A/P/A Collections at NYU

Karl Akiya (1909-2001) was born in San Francisco and educated in Japan. A vocal opponent of Japanese militarism, he returned to the US in 1931. Upon his return, he joined the Japanese American Citizens’ League and organized kibei (Japanese Americans who had been educated in Japan) membership sections in California. After a brief incarceration at ...

Andolan (Organizing South Asian Workers) is a non-governmental, membership based group in New York City that organizes and advocates on behalf of South Asian immigrant workers, with particular focus on Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Indian, Nepalese, and Sri Lankan workers in the retail, food service, and domestic work industries, many of whom are women. Founded in 1998 ...

Artist and community activist Tomie Arai (1949- ) has been working as an artist in the New York City area since the 1960s, and together with Legan Wong (1951- ) has also been involved with the New York-based Asian American cultural movement since the 1970s. The Tomie Arai and Legan Wong Papers document arts and ...

The Asian American Arts Centre (AAAC), founded in 1974 as the Asian American Dance Theatre, is one of the oldest community arts organizations in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Partners Robert (Bob) Lee, an art curator and author, and Eleanor Yung, a choreographer and acupuncturist, established AAAC to promote Asian American art and support Asian American artists and ...

The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) was founded in 1974 to protect and promote the civil rights of Asian Americans through litigation, advocacy, education, and organizing. AALDEF was the first legal rights organization on the East Coast focused on serving Asian Americans. It offers legal assistance and policy recommendations within every level ...

Founded in 1975, Asian CineVision (ACV) is a non-profit media arts organization dedicated to the development, exhibition, support, promotion, and preservation of Asian and Asian American film and video. ACV established several firsts for Asian American media in the US. These accomplishments include creating Chinese Cable Television (CCTV), the first Chinese language news program in ...

Asian Women United (AWU) was a New York City-based collective of Asian American women activists and educators. Organized in 1978 when the Asian Women’s Caucus split into two groups, AWU worked, “towards a society free from race and sex discrimination through the development of women as community leaders with an understanding of the Asian woman’s ...

Established as a formal entity within the AFL-CIO in 1992, the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA) was envisioned as an organization that would address a number of pressing needs within the A/P/A community. These needs included educating laborers, promoting political education and voter registration, and providing training and mentoring to A/P/A leaders within the ...

Broadcasting on WBAI 99.5 FM, Asia Pacific Forum (APF) is a progressive pan-Asian radio show based in New York City focusing on culture and politics. APF’s broadcasts cover underreported stories from Asia and Asian America and explore topics such as activism, civil and human rights, foreign policy, immigration, history, labor, literature, pop culture, and the ...

Born in Taiwan in 1954, installation artist, filmmaker, and media activist Shu Lea Cheang received a BA in history from National Taiwan University in 1976 and an MA in Cinema Studies from New York University in 1979. She began her career in New York City as a member of the grassroots alternative media collectives Paper ...

May Chen (b. 1948-) is a labor organizer who has advocated for immigrant workers for more than two decades. Born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, she received her BA from Radcliffe College and her MA in Education at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her involvement in the labor movement began in 1983 with her ...

Fay Chiang (1952-2017) was an Asian American poet, visual artist, and community leader from New York City. Raised in Queens and educated at Hunter College and the School of Visual Arts, she became active in the anti-war and the Asian American cultural movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Chiang dedicated her professional life ...

Rocky Chin (b. 1947-) is a civil rights attorney and community leader long engaged in labor and human rights advocacy. Born in Washington, DC, Chin earned his BA at Lehigh University, MA at Yale University, and JD at University of Southern California. He was appointed as director of the Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity ...

Tung Pok Chin (1915-1988) was born in China and immigrated to the US in 1934 as a “paper son.” He worked in laundries in Boston, Massachusetts before establishing his own laundry business in Harlem and Brooklyn, New York, with the assistance of the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance. In his spare time, he studied English, read ...

Dr. Gloria Wong Chung (1925-2007) was a leader in the struggle for healthcare and empowerment in New York City’s Chinatown and one of the first female A/P/A psychiatrists in the US. Born in Taishan, Guangdong Province in 1925, she and her family immigrated to the US in 1929, settling in Albert Lea, Minnesota. She graduated ...

New York City-based Asian American artists founded the artist collective EPOXY in 1982. The mission of the group is suggested by its namesake— epoxy resin—a binding agent that forms through the combination of two different compounds. The artists believed that collaboration would create works that would be more than a singular contribution and would reflect ...

Born in Shanghai in 1943, New York City-based sculptor Ming Fay grew up in Hong Kong and moved to the United States in 1961 to attend the Columbus College of Art and Design. He received a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Fay has ...

Founded in 1990, GAPIMNY (formerly known as Gay Asian Pacific Islander Men of New York) is an all-volunteer, membership-based community organization with the mission to empower queer and trans Asian/Pacific Americans to create positive change. It provides a range of political, social, educational, and cultural programming and works in coalition with other community organizations to ...

Canton-born modernist painter Yun Gee (1906-1963) immigrated to San Francisco, California in 1921. Deciding to pursue a career as an artist, Gee enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute and became involved with a group of artists who established the Modern Gallery in 1926. In the same year, he also founded the Chinese Revolutionary Artists’ ...

Godzilla Asian American Arts Network was an artist collective founded in 1990 to stimulate dialogue about Asian American visual art across generations and disciplines for New York-based A/P/A artists and art professionals. Godzilla sponsored public programs such as exhibitions, lectures, and symposia to establish a forum that would foster networking and mutual support. Until its ...

Larry Hama (b. 1949-) is an influential comic book writer and artist behind such titles as G.I. Joe, The ‘Nam, and Bucky O’Hare. Born in Manhattan and raised in Queens, New York, Hama is a third generation Japanese American. He attended Manhattan’s High School of Art and Design, and from 1969 to 1971, served in ...

Artist Arlan Huang (b. 1948– ) was born in Bangor, Maine, raised in San Francisco, and currently resides in New York City with his partner, Lillian Ling. He was involved with Basement Workshop (1971) and was co-coordinator of Yellow Pearl, a collection of art, music, and writing by young Asian Americans. Yellow Pearl was anchored ...

The Japanese American Newspapers Collection contains 18.6 linear feet of publications from fifteen different Japanese American newspaper titles dating from 1946 to 2014. The collection includes extended runs of Hokubei Shimpo and New York Nichibei, as well as short runs of regional papers and international editions of Japanese newspapers from the late twentieth century. The ...

Midori Shimanouchi Lederer founded the Japanese American Social Services, Inc. (JASSI) in 1981 to address the lack of social services for aging Japanese Americans with limited English language skills. JASSI quickly grew to encompass the needs of Japanese restaurant workers, students, recent immigrants, and those in need of counseling or other referral services in the ...

Isaku Kida (1905-1996) immigrated to the United States from Japan in 1930 as a student of theology. Following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, he fell under the suspicion of the FBI for his growing interest in Communism. Arrested and incarcerated at Ellis Island, he was subsequently released to work as a language instructor for the ...

The Yoshio Kishi and Irene Yah-Ling Sun Collection, the acquisition of which was made possible in large part by a donation in memory of Dr. Wei-Yu Chen, contains over 10,000 items of Asian Americana that trace the representation of Asians and Asian Americans in American popular, political, academic, and literary media. Yoshio Kishi (1931-2012), a ...

Michi Kobi (1924-2016), born Machiko Okamoto, was a Japanese American actress and activist. During World War II, she (along with 110,000 other Nikkei) was forcibly removed from her home and incarcerated at the Central Utah Relocation Center, a concentration camp in Topaz, Utah. She turned to acting while incarcerated and after the war pursued an ...

Midori Shimanouchi Lederer (1923-2005) was born and raised in Fresno, California, and was a student at the University of California, Berkeley, when she and her family were incarcerated at the Topaz War Relocation Center, a concentration camp, in 1942. Her 1943 appeal to the US government granted her permission to leave Topaz and resume her ...

Founded in 1998, the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA) is a union that supports taxi drivers in New York. The NYTWA was founded by members of the Lease Drivers Coalition, an advocacy project of the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence (CAAAV). NYTWA lobbied for structural change in the taxi driving industry, which is ranked by ...

Pauline Park (b. 1960-) is a New York City-based transgender activist. She is the president of the board of directors and former executive director of Queens Pride House (QPH) and chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA), both of which she co-founded. She led the campaign for the transgender rights law ...

Peeling (1995-2005) was a New York City-based collective of writers, performers, directors, and producers. Using autobiography as a departure point, their collaborations explored contemporary Asian American identities through the development of original theater work. Originally founded in 1995 as “Peeling the Banana” by director and performer Gary San Angel at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, ...

Q-Wave was founded in 2004 and is a community organization based in New York City. Q-Wave is a grassroots organization of lesbian, bisexual, trans, and queer women, trans men, and gender non-conforming/non-binary/trans folks of East Asian, Southeast Asian, South Asian, West Asian, and Pacific Islander descent. The organization strives to build a supportive, progressive community ...

Radio Bandung was a weekly radio newsmagazine from 1991 through the late 1990s that aimed to deliver news and cultural information about Asian/Pacific/American communities and the Asian/Pacific geographic region to the general public. Domestic topics covered on the program included anti-immigration hearings, South Asian taxi drivers in New York City, the Native Hawaiian independence movement, ...

Krishna Reddy (1925-2018) was a highly accomplished artist, art educator, and author who has made major contributions to revolutionizing the technology and artistic possibilities of intaglio simultaneous color printmaking. Born in India, Reddy first studied sculpture in Santinketan, West Bengal, and later traveled to Europe in the 1950s to study under sculptors Henry Moore, Ossip ...

“It is with a feeling of enormous loss and grief that I note the sudden passing of Jack G. Shaheen on July 9, 2017. He devoted his life to documenting Hollywood and television’s misrepresentations of Arabs and Muslims, constantly documenting, writing, and speaking about this caricature and that image long before the public and academics ...

From 1870-1970, Newark, New Jersey was home to a Chinatown and small Chinese American community. Numbering only about 3,000 residents at its peak, it was one of the few East Coast Chinatowns to exist during this time period. Newark’s Chinatown was home to businesses, churches, and other social organizations that were created by and for ...

Formed in 1979, Soh Daiko was the first taiko group on the East Coast. Soh Daiko and taiko drumming offer a striking and powerful rebuff to stereotypical notions of Japanese and Asian American women as quiet and demure. Taiko has deep roots in Japan, but is relatively new to North America. It was first introduced ...

Born and raised in Hong Kong, Dan Tsang received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Redlands, and two master’s degrees from University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. He worked for two years as a research librarian at Temple University’s Contemporary Culture Collection and for thirty years as a bibliographer and data librarian at University of California, ...

The Vietnamese Boat People podcast and nonprofit was founded in 2018 by Tracey Nguyen Mang, a former boat refugee whose family of nine fled Vietnam in multiple phases. Nguyen Mang arrived in America in 1981 when she was three years old. Growing up, she was ashamed by the stigma associated with being a refugee. Her ...

Takako “Taxie” Wada (1921-2016), was born Takako Kusunoki in Colusa, California. While attending public school, Wada adopted the nickname “Taxie” because her non-Japanese teachers had difficulty pronouncing her name. Upon graduating from high school, she obtained a part-time job at one of Colusa’s newspapers, The Sun Herald. It was this experience with the paper that ...

From approximately the middle 1970s through the late 1980s, Darlene Wone (also known as Mei Oye, and Mei Oye Soo Hoo) was an activist in the Asian/Pacific/American women’s movement, as well as the Asian American movement more generally. These movements, arising alongside the broader civil rights and women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s in ...

Martin Wong (1946-1999) was a Chinese American artist best known for legitimizing graffiti as an art form. Born in Portland, Oregon, he grew up in San Francisco’s Chinatown and, in 1968, graduated from Humboldt State University with a degree in studio art. Wong was part of the Bay Area’s performance art scene in the 1970s, ...

William F. Wu (b. 1951- ) is a Chinese American science fiction writer who has published thirteen novels and more than fifty short stories. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Wu attended the University of Michigan as an undergraduate, and later returned to earn his PhD in American Culture. During this time, he became active in ...

George Yuzawa (1915-2011) was a beloved and central figure in New York’s Japanese American community. Originally from Los Angeles, California, Yuzawa was an active member of its Japanese American community. He helped found Boy Scout Troop 64 and the Japanese Athletic Union. Yuzawa graduated from Los Angeles City College with an associate’s degree in business, ...