Asian American Arts Alliance Names Third Year 2018 Van Lier Fellows

The Asian American Arts Alliance has administered its third cycle of the Van Lier Fellowships in the categories of Visual Arts Practice and Visual Arts Curation and announces its 2018 Van Lier Fellows: Maia Chao for Visual Arts Practice and Simon Wu for Visual Arts Curation.

Each Van Lier Fellow will receive a $12,000 cash stipend as well as a package of professional development opportunities that include artistic mentorship, leadership coaching, and technical assistance resources. The fellowships are supported by the Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund at the New York Community Trust.

In addition to the selected fellows, the Alliance has selected five applicant finalists to receive Notes of Extraordinary Merit to acknowledge the caliber of artistic vision and value clearly demonstrated by the individual's practice: Emily Chow Bluck, Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin, Alice Yang, and Rosalie Yu in Visual Arts Practice and Danielle Wu in Visual Arts Curation.

Review panels of respected professionals in the field were selected based on their perspectives and experiences working with artists of diverse practices and cultural backgrounds. The review panel for Visual Arts Practice included Shane Brennan, Assistant Director of Program Development at the Trust for Governors Island; Sheetal Prajapati, Director of Public Engagement at Pioneer Works; and Kay Takeda, Vice President for Grants and Services at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. The review panel for Visual Arts Curation included Shira Backer, Assistant Curator at the Jewish Museum; Gabriel de Guzman, Curator and Director of Exhibitions at Smack Mellon; and Prerana Reddy, Director of Programs at A Blade of Grass (formerly Director of Public Events at the Queens Museum of Art). Both panels were moderated by Leslie Kuo, Assistant Director, Annual Fund at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, visual arts consultant, and board member at the Asian American Arts Alliance.

"The Alliance is thrilled to welcome these two outstanding emerging visual arts professionals as this year's Van Lier Fellows," said Anjali Goyal, Acting Executive Director of the Asian American Arts Alliance. "Sally and Edward Van Lier were proud supporters of young talent, and Maia and Simon Wu join an incredible roster of Van Lier Fellows across the city whose careers were advanced over the past 27 years with the support of this eminent fellowship. The Alliance is proud to administer this program on behalf of the New York Community Trust, supporting the Alliance's mission to build a pipeline of talented artists of color and prepare them to be leaders in the field."

The Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund at the New York Community Trust has been underwriting similar fellowships since 1991 at such dynamic and barrier-breaking nonprofit arts institutions as New Dramatists, Second Stage Theatre, and Asian American Writers' Workshop. The Trust carries out the Van Liers' legacy of arts appreciation by supporting arts groups and training programs. To read more about the fund's history, click here.

Maia Chao, 2018 Van Lier Visual Arts Practice Fellow, is an interdisciplinary artist from Providence, RI whose work-often playful and absurd-uses existing institutions and their systems as sites of social intervention and critique. Using video, performance, installation, and social practice, she is dedicated to art that models counter-institutions, alternative spaces, and redistribution. Her work has been shown at the Hudson D. Walker Gallery, Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum, Exposé Gallery, Granoff Center for the Arts at Brown University, Driveby Projects, and the Rhode Island Convention Center. She is slated to participate in Open Engagement (Queens Museum) and the Museum of Capitalism (School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts) in 2018. She recently co-founded a socially engaged artwork at the RISD Museum called Look at Art. Get Paid. with prospects to expand to a cohort of art museums. Chao is the recipient of a Fulbright grant and a RISD Presidential Scholarship, and she recently completed a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. She holds a BA in Anthropology from Brown University and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. maiachao.com

Simon Wu, 2018 Van Lier Visual Arts Curation Fellow, is a Burmese American curator and graphic designer involved in collaborative art production and research. He has produced independent exhibitions at his own apartment, THINK!Chinatown gallery, and Parasol Projects. His most recent exhibition, Magical Girlz, brought together three artists to produce new work examining the way children make sense of the adult world. He currently serves as a Public Programs Fellow at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Program Coordinator for the Racial Imaginary Institute, for which he is part of the curatorial team for an upcoming exhibition at the Kitchen (On Whiteness, June 2018). He received a BA in Art History and Studio Art from Princeton University in 2017, where his thesis, "Resistance performed: politics and aesthetics in Myanmar," was advised by Irene V. Small. simonwu.info