“On the Front Lines: Portraits of AAPI Activists” highlights a handful of emerging and established activists in the AAPI community. By documenting their fight for social justice, the project archives personal anecdotes and adds critical figures to the historical canon. Occupying diverging realms of advocacy – from academia and arts to non-profits and politics – each activist provides a glimpse into their world and the work they do within it. Among the multitude of experiences, they share where and how they grew up, the people and events that influenced them and most importantly, the initiatives they lead today. Together, their experiences, discoveries and reflections create a rich database for future generations to draw from. As Karen Ishizuka writes in her 2016 book, Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties, “Asian Americans and other disenfranchised groups have always relied on oral histories to recover and reconstruct our collective pasts against the hegemony of dominant narratives.” This project, as Ishizuka prompts, is but one endeavor that aims to document our history and the movers and shakers within it.
See more of the this artist's work: kalaidoscope.com/portfolio
