In case you are unaware, The Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU featured a multidisciplinary Ilocano artist and building practitioner as their 2025 Artist-in-Residence: Sean Connelly.
His exhibition is called “Hawai‘i is not the United States, but it is your Future”
Images captured on November 19, 2025 in the exhibition space at 20 Cooper Square.
About the artist [from the project description]
Born and raised in Honolulu, Sean Connelly (2025 Artist-in-Residence) is an artist and building practitioner working collaboratively across sculpture, architecture, film, and cartography. Connelly’s practice engages deeply with decolonial interventions and supports Native liberation, food sovereignty, land justice, and cultural resurgence centering ‘āina (Land / That Which Feeds).
About the exhibition [from the project description]
“Hawai‘i is not the United States, but it is your Future” foregrounds oceanic ways of knowing in a continental setting, advancing an approach to the built environment that conceives building, body, land, water, and sky as an interdependent system of relation and care. Through sculptural and cartographic works, the exhibition invites audiences to reconsider urban and ecological futures using Pacific frameworks in which interconnections are repaired to nurture continuity rather than fragmentation. Presented at 20 Cooper Square Gallery on Lenape lands occupied by the United States, the exhibition centers Hawai‘i history and Oceanic perspectives while taking care not to overwrite the diverse local and Indigenous histories of New York and the East Coast; instead, the exhibition situates itself in humble dialogue with ongoing, often overlooked struggles against dispossession, forced removal, and erasure that Native peoples across Turtle Island, Hawaiʻi, and the Pacific continue to confront in parallel.
Link for further reading:
https://apa.nyu.edu/exhibition/hawaii-is-not-the-united-states-but-it-is-your-future/
