Asian American Arts Centre
It obtained its original location on the third floor of 26 Bowery Street as an Artist-In-Residence (AIR) tenant in 1976; the education programs were expanded into a Saturday Community School on-site, which included dance and later art classes for children and adults.
Accumulating contributions from over 300 artists over the next several months, CHINA: June 4, 1989 was exhibited at the Blum Helman Gallery and PS1 (now MoMA PS1) in 1990, and travelled to Austin, Texas, Cleveland, Ohio, and later to Flint, Michigan in 1994.
The Arts Centre was contracted to curate an exhibition in the U.S. Senate's Russell Rotunda in Washington, D.C. upon the escape of Chai Ling and Wang Dan, two former leaders of the student demonstrations, from China.
AADT collaborated with notable choreographers Saeko Ichinohe, Sun Ock Lee, and Reynaldo Alejandro in the Asian New Dance Coalition; the company also invited guest choreographers, dancers, performers, and artists such as Yung Yung Tsuai, Muna Tseng, Zuni Icosahedron, Sin Cha Hong, poets Kimiko Hahn & Shu Ting, playwright David Henry Hwang, and artist Zhang Hongtu.
ARTSPIRAL, a magazine published by AAAC that focuses broadly on citywide Asian American cultural issues, ran as an annual print publication from 1988 to 1993; it was revived in 2008 as an online blog.
[5][7] The Artists-in-Residence program, which supported 19 young artists in total, including Zhang Hongtu, Margo Machida, Yong Soon Min, Byron Kim, and Dinh Q. Lê, concluded in 1993.
[9] Contemporary artists who have exhibited at AAAC include Vito Acconci, Ai Weiwei,[10] Tomie Arai, Shusaku Arakawa, Natvar Bhavsar, Wafaa Bilal, Luis Camnitzer, Chen Zhen, Emily Cheng, Mel Chin, Albert Chong, Kip Fulbeck, Chitra Ganesh, Gu Wenda, Zarina Hashmi, Tehching Hsieh, Venancio C. Igarta, Yun-Fei Ji, Indira Freitas Johnson, Matsumi Kanemitsu, Ik-Joong Kang, Byron Kim, Swati Khurana, Barbara Kruger, Nina Kuo, Anna Kuo, Kwok Man Ho, Dinh Q. Lê, Simone Leigh, Choong Sup Lim, Nam June Paik,[11] Alfonso A. Ossorio, Howardena Pindell, Faith Ringgold, Tara Sabharwal, Toshio Sasaki,[12] Dread Scott, Roger Shimomura, Kunie Sugiura, Tam Van Tran, Tseng Kwong Chi, Toyo Tsuchiya, Martin Wong, Xu Bing, Lily Yeh, Charles Yuen, Danny N. T. Yung, and Zhang Hongtu.
Ng became well known in New York's Chinatown as a singer and composer of muk'yu, or wooden fish, a type of narrative folk song typically sung in the Toisanese dialect.
As a gateway for artists, dancers, staff, interns, students, teachers, volunteers, and audience, AAAC has passed on the traditional and contemporary dynamics of its community's heritage.
The Public Education program began with figure drawing classes, evolving to offer gallery talks, performances, tai chi workshops, and the on-site Saturday Community Art School for children.
A frequent recipient and benefactor of government grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) since the 1970s, the Arts Centre experienced a loss in funding when Congress reduced the NEA's annual budget from $180 million to $99.5 million in 1996 as a result of pressure from conservative American interest groups and Congress members including the American Family Foundation, Heritage Foundation, and former U.S.
Senator Jesse Helms amid controversy around government funding toward sexually explicit art by artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano.
As a local cultural non-profit that derived a large portion of its budget from public funding, AAAC was forced to scale back its programming from the mid-1990s to the late-2000s.
As part of its off-site programming, the Arts Centre has frequently collaborated with the New Museum's biennial Ideas City Festival—in 2013, it hosted a panel discussion at the Festival titled Space Time: Presence that addressed concepts of quantum space-time in both an aesthetic and scientific context.
Along with 20 other New York City-based organizations including the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, En Foco, and Picture the Homeless, AAAC has both endorsed and received an endorsement from the People's Cultural Plan (PCP),[18] an equity initiative launched in 2017 to redistribute city government funding and support to artists, art workers, tenants, community art organizations, and various historic neighborhoods in New York City.
