Tomie Arai is a public artist who lives and works in New York City. She has designed both temporary and permanent public works of art, with several decades of experience working with local communities to create visual narratives that give meaning to the spaces we live in. Arai uses the specificity of her experience as an Asian American as a personal space in which to locate broader issues of race and gender, of inclusion and exclusion, and of belonging and non-belonging. She is one of the co-founders of The Chinatown Art Brigade, a radical cultural collective that creates new models of artistic production that engages with community groups to collecti shared histories of resistance and social recall. 

Tomie Arai, Here to Stay Project, New York City, 2016 (Courtesy of the Artist)