Art Restart - Multidisciplinary artist Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya on how she protects her explorer's spirit and invites strangers to join her in her discoveries

Multidisciplinary artist Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya on how she protects her explorer's spirit and invites strangers to join her in her discoveries

07/05/22 • 25 min

A neuroscientist-turned-artist, Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, has long known how to “make the invisible visible,” as her artist statement declares. Her ability to make intricate scientific concepts accessible through art and design earned her a TED residency as well as the opportunity to speak on two TED mainstages. Her numerous works — including an AR installation immersing viewers in the world of microbes and “Beyond Curie,” a project that harnessed both technology and design to celebrate the most badass women in STEM history — have been featured in spaces all over the world, from a highway tunnel in the Netherlands to New York’s Cooper Union.

In the last couple of years, Amanda has focused her talents on engaging with and revealing often-hidden parts of the human psyche, from the bigotry and racist violence that have reared their heads throughout the country to the cumulative trauma and grief of the COVID crisis. As an artist-in-residence with the New York City Commission on Human Rights, she created a citywide mural project titled “I Still Believe in Our City” to counter anti-Asian violence and center the lives and experiences of Asian Americans and people of color as crucial threads in the American fabric. Soon after the shootings at a spa in Atlanta in 2021, Time magazine featured images from the series on its cover.

Pier Carlo Talenti spoke to Amanda while she was taking a brief break from troubleshooting one in a series of installations on Lincoln Center plaza in New York City. In this interview she describes the challenges and joys of expanding her artistic practice to invite even more collaborators — from institutions to the public at large — into her creations.

https://www.alonglastname.com/

https://www.istillbelieve.nyc/about

https://www.lincolncenter.org/series/summer-for-the-city/s/GATHER:%20A%20series%20of%20monuments%20and%20rituals

https://www.alonglastname.com/

https://www.istillbelieve.nyc/about

https://www.lincolncenter.org/series/summer-for-the-city/s/GATHER:%20A%20series%20of%20monuments%20and%20rituals

Previous Episode

Lear deBessonet and Clyde Valentín galvanize community artmaking to achieve local and national healing

It’s a good thing that director Lear deBessonet and producer Clyde Valentín have extensive experience in community-engaged participatory art — nine years ago she founded the acclaimed Public Works program at the Public Theater in New York City; he was the inaugural director of Ignite/Arts, a renowned community-arts incubator in Dallas since 2015 — because the scope of their newest project, One Nation/One Project, would overwhelm most artists and administrators.

One Nation/One Project, a partnership with the National League of Cities, is a truly national multi-year health-and-wellness initiative. Over the next two years, 18 communities scattered throughout the country will create hyper-local participatory and collaborative art works that in July of 2024 will be shared with a national audience. It’s a hugely ambitious project, a reimagining of the 1930s Federal Theatre Project, that looks to capitalize on a well-documented fact, namely that participating in the arts makes individuals and communities healthier.

Among the first cohort of nine sites that One Nation/One Project recently announced is the Kenan Institute’s very own community of Winston-Salem and surrounding Forsythe County. The Institute is working with several local partners — including the Arts Council of Winston-Salem & Forsyth County, Forsyth County Department of Public Health, United Health Centers and the City of Winston-Salem Department of Community Development — to support the program.

The other eight communities chosen are Gainesville, FL; Chicago, IL; Utica, MS; Providence, RI; Rhinelander, WI; Harlan County, KY; Edinburg, TX; and Phillips County, AR, focusing on the cities of Elaine and Helena.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Lear and Clyde describe how they conceived and designed their ambitious project and share their hopes for the national healing the 18 local creations might engender.

https://www.onenationoneproject.com/

Next Episode

Actor and artistic director Gregg Mozgala uses theater to put the disabled body on display with unassailable authenticity.

UNCSA alumnus Gregg Mozgala, after years of performing on some of Off-Broadway’s finest stages, is enjoying a well-earned banner year. He recently completed a national tour playing the title character in “Teenage Dick,” a modern take on Shakespeare’s “Richard III” centered on the experience of a high school student with cerebral palsy, and this summer he appeared in “Richard III” itself, alongside film and theater star Danai Gurira, in the Public Theater’s revered Shakespeare in the Park season. This fall he will cap off the year with his Broadway debut in Martyna Majok’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Cost of Living,” reprising the leading role he performed in the play’s premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club in 2018.

Gregg can credit that success not only to his acting but also his producing skills. In 2012, determined to make disability and people with disabilities more visible on the nation’s stages, he founded The Apothetae, a New York-based theater company dedicated to the production of works that explore and illuminate the disabled experience. The Apothetae has developed several new plays and adaptations from and with both established and up-and-coming artists — disabled and non-disabled, Deaf and hearing — and it is through The Apothetae’s commissioning program that playwright Mike Lew completed “Teenage Dick.”

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Gregg describes how an understanding of his cultural lineage as a disabled performer led him to create a company that celebrates displaying disabled bodies and their stories with unassailable authenticity.

http://www.greggmozgala.com/

http://www.theapothetae.org/