Lani Asunción, Big Luau Give Back Aloha | Photo by Sasha PedroLani Asunción, Big Luau Give Back Aloha | Photo by Sasha PedroOn view: January 20–April 13, 2024
Closing Reception & Two Artist Talks: April 13, 2024 | 3-6pm
You’re invited to join us on Saturday, April 13th for the closing receptions of our current Mills Gallery exhibitions. From 3-4 pm, curator J.R. Uretsky and artist Lani Asunción will have a conversation about their exhibition Duty-Free Paradise. From 5-5:30 pm, artists Robert Rovenolt and Nathan Heilman will discuss Rovenolt’s current Project Room Show, Robert Rovenolt: (no regrets).
Duty-Free Paradise (DFP) (2020-23) plays on the tensions between lived and imagined Hawai‘i. Through the lens of tourism, around which the Islands’ economy heavily circulates, this work explores the contradictions between perceptions and realities of island life as a paradise constructed through American pop culture, underwritten by militarism and biopolitics.
Duty-Free Paradise at the Mills Gallery at Boston Center for the Arts (BCA) explores the colonial history between Boston and Hawai‘i through Asunción’s queer, multiracial, Filipinx identity and lived experience. In the 1920s, Asunción’s grandparents immigrated from the Philippines to the island of O’ahu to work at the Kahuku Sugar Plantation, where Asunción’s father was born. Decades later, Asunción found themselves creating in their studio in Jamaica Plain, a few blocks away from the historic Dole House home of James Drummond Dole — founder of The Hawaiian Pineapple Company, now known as the Dole Food Company. Dole’s legacy is intricately rooted in the dispossession of indigenous Kānaka Maoli lands orchestrated by his cousin, Governor Stanford Dole, a key figure in the 1893 coup against the Hawaiian Monarchy. In 1898, the once-free sovereign state was illegally annexed by the United States. Mirroring the same year Spain formally ceded the Philippine Islands to the U.S. This convergence of events set the stage for the migration of Filipinos to Hawai‘i, where they labored on plantations such as Dole’s.
As a Filipinx-American who grew up in Hawai‘i, now living in Boston, Asunción offers an exposition of Boston’s complicated history with Hawai‘i. Through honoring Kānaka Maoli culture and the Filipinx diaspora, they embody characters that critique colonialism and imperialism with a compelling sense of ritualistic care.
This project was supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.
Lani Asunción, DFP | Photo by Sasha Pedro
Print by Lani Asunción, DFP Dole Target detail
Lani Asunción, Isle of the Blessed | Photo by Sasha Pedro
Lani Asunción, Song Land Sea | Photo by Ken Butler
Public Programs
Opening Reception
Friday, January 26 | 6–9pm
BCA Mills Gallery, 551 Tremont St., Boston, MA 02116
Join us for the public opening reception for two exhibitions: Lani Asunción: Duty-Free Paradise and, in the Project Room, Robert Rovenolt: (no regrets), 6-9pm in the Mills Gallery. Concurrently, next door from 5:30–8pm, there’s an open house in the Artist Studios Building holding our BCA Studio Residency.
Public Performance
Saturday, March 16 | 4–6pm
BCA Mills Gallery, 551 Tremont St., Boston, MA 02116
Join us on Saturday, March 16, 2024, from 4-6 pm at the Mills Gallery for performances by Lani Asunción, Shey’ Rí Acu’ Rivera Ríos and Anabel Vázquez Rodríguez. Artists will conjure cultural memory, queer power, and liberated futures through performances that respond to the impacts of imperialism in the context of the United States and grounded on the events of 1898 when the United States invaded Puerto Rico and annexed Hawai’i.
*Performance starts promptly at 4:30 pm
Closing Reception & Two Artist Talks
Saturday, April 13 | 3–6pm
BCA Mills Gallery, 551 Tremont St., Boston, MA 02116
You’re invited to join us on Saturday, April 13th for the closing receptions of our current Mills Gallery exhibitions. From 3-4 pm, curator J.R. Uretsky and artist Lani Asunción will have a conversation about their exhibition Duty-Free Paradise. From 5-5:30 pm, artists Robert Rovenolt and Nathan Heilman will discuss Rovenolt’s current Project Room Show, Robert Rovenolt: (no regrets).
Lani Asunción, WCH Dole House | Photo by Rita Lambardi
About
About the Artist
Lani Asunción
Lani Asunción is an interdisciplinary multimedia artist who makes socially engaged work that uses transmedia storytelling through new media technologies and immersive digital environments. Asuncion creates a visual language guided by historical research, community engagement, and experimental ritualized performance connected to their identity as a queer multiracial Filipinx-American. They use new media to encourage conversations that magnify connections to facilitate healing in the face of cultural violence, oppression, and ancestral intergenerational trauma narratives. Asunción has been awarded the Kala Fellowship, Future Frequencies Fellowship at MassMoCA Studios, and NEFA Public Art for Spatial Justice Grant. They are founder and Creative Director of Digital Soup, a Boston based queer BIPOC multimedia arts collective.
About the Curator
J.R. Uretsky
J.R. Uretsky is an artist, performer, musician, and art curator living in Providence, Rhode Island. Uretsky has over fifteen years of experience organizing, designing, and installing exhibitions. Uretsky worked as the curator at the New Bedford Art Museum, where they exhibited Pete Souza (Chief Official White House Photographer for President Barack Obama) and Academy Award-winning (Black Panther, 2019) costume designer Ruth E. Carter. Their artwork and writing have been published in print, online, and video journals such as Headmaster Magazine, Sculpture Magazine, Gaga Stigmata, Big Red & Shiny, and ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art. Uretsky earned degrees from Biola University, the University of Connecticut, and Harvard University.