Week 3: Creativity, Innovation, and Cultural Expression (May 15 to 21).
Asian, Arab, and Pacific Islander artists have long created from inside the tension that creativity is inseparable from the communities, histories, and urgencies that shaped them.
This week we honor an architect who redefines what it means to hold a moment, a poet who builds bridges across the Arab American experience one ordinary image at a time, and a Marshallese poet-diplomat who read their verses at the United Nations as her homeland is being swallowed by a rising sea.
Voices of the Craft
Maya Lin was 21 years old and a Yale undergraduate when she was commissioned to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. The polished black granite wall, cut into the earth to enshrine the names of 58,000 dead, not alphabetically, not heroically, but chronologically in the order they died. This testament to the cost of war has become the most visited monument in Washington. Committees objected; veterans groups protested; critics questioned whether a young Chinese American woman had any standing to define national grief. The wall answered for itself. Lin went on to design the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery and her ongoing project What Is Missing? is a memorial to species and habitats lost in the sixth mass extinction, which she calls her final memorial. Her 2024 conversation with All Arts TV on climate, creativity, and what monuments owe the living is a quiet masterclass.
The prolific Poet, Author, Editor, and Songwriter, Naomi Shihab Nye was born in St. Louis to a Palestinian father and an American mother, and grew up between Jerusalem and San Antonio. For more than forty years she has been what she calls a wandering poet; crossing borders on the strength of language alone and leading workshops in schools and communities across the world. Her collection 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East explores the lives of people in the Middle East, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Her poems begins in the local and the ordinary – a fig, a stranger’s hands, a grandmother’s voice – and arrive somewhere far larger. Her conversation through On Being is a good place to hear how she thinks about language as a form of hospitality. Her beautiful work reminds us that bearing witness to another culture is not an academic exercise but an act of love.
Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner is a Marshallese poet, performance artist, and Climate Envoy for the Republic of the Marshall Islands. In 2014 she stood before the opening ceremony of the United Nations Climate Summit and performed “Dear Matafele Peinam,” a poem written to her infant daughter. The powerful piece is a promise to fight for “home,” made to a child whose home may not survive. World leaders wept; the room gave a standing ovation that lasted over a minute. She co-founded Jo-Jikum, a nonprofit educating Marshallese youth about climate solutions, and her 2017 collection Iep Jaltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter documents nuclear testing, forced migration, and rising seas alongside the beauty of what is at stake. The United States conducted over 60 nuclear weapons tests in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958. The Pacific did not create the emissions crisis now threatening to erase it. Jetnil-Kijiner names that plainly, in verse, at the highest tables in the world. Her UN performance remains essential viewing for everyone invested in supporting communities of conscience who name colonial harm directly and invite us to act accordingly.
“We are the ones who will live with the consequences of your decisions.” – Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, UN Climate Summit
Reflection: When has art changed the way you understood a political or moral crisis? What would it mean to you if the work of these artists was not just as inspiration, but as an invitation to engage with the worlds they are inheriting?
For more information and access to other events, sign our Guestbook!