Photo credit: Matthew Okazaki, Ojichan's Home, Crystal City, Texas, 1945, Digital collage, 12 x 16
Join Pao Arts Center, Curator Leslie Anne Condon, and artists Melody Hsu, Madeline Lee, Yuko Okabe, Matthew Okazaki, Melissa Teng, and Lily Xie as we celebrate the opening of Intergenerational Storytelling on view at our gallery from January 27 - March 25, 2022.
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About the Artists:
Melody Hsu is an international student from Taiwan—and as of the past five years—a proud Bostonian. As a socially engaged multidisciplinary creator, she believes that the soul of art and design is the human experience and that the heart is service. Melody dedicated 2021 to delivering multimedia experiences for equity as she curates work that strives to express, educate, and entertain.
Madeline Lee is an artist exploring the intersections of identity and place. She grew up near Cleveland, Ohio and has been based in the Boston area since 2015. Madeline studied at Tufts University, blending Environmental and Architectural Studies with her artistic practice. She has a deep curiosity for changing landscapes and the stories we tell through sharing food and spaces. Centered around process, her work is based in observing people, environmental shifts and the subtle processes that create our daily lives. Madeline's recent work has been shown with Unbound Visual Arts, Dorchester Art Project, Creatives of Color Boston, and at the 2021 in PUBLIC Festival.
Starting with zany and colorful comics on the back of her father’s work papers, Yuko has since honed her artistic skills into stories and editorials that evoke whimsy, humility, and curiosity. In addition to her formally-trained illustration practice, she explores interdisciplinary collaborations to advocate for “arts-thinking’’ in non-traditional settings. Such endeavors have led her to research and team opportunities in fields such as healthcare, community development, education, technology, and social work. She earned her BFA in Illustration with Honors from the Rhode Island School of Design and has received recognition from Society of Illustrators LA, Creative Quarterly, BallPit Mag, Light Grey Art Lab, and 3x3 - The Magazine of Contemporary Illustration. Her illustration practice involves freelancing with various nonprofit, commercial, startup, and independent clients as well as pursuing personal work through paintings and short-form narratives. From 2019-2021, she was an Artist Fellow with North Shore Community Development Coalition through Enterprise Community Partners Rose Fellowship, a national program which places designers and cultural practitioners with affordable housing organizations. She's a proud auntie, has an oatmeal Instagram, and is hoping that one day she'll learn how to ride a bike.
Matthew Akira Okazaki is an architect, artist, and educator based out of Boston, Massachusetts. His work investigates spaces of the in-between: territories of ambiguous authorship, cultural thresholds, and sites of convergent histories. Alongside his art practice, Okazaki runs the architecture and design firm Field Office LLC, and is a partner at Architecture for Public Benefit, an architecture office serving mission-driven organizations in the local Boston area. Okazaki holds a Master of Architecture from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design with commendation and a Bachelor of Science in Applied Mathematics from UCLA. He currently teaches architecture and design studios at Northeastern and Tufts University, and has held previous teaching positions at Brandeis University and Harvard University’s Design Discovery.
Melissa Q. Teng is a social practice and multimedia artist whose works examine systems of control and the freedoms within, often as acts of collective imagination and care. Her work is frequently in collaboration with community and responds to issues of hypervisibility and invisibility. Her interdisciplinary practice is rooted in storytelling, ranging from interactive media to public art. Currently, she is a graduate student in the Data + Feminism Lab in the Dept. of Urban Studies + Planning at MIT. She is part of the inaugural Collective Futures Fund cohort through The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Tufts University Art Galleries. Her research about design, technology, and community engagement has been published in New Media & Society, the proceedings of Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM SIGCHI), and the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction. She has professional experience working as a UX & data visualization designer, and her teams’ work has been recognized by the Webby’s, Kantar’s Information Is Beautiful, Awwwards, FastCompany’s World Changing Ideas, the New York Times, and others.
Lily Xie is a Chinese-American artist and educator whose socially engaged work explores radical imagination, reimagined histories, and other routes to collective resilience. Lily shares strategies adapted from her drawing and bookmaking practices as tools for community empowerment and justice. Most recently, she was a member of the inaugural cohort of Radical Imagination for Racial Justice, a program from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and the City of Boston. Lily is part of New England Foundation for the Arts’ Public Art for Social Justice 2021 cohort, and has been awarded grants from The Boston Foundation, the Mayor's Office of Arts & Culture, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Transmedia Storytelling Initiative. Lily’s work has been displayed at the Boston Center for the Arts, Unbound Visual Arts, and Pink Noise Studios
About the Curator:
Leslie Anne Condon is a Boston-area multidisciplinary artist and independent curator, interested in Critical Race Art History and issues of representation within the arts. She graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a degree in English and a minor in the Fine Arts. She briefly attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts as a Diploma student and earned her Post Baccalaureate in Fine Art 3D from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2011.
About the Partner:
Unbound Visual Arts (UVA) is a unique Allston-Brighton-based non-profit art organization. We serve the Greater Boston community with impactful educational programs and exhibits to encourage learning, engagement, and change.
Contact: Leslie Condon, 617-863-9080 x 2017