Plants & Journeys: An Artist Talk
Join exhibiting artist Bundith Phunsombatlert, Brooklyn-Brooklyn-based community gardener/organizer Vere Gibbs, historian/curator Jack Tchen, and art critic/curator Lilly Wei, as they discuss Phunsombatlert's artistic practice and their own through the lenses of decolonization and grassroots community engagement.
Artist Phunsombatlert interviewed Gibbs along with tens of Brooklyn-based elders of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora for the creation of his artworks focusing on the trans-Atlantic slave trade, migration, and memory. Phunsombatlert wove their conversation and a chorus of community voices into the artwork currently on view at Central Library.
From the Caribbean to Brooklyn, from Asia to the United States—from wherever your migration journey has taken you-- join us in community, storytelling, and art.
The artist will bring plants from the series.
About the Speakers
Vere Gibbs: In 2007, Vere got permission from New York City Parks’ GreenThumb program to restore an abandoned community garden called Jerry and the Senior Gents Garden. Vere is the steward of this community garden and hopes that they will soon be able to rename the garden The Panoply Tangent, which means “the meeting place” of many splendid things. Vere is now a PhD candidate at William Howard Taft University, pursuing a doctorate in education with a concentration in leadership and management.
Bundith Phunsombatlert has been named the 2023 Katowitz-Radin Artist-in-Residence at Brooklyn Public Library. Drawing upon his personal experience of immigration and its history, his recent projects trace the unseen paths of immigrants and their immigration stories through real and imagined landscapes. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally for over twenty years. Selected exhibitions include at Auckland Triennial; New Zealand; Guangzhou Triennial, China; Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Australia, and International Biennial of Graphic Art, Slovenia, among others. Recently, his projects have been on exhibition at the Katonah Museum of Art, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Brooklyn Public Library (Central).
Jack (John Kuo Wei) Tchen is a historian, curator, writer, and dumpster diver devoted to anti-racist, anti-colonialist democratic participatory storytelling, scholarship, and opening up archives, museums, organizations, and classroom spaces to the stories and realities of those excluded and deemed “unfit” in master narratives. Professor Tchen has been honored to be the Inaugural Clement A. Price Professor of Public History & Humanities at Rutgers University – Newark and Director of the Clement Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture & the Modern Experience, since Fall 2018. Decolonizing the histories of Newark, NYC, and our estuarial bioregion is his primary focus.
Lilly Wei is a New York-based independent curator, writer, journalist and critic whose area of interest is global contemporary art and emerging art and artists.
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BPL Presents programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
