Diaspora People’s Month 2020
Week 1: Philosophy, Art, and Action
On July 1, 2020, SAMASAMA x SCL launched Diaspora People’s Month with a discussion featuring visual artist Jon Henry, whose work focuses on photography and text, Tammy Nguyen, multimedia artist and founder of Passenger Pigeon Press, and Dominic Green, filmmaker, photographer and 2020 resident artist at The Nicholson Project.
Read about the artists and their reflections on diaspora below, and browse works for sale as part of the Diaspora People’s Month Gallery.
Jon Henry is a visual artist working with photography and text, from Queens NY (resides in Brooklyn). His work reflects on family, sociopolitical issues, grief, trauma and healing within the African American community. His work has been published both nationally and internationally and exhibited in numerous galleries including Aperture Foundation, Smack Mellon, and BRIC among others. Known foremost for the cultural activism in his work, his projects include studies of athletes from different sports and their representations.
He was recently named one of LensCulture's Emerging Artists for 2019 and has also won the Film Photo Prize for Continuing Film Project sponsored by Kodak.
My practice is an exploration of confusion. I am interested in confusion as a tense space for either radical thinking or complacency. I explore what this tension means to me, and what it could mean to my viewers, by creating stories realized in printmaking, painting, publishing, and happenings.
I am part of the Vietnamese War Diaspora. My parents are Vietnamese boat refugees from 1978 and I was born in San Francisco in 1984. Their passage and my birth created a distance that I try to fill with my artwork where I am constantly exploring topics that might allow me to understand the distance between their generation and mine. This in-between space is confusing, but I find some solace in engaging with communities such as this one with SAMASAMA Art which centers these narratives of migration that cease to have a definition.
My interpretation of what Diaspora People's Month means to me is knowledge of self and what the power of that knowledge invokes within a being. I believe that knowing thyself and the understanding of a person's ancestral lineage can improve their existence exponentially because the way they're showcased and programmed isn't handled through the gaze of an outsider. I believe through my work I try to showcase black people in a positive light and more important to me naturally and beautifully because historically our imagery has been controlled by a system that was not built for us but built to destroy us once we were no longer chattel.
