Announcing 2025 Artist/Activist Fellow

Continuing Asian Arts Initiative’s dedication to building community through the power of art, we launched a call for proposal last Fall for our inaugural Artist/Activist Fellowship to seek artists and collectives who work at the intersection between artistic practice and social activism. We are excited to announce our 2025 Artist/Activist Fellows:

Lauren Lowe (she/they), who also goes by LL, is a queer writer and teaching artist with family roots in Philadelphia’s Chinatown. LL has been organizing with the Save Chinatown Coalition, teaching courses at Writers Room on storytelling for social change, and coaching girls’ basketball with the Philadelphia Suns.

Fellowship Project:

"I envision a collaborative and community-driven story-sharing project centering on these neighborhood basketball histories—and more broadly, collective relationships to sport/play and community rec spaces. Through a generative public workshop(s), I would use writing and photography to document these stories and facilitate intergenerational dialogues across communities."

The Memory Workers’ Guild (MWG) exists to create a better present and future for the legacies of Black cultural workers that are often buried behind the nature of our care. While members engage in cross-cultural work in solidarity with all oppressed groups, we center Black, queer, and femme perspectives as both clarifying principles and protective boundaries against the anti-Black racial, sexual, cis-hetero, and class violence that appears all too regularly in our lines of work.

Fellowship Project:

"For the Fellowship, MWG would like to recommence the Memory Work Labs, a community of culture workers exchanging ideas and organizing around our labor experiences while also making space to build on our personal creative toolkits. MWG will experiment in developing non hierarchical workshop structures that prioritize collective learning towards cultural action over singular facilitation. Each workshop will center around a theme in culture work. MWG will invite a member of the guild to guide the experience and work together to create a framework that incorporates their practice while leaving room for organic conversation around collective action."

Focusing on relationship building as a process, rather than producing a final product for an exhibition, the Fellows will develop their projects in dialogue with AAI staff, with one another, and with members of the general public during the course of the fellowship, which will allow for an ongoing exchange among collaborators. Stay tuned for more updates on the Fellowship and work from our Fellows. Welcome to Asian Arts Initiative, LL and MWG!

Lauren Lowe

Lauren Lowe (she/they) also goes by LL. A queer writer and teaching artist with family roots in Philadelphia’s Chinatown, she is working on a nonfiction book about the gentrification she’s witnessed in the city—drawing contrasts and parallels between her experiences working in West Philadelphia with the history of Chinatown and her father’s involvement in political resistance to city planning decisions in the 1970s. Lately, LL has been organizing with the Save Chinatown Coalition, teaching courses at Writers Room on storytelling for social change, and coaching girls’ basketball with the Philadelphia Suns.

Memory Workers' Guild

Website

The Memory Workers’ Guild (MWG) exists to create a better present and future for the legacies of Black cultural workers that are often buried behind the nature of our care. While members engage in cross-cultural work in solidarity with all oppressed groups, we center Black, queer, and femme perspectives as both clarifying principles and protective boundaries against the anti-Black racial, sexual, cis-hetero, and class violence that appears all too regularly in our lines of work.

Whether in museums, schools, community centers, non-profits, neighborhoods, and otherwise, there’s a bitter irony many of us have experienced that our deep care for cultural preservation has led to a dismissal of our needs by institutional powers and sometimes even ourselves. In the case of the former, MWG serves as a platform to leverage a collective effort against these painful dismissals, a potential to fight together against our shared working grievances. In the case of the latter, MWG serves as a home base for the replenishment of our tools of care, joy, culture, and energy.

Call for Artist/Activist Fellowship 2025

Artwork by Youth Art and Self-Empowerment Project, from ABOLITION NOW! Exhibition at Asian Arts Initiative, 2020

Fellowship Details + FAQs

*Due to a shift in the focus of the Spring 2025 exhibition, Asian Arts Initiative is renaming this fellowship to the Artist/Activist Fellowship, and extending the deadline to December 8, 2024.

Asian Arts Initiative (AAI) seeks artist and activist collectives to serve as fellows during the Spring 2025 exhibition. The exhibition will highlight the intersection between artistic practice and social activism, with a specific interest in Afro-Asian community solidarity.

Continuing AAI’s dedication to building community through the power of art, Artist/Activist Fellows will be asked to develop their projects/proposals during the course of their fellowship, in dialogue with AAI staff, with other Fellows, and with members of the general public. The intent of this iterative process is to foster conversation and collaboration through the duration of the exhibition. While allowing for more focus on relationship building as a process, this strategy, we hope, eliminates the pressure of producing a complete product for the Exhibition. This fellowship will allow for an ongoing exchange among collaborators. We encourage a diverse group of multidisciplinary artists and activists to join the experiment.