virtual
May 7, 2020
At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, GYOPO partnered with Los Angeles County Museum of Art and StopDicsriminAsian to launch “Racism is a Public Health Issue,” a series of panel discussions with esteemed academics, artists, writers, and cultural workers about ongoing racial disparities in health outcomes. The first of the three-part series launched in May 2020 and addressed the racialization of COVID-19 and the history of racism and stereotype-driven myths that have silenced and cleaved Asian American communities. GYOPO used the second installment to discuss the media’s representation of Black deaths, inviting questions on how art can be used to address the harms of racism. The third and final conversation of the series focused on how essential workers confront inadequate safety measures without fair wages and other basic protections, bringing to focus the racial underpinnings of COVID-19’s impact on communities of color and critical ways to generate awareness and change.
Panelists included: Vice President for Narrative, Arts, and Culture at Race Forward Jeff Chang; writer Cathy Park Hong; San Francisco State Chair of Asian American Studies Russell Jeung; actor-comedian Bowen Yang; artist Anicka Yi; Eraka P. Bath, MD, Associate Professor and Vice Chair for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion for the Department of Psychiatry at the Jane and Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, UCLA; Ava DuVernay, Filmmaker and Founder, ARRAY; Darnell Hunt, Professor and Dean of Social Sciences, UCLA; artist Rashid Johnson; President and Founder, Dolores Huerta Foundation Dolores Huerta; artist Narsiso Martinez; Civic Engagement Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Executive Director of Care in Action Jess Morales Rocketto; and Political Director for 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East Gabby Seay.
Programs were introduced by LACMA Curator of Contemporary Art and GYOPO co-founder Christine Y. Kim and moderated by Commonwealth & Council Partner Kibum Kim; LACMA Vice President of Education and Public Programs Naima J. Keith; and Director and Professor, UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Chon Noriega.
Co-presented with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Stop DiscriminAsian
When news of a novel coronavirus arrived in the United States in early January, xenophobia was not far behind. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, reports of racist attacks against Asian Americans have increased. As the number of confirmed cases exploded in America, racial disparities in health outcomes became starker. The hardest hit are often Black and Latinx communities—many of whom are essential workers. Join GYOPO, LACMA, and StopDiscriminAsian (SDA) for the first in a series of lively virtual conversations about the economic and racial disparities that have been made blatant by this crisis.
The rise of anti-Asian and anti-Asian American racism during the COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare deep racial inequities in the United States. In the first of a series of conversations about racism and public health, GYOPO, LACMA, and SDA invite five Asian American cultural producers to speak about the racialization of COVID-19; intersections with class and gender; the history of racism against Asian Americans; and the racist myths and stereotypes that have silenced and cleaved Asian American communities.
Panelists include Vice President for Narrative, Arts, and Culture at Race Forward Jeff Chang; writer Cathy Park Hong; San Francisco State Chair of Asian American Studies Russell Jeung; actor-comedian Bowen Yang; and artist Anicka Yi. Introduced by LACMA Curator of Contemporary Art and GYOPO co-founder Christine Y. Kim, and moderated by Commonwealth & Council Partner and Associate Director of Business Development at Sotheby’s LA Kibum Kim, the panelists will speak about their personal experiences, political actions, and the need for greater discourse and a recommitment to a broader struggle for racial equity.
GYOPO urges national and local leaders and citizens across parties, industries and institutions, including arts and culture, to meditate on inclusivity and collectively transition into a new normal. This moment necessitates greater educational discourse, self-evaluation, mutual aid, and a recommitment to the broader struggle for racial equity in alliance with other marginalized groups. This first conversation aims to identify the role cultural representations play in performing, reproducing, and subverting social stereotypes.
Jeff Chang is the Vice President for Narrative, Arts, and Culture at Race Forward. A national leader in narrative and cultural strategy, Jeff co-founded CultureStr/ke and ColorLines. His books include Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop, and Who We Be: A Cultural History of Race in Post Civil Rights America. Jeff was a USA Ford Fellow in Literature, winner of the Asian American Literary Award, and was recently named to the Frederick Douglass 200.
Cathy Park Hong is the author of the creative nonfiction book Minor Feelings: An Asian-American Reckoning and three poetry collections. Hong is a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems have been published in Poetry, The New York Times, The Paris Review, McSweeney's, and elsewhere. She is the poetry editor of The New Republic and full professor at the Rutgers University-Newark MFA program in poetry.
Dr. Russell Jeung is Chair and Professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. Dr. Jeung's research centers on Sociology of Race, the Sociology of Religion, and Social Movements. Dr. Jeung is the author of At Home in Exile: Finding Jesus Among My Ancestors and Refugee Neighbors, and Family Sacrifices: The Worldviews and Ethics of Chinese Americans. With Chinese for Affirmative Action and the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, he helped establish Stop AAPI Hate, a center that tracks anti-Asian discrimination and advocates for targeted policy interventions.
Bowen Yang is an actor, comedian, podcaster, and writer. Yang cohosts comedy podcast Las Culturistas and is a featured cast member on SNL. When he was promoted from writing staff to on-air cast in 2019, Yang became SNL's first Chinese-American, third openly gay male, and fourth Asian American cast member.
Anicka Yi's art fuses multi-sensory experience with synthetic and evolutionary biology to form lush bio-fictional landscapes. Through her research and 'techno-sensual' artistic exploration, Yi is opening new discourse in the realms of cognition, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Her recent solo exhibitions include the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Fridericianum, Kassel; Kunsthalle Basel; List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; The Kitchen, New York; and The Cleveland Museum of Art.