Photos by Maya Wali Richardson

R U 4 REAL: An Exhibit on Authenticity and Anger, YJC x BUFU Collab, June 2016

Sean-Kierre Lyons (b. 1991) is a non-binary activist and painter. Kierre is based in New York City, mainly works with acrylic on flat canvas and is self taught. They are inspired by the events of their own life, African art, most of their work deals with experiences of being black person in America and addressing other forms of oppression.

Artist Bio: Parissah Lin is 10% anger, 12% unpunctuated streams of thought, and 78% pretty colored smoke. She focuses on visual and performance arts as a space through which diasporic, indigenous, and post-colonial identities can resist, refuse, or subvert the violence produced by colonialism and imperialism. Her artistic praxis uses video art, archival and collected footage, public mourning, and performance. She spends a lot of time crying.

"Bacon", 2016 Art is not just for "artists", it's sets of techniques that can be used to empower folks to be artistic. Walter's goal is to lift up and create new forms of representation for black and brown folks. He believes one of the responsibilities of an artist is to document the world around them, whether its representing the past, chronicling the present or imagining the future. On his pursuit to become a visual journalist, Walter has worked as a teaching artist at various NYC public high schools, continues to design for the Black Lives Matter network, and creates acrylic works amongst other creative endeavors. His passion for collaborating and creating have brought him around the country and world alike. To learn more about Walter and his work, head over to his site at www.strikingly.com/waltercruz, instagram: @2oceans

"The Caribbean’s history of violent colonization along with its’ current states of unrest-from sky-high murder rates in Trinidad and Tobago and its’ evolution into a narco-state, to the underground sex trafficking rings that pepper the region, to ethnic cleansing in the Dominican Republic-is subject to erasure through many forms of media on the Internet, leaving daily traumas largely unearthed. This piece, entitled Coup, aims to disrupt the visual narrative projected onto the region by the West by subtly infiltrating popular perception and forcing viewers to confront the truth of what happens on these islands everyday."

"The characters say "闭" and "嘴," which together mean "shut up." The way this type of papercut usually appears is with the character "囍," which is pretty directly associated with matrimony. "Shut up" is something I associate with marriage as well as what is expected of me to perform as a Chinese-American woman."

"The foundation of my work is rooted in memory and communication interrogating how distractions drive behaviors when communicating as well as how memory subconsciously roots itself in the the contemporary proliferation of black identity. My works are comprised of varying video, audio, visual and physical elements. I record video sequences of benign interactions between myself and objects while layering snippets of recorded conversations as the audio for the video in hopes of portraying the random nature of thinking and how it rarely relates to your present circumstance. My collage works consists of mixed media on paper as well as video marionette narratives that utilize joy as well as nostalgia to question where blackness thrives and where it will evolve to."

🔸 Azzah Sultan is a multidisciplinary artist from Malaysia currently based in New York City. Azzah grew up moving around a lot, which gave her a very strong perspective in seeing things in a global scale. Ever since moving to New York City four years ago to study fine arts at Parson’s School of Design, she was confronted with widespread Islamophobia from ignorant misrepresentations of Muslims within the media. Her work explores religion, race and culture to identity within a western society. 🔸

Dana Davenport is a Korean and African American photographer and performance artist working with themes related to identity, the body, and representation of the body. She uses symbols and text as a way to distinguish between her African American and Korean heritage. She uses her body as a symbol of her Blackness, bringing into conversation the erasure of her Korean. Her work is both a celebration and critique of these cultures.

Exhibiting work by: ~ Elliott Jerome Brown ~ Sonia Choi ~ Walter Cruz ~ Dana Davenport ~ Stephano Espinoza Galarza ~ Kearra Amaya Gopee ~ Tiffany Liu ~ Parissah Lin ~ Sean-Kierre Lyons ~ Emily Mock ~Devin Morris ~ Haleigh Nickerson ~ Azzah Sultan This exhibition is part of By Us For Us: A Month of Black & Asian Futurity. Check out the link for the other events: https://www.facebook.com/events/982193815234924/ ___ YJC (YELLOW JACKETS Collective) is a queer/intersectional Asian American group intent on collaborating with radical folks to produce/curate/discuss/archive alternative movements that are by and for marginalized bodies and communities. BUFU (By Us For Us) is a decentralized multimedia documentary project creating space to deconstruct the Black-Asian cultural and political relationship.

- Dean Wong, author of “Seeing the Light: Four Decades in Chinatown””

In partnership with the YELLOW JACKETS as a follow up to their exhbition: YJC & BUFU Present: R U 4 REAL. An Exhibition On Authenticity and Anger, they will be leading us through a talk on how anger & authenticity are coded, socialized, and projected onto Black & Asian bodies within a system of white supremacy. By Us For Us: A Month of Black & Asian Futurity (JUNE 3rd - JULY 2nd) https://www.facebook.com/events/982193815234924/ Join us every Friday in June for BUFU TALKS. A series of events around Black+Asian futurity through "talks". These sessions will be large group facilitated community discussions that will hope to create spaces for dialouge across community around politics, identity, solidarity, and more. BUFU TALKS is a community based, nurturing, round table discussion aimed towards healing, sharing, and growing. This is a space that requires no prior knowledge or education on the subject and is open to transform for those who participate and engage.