Hawai‘i is not the United States, but it is your Future

Hawai‘i is not the United States, but it is your Future, an exhibition by artist and building practitioner Sean Connelly (2025 Artist-in-Residence), 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. New York City is just one place within the expansive homelands of Lenape peoples, who are engaged in their own struggles for return and sovereignty.

Over the past fifteen years, Connelly’s practice has pursued the advancement of ʻāina (land/that which feeds) through the recovery of ahupuaʻa, land divisions extending mauka to makai (mountain to ocean), as both method and metaphor for remapping social and environmental balance. His early project Hawaiʻi Futures (2010) advanced an ocean–earth–island–cosmos framework for living in place, reframing the ahupua‘a as an interconnected system of water, soil, wind, and people oriented toward sustenance and regeneration. Engaging digital mapping and contemporary fabrication with ancestral modes of making, governance, and reciprocity, his work moves between speculation and application, ranging from earthen monoliths and thatched, lashed assemblies to videographic studies of navigation and electromagnetic waveforms, as well as community-led efforts to restore ʻāina across the Pae ʻĀina o Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian Islands).

Born and raised in Hawaiʻi within the plantation-era Ilokano diaspora and a queer, matriarchal, multiethnic ʻohana shaped by Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) relatives, Connelly’s perspectives are grounded in his history as an Ilokano Pacific Islander American and in demonstration of the relationships, teachings, and cultural resurgence that have guided his family and community. While he claims his heritage as Ilokano and not Native Hawaiian, his own cultural reclamation within the wider Oceanic diaspora has been shaped by place-based solidarity with the cultural commitments of his Kanaka ʻŌiwi family and community, including younger generations raised speaking ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian) as a first language. His work emerges from Indigenous, diasporic, and multiethnic family relations without making claims to identity, but rather foregrounding his commitments to place, Indigeneity, and oceanic futures within the lived cultural context of his ʻohana and community.

The full exhibition text is available for download.

The gallery will be closed on Thursday, November 27 and Friday, November 28.

Accessibility note: The gallery is on first floor and is accessible to the public. All gender restrooms are available. For accessibility needs, please email apa.rsvp@nyu.edu.

Group and class visits: Please email apa.rsvp@nyu.edu to schedule a group or class visit with a list of preferred dates and times, and the size of your group.