𝙞𝙗𝙡𝙚 𝙃𝙖𝙣𝙙𝙨, on view through September 17, 2023. Gallery hours: Thursday-Sunday, 1-6pm.

The exhibition is curated by Emireth Herrera Valdés

Thank you to Johanna and Audrey for sharing your stories with me. These are selections from a project that was first a part of a public street sign installation project for @highlinenyc

About the my piece from their press release:

“Betty Yu's ‘Working Stories’ examines the effects of gentrification and displacement on low-income working-class people in the Chelsea neighborhood of NYC. Featuring an aluminum sign portraying a female domestic worker protesting with the Domestic Workers Alliance, along with portraits and audio interviews of two nannies Yu interviewed, the artwork showcases the activism of domestic workers seeking greater rights and better working conditions regardless of their legal status.” 

– Emireth Herrera Valdés

And thanks to Stephen Gambello of Tussle Magazine Projects for the thoughtful review:

“Betty Yu's "Working Stories" (2019) invites us to reflect on the plight of domestic workers in their own words. Flanking a steel plaque protesting the violation of domestic workers' rights, we find two portraits of nannies who were interviewed for this project. Recordings of these individuals express their impressions and frustrations regarding the injustices they endure, such as long hours and low pay. Listening to their perspectives takes us beyond our context and grants us a genuine understanding of how their existence is compromised. Their experiences become our own at that moment, immersing us in a tangible and genuine connection to their lives.”

*Photo of Betty Yu standing in front of her work and installation photo is by Go Sugimoto

"Family Amnesia" was presented at 2023 Photoville Opening Night

Family Amnesia was presented as an Artist Spotlight by Magnum Foundation at Photoville Opening Night,  June 3rd, 2023 

The video screened was shot and edited by Hai-Li Kong, additional camera by Cal Hsiao. Still shot from the video.

Artist Spotlight: Family Amnesia invites viewers to learn about her Chinese-American family roots in the U.S. through her engaging and interactive zine. The zine explores her family’s multi-generational resilience and resistance through family photos, collages and short personal films. This zine also features work that will be part of her forthcoming art and photography book, Family Amnesia to published by Daylight Books in May 2024.

Link to Family Amnesia

Link to Photoville opening night

Chinatown Art Brigade: Degentrification Archives Exhibit Opening - Feb 10th 2023, 5-7pm

Join us this upcoming Friday, February 10th from 5-7pm at the Pace University Art Gallery (41 Park Row, 1st Floor) -  for the opening of our exhibition "Chinatown Art Brigade: Degentrification Archives." The exhibit will be on view from February 10 through March 25, 2023. We are inviting our friends and collaborators, many of whom are featured in the exhibit, to celebrate its opening.

WHAT: Chinatown Art Brigade: Degentrification Archives Exhibit Opening 

WHEN: THIS FRIDAY, February 10th from 5-7pm

WHERE: Pace University Art Gallery (41 Park Row, 1st Floor) Guests should enter via the Spruce Street entrance of 41 Park Row. 

More Info: the IG Invite and FB invite 

DJs Romil Chouhan and Tao Leigh Goffe (also known as the Sbarro Soundsystem) will be providing the beats.

*Please note that proof of COVID-19 vaccination is required. 

Details:

Pace University Art Gallery presents “Degentrification Archives,” an exhibit by the Chinatown Art Brigade (CAB) which uplifts the stories of people most directly impacted by the gentrification of Manhattan’s Chinatown, with the long-term goal of protecting and preserving our neighborhood. The "Degentrification Archives" is a curated collection spanning our seven year history. The exhibition includes archival material, photographs, videos, placekeeping maps, large scale projections, as well as banners, posters and other direct action ephemera. The show also highlights our collaborations with local and national cultural groups, movements, and formations including CAAAV Chinatown Tenants Union, the W.O.W. Project, The Illuminator, Decolonize This Place/MTL+, Grassroots Asians Rising, Asian Americans United, Mi Casa No Es Su Casa (also known as Mi Casa Resiste), CID Coalition, Coast to Coast Chinatowns Against Displacement (C2C) and many others. Additionally, the exhibition highlights the racial justice, housing rights, and community organizing history of CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, CAB’s partner organization. In the dedicated lab space, a timeline highlights CAAAV’s nearly 35-year history along with photographs, videos and related ephemera.

Five Mixed Media Collages Exhibited in “in/stasis” at Artists Space as part of Whitney Museum of Art’s ISP (May 20 – 29, 2022)

The exhibition in/stasis is curated by Daría Sól Andrews, Sally Eaves Hughes, and Klaudia Ofwona Draber, the 2021–22 Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellows of the Whitney Independent Study Program.  (May 20 – 29, 2022)

Exhibition of Betty Yu’s Mixed Media Collages from the “We Were Here: Unmasking Yellow Peril” (Photo credit: Steven Cottingham)

New York, April 25–in/stasis brings together thirteen artists whose works attend to the attritional loss of community, land, and resources in the world around and beneath them. The exhibition approaches the experience of displacement in stasis, marking the ways displacement functions not only geographically, but also at cultural, temporal, and infrastructural levels. The exhibition takes up Rob Nixon’s proposal of “a more radical notion of displacement, one that, instead of referring solely to the movement of people from their places of belonging, refers rather to the loss…that leaves communities stranded in a place stripped of the very characteristics that made it habitable.” Such displacements often occur slowly and over such long periods of time that they are rendered invisible and readily ignored. Through attention to these calamities, in/stasis seeks to represent and resist their devastating effects.

From Whitney/ISP Program’s “in/stasis” Exhibition Catalog

Displacement is typically understood in the context of forced movement, defined as the act of relocating someone or something from its site, position, or role. This notion of displacement calls to mind images of migrants and refugees fleeing war, persecution, or environmental disaster. Yet, there are also those who remain in place—in the midst of dispossession, extraction, and gentrification—immobilized yet moved out of the living knowledge of home. The artists featured in in/stasis complicate the association of displacement with mobility and unsettle notions of what characterizes the displaced experience. 

in/stasis presents work by Natalie Ball, Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki, Carolina Caycedo, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Emily Jacir, Tomashi Jackson, Nadia Myre, Otobong Nkanga, Cameron Rowland, Farideh Sakhaeifar, Sheida Soleimani, and Betty Yu. The projects in the exhibition engage a range of subjects and geographies including: the changing boundaries and status of property in Sunset Park, New York; the Canadian Indian Act of 1876; river communities and the damming industry in Colombia; and the extraction of natural resources in West Africa. Each of the artists in the exhibition approach displacement as a critical political question, exploring the personal and institutional registers that structure, implement, and benefit from displacement. In addition to calling out perpetrators, they also call attention to rebellions against slow violence, led by those who fight against the social and cultural amnesia induced by displacement in stasis through sustained activism and protest. 

For more info about the exhibition CLICK HERE

Read a review about the exhibition in Fine Art Globe - CLICK HERE

The Door Poster Project in the "Art for Change: The Artist & Homeless Collaborative" Exhibition at NY Historical Society

“YOUTH VISIONS FOR TOMORROW, TODAY! END HOMELESSNESS” Poster, 2021 (Offset Lithograph on paper for the New-York Historical Society)

Created by Betty Yu and Youth Leaders at The Door (Cameron Nicholas Austin, Benjamin Douglas Brown, Shekanah Hibbert, Hallie Honore, Kimberley Nieves, Peter Alfred Messia de Prado, and Shonnae Teel) for Art for Change: The Artist & Homeless Collaborative at the New-York Historical Society, December 3, 2021 – April 3, 2022

BRING THIS POSTER TO LIFE USING AUGMENTED REALITY

You will be unlocking the experiences, stories, and visions for the future expressed by youth leaders of The Door. CLICK HERE for Instructions

INTERVIEWS WITH YOUTH LEADERS OF THE DOOR

The Door has provided comprehensive youth development services since 1972. Project participants interviewed young people receiving services through The Door’s Runaway and Homeless Youth program, which serves 1,650 young people a year, about their experiences.

Interview with Benjamin Douglas Brown

Interview with Cameron Nicholas Austin

Interview with Peter Alfred Messia de Prado

Interview with Shekanah Hibbert

LETTERS TO OUR FUTURE SELVES

IMAGINING AN END TO HOMELESSNESS AND A BRIGHTER FUTURE DRAWINGS

Ben, Peter, Shonnae, and Shekanah describe their Visions For The Future Drawing

Cameron, Kimberly and Hallie describe their Visions for the Future Drawing

Group photos of Artist Betty Yu with youth leaders, participants and staff of The Door

About the Artist Betty Yu:

Multimedia artist and activist Betty Yu collaborated with Youth Leaders at The Door to create this poster reflecting on youth homelessness today. The Door has provided comprehensive youth development services since 1972. Its youth leaders serve as peer advocates and are responsible for community-building projects. Project participants interviewed young people receiving services through the Door’s Runaway and Homeless Youth program about their experiences to develop the augmented reality-enhanced design.

Born and raised in New York City to Chinese immigrant parents, Yu co-founded the Chinatown Art Brigade, a collective that organizes against displacement in Chinatown due to gentrification.

“Mapping Indigenous, Black and Asian Resistance in NYC” part of FiveMyles' "Maps" Exhibition

“MAPS” DECEMBER 4 – JANUARY 2, 2022 AT FIVEMYLES (558 St. John’s Place in Brooklyn)

BETTY YU - SARI CAREL

CURATED BY KLAUDIA OFWONA DRABER AS PART OF AN ARTIST RESIDENCY ON GOVERNORS ISLAND AT KODA

CLICK HERE for info

“Mapping Indigenous, Black and Asian Resistance in NYC” (by Betty Yu)

Photos by Betty Yu and Argenis Apolinario

Description:

“Mapping Indigenous, Black and Asian Resistance in NYC” is a work-in-progress multimedia installation that honors the under told stories of decolonization, liberation, and uprisings against white supremacy led by people of color on Lenape land (currently known as New York City) spanning the last 400 years. The installation currently features three organza banners, a 75-minute video and a selection of research materials. 

I started work on this project during my residency with KODA on Governors Island this past Fall 2021. This project has provided a critical creative outlet for me as I reflect on this last year of racial justice uprisings in the wake of the police murdering of George Floyd and in the face of COVID related anti-Asian violence. As a long time activist and avid student of history, I know that the white supremacist power structure has always pitted us, people of color against one another. I also know that Black, Indigenous, Asian and Latinx communities have a lot more in common than differences. 

I wanted to provide a visual portal into those stories of resistance that are rooted right here in New York City. I specifically focus on the stories in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. As a lifelong New Yorker I knew little about these histories. 

I spent countless hours researching, looking through newspaper archives, books and records, desperately trying to find oral histories and direct accounts told through Indigenous, Black, and Asian voices, but found very little. When there was a slave rebellion or indigenous uprising it was almost always told through the colonizer, the oppressor’s lens. Rarely, could I find an account from an emphatic witness or someone directly involved. Sadly most of these uprisings ended in tragic death and execution. And of course, we know this is how the dominant narrative gets shaped and fed to us as the “official” history.

The stories I cite are not meant to be comprehensive or exhaustive, just a snapshot of what I’ve been working on.  The stories span nearly 400 years - from the first account of enslaved people of African descent stolen from their homeland and forced onto New York soil in 1626 then organizing rebellions in 1712 and 1741, to the stories behind today’s Astor Place was one of the larger Lenape gathering spaces known as “Kintecoying” a major inter-tribal crossroads to the founding of Chinese Equal Rights League, one of the first groups formed in 1892 to fight for the equal rights of Chinese-Americans at the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

My aim was to uplift these often undertold parallel and intertwined histories of resistance.

Closing with this quote from Chief Denise Stonefish Kihkay from the Eelünaapéewi Lahkéewiit Council Lenape Delegation Visit to New York in 2019 “Both the blacks and Chinese are natural allies in our work to bring greater attention to our place in our homelands.”

Installation pieces:

Banners (dimensions 24” x 48”) L to R:

  • “Indigenous Resistance Matters”

  • “Black Resistance Matters”

  • “Chinese- American Resistance Matters”

Video:  Mapping Indigenous, Black and Asian Resistance in NYC (TRT: 1:14:33) - WATCH HERE
Table: Project Research Materials