For our second Open Session tomorrow evening at Storefront, multimedia artist and co-founder of Chinatown Art Brigade, Betty Yu examines on the ground socially-engaged movements, in particular the growing grassroots movement in NYC calling for the abolition of prisons, the police state and the carceral system as a whole. Since 2017, the city has continued to push forward plans to build 4 borough based jails in the guise of closing Rikers Island, one of the worst prisons in the U.S. One of those jails is in the heart of NYC’s Chinatown in Lower Manhattan. It will be the tallest jailscraper in the world. The other jails are being proposed in Kew Gardens, Queens; Downtown Brooklyn, and in Mott Haven, Bronx. Meanwhile, prominent activists from the feminist and social justice movement are praising a new initiative to build a “Feminist” Jail in Harlem.
Yu has assembled a special group of activists and community leaders— attorney, abolitionist, researcher and political educator, Jindu Obiofuma, Denise Zhou from W.O.W. Project, Mon Mohapatra from Critical Resistance NY, No New Jails NYC, and Inside/Outside Organizing Collective NYC, and Anna Ozbek, member of Chinatown Art Brigade, for a roundtable discussion to highlight critical grassroots approaches to advancing the fight for abolition in immigrant, low-income and communities of color.
About the Artist
Betty Yu is a multimedia artist, photographer, filmmaker and activist born and raised in New York City to Chinese immigrant parents. Yu integrates documentary film, new media platforms, and community-infused approaches into her practice, and she is a co-founder of Chinatown Art Brigade, a cultural collective using art to advance anti-gentrification organizing. She holds a BFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College/CUNY, and New Media Narratives program certificate from the International Center Photography.
Yu teaches video, social practice, art and activism at Pratt Institute, John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY, and The New School, in addition to over 20 years of community, media justice, and labor organizing work. Among various distinctions, she was a participant of After the Plaster Foundation, or, “Where Can We Live?” (Queens Museum, 2020-21). In Fall 2020, she curated Imagining De-Gentrified Futures at Apex Art in Tribeca, NYC.
About the Participants
Jindu Obiofuma is an attorney, abolitionist, researcher and political educator committed to redefining the experience of justice, healing and safety. She is a believer in abolition democracy and in the inevitability of Black liberation. She has worked on issues of pretrial policy, juvenile justice policy and Black liberatory policy at Harvard, Columbia, and Law for Black Lives. She plans to do this work for as long as she is able and hopes to continue building community along the way.
Denise Zhou is a filmmaker and cultural worker based in Brooklyn, New York. She is currently collaborating with the W.O.W. Project, a youth arts and anti-gentrification organization in Chinatown, as part of the Creatives Rebuild New York Artist Employment Program.
Mon Mohapatra is an Indian abolitionist organizer, propagandist, and poet living on Lenni-Lenape / Canarsie land. Her work uses play, collaborative art, and campaigning to push forward solidarity strategies to end anti-Black, casteist, ableist, anti-queer, and ecocidal state violence in the US and elsewhere, as expressed in systems of policing, imprisonment, coercion, family separation, and social control.
Anna Ozbek is a multimedia journalist, filmmaker, activist, and educator. She is a member of the cultural organizing collective Chinatown Art Brigade and the art-activist collective The Illuminator. Her work has appeared in CNN, NY1, National Geographic, Global Post, and Democracy Now!. She has an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College and is an Assistant Professor of Visual Journalism at Purchase College.
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On the Ground
On the Ground is a yearlong research project and exhibition series about New York City’s ground floor. Through a close look at the urban typology of the storefront, this expansive endeavor presents newly commissioned artistic explorations and dialogues about the heterogeneous threshold between public and private space throughout 2023. The project will unfold through three exhibitions, a radio show, an open call, a public program, and a thematic reader.
