A SERIES OF ART INSTALLATIONS & PROGRAMMING POWERED BY ASIAN AMERICAN WOMEN
Led by artist and curator Philippa Pham Hughes and artists Xena Ni and Adele 이슬 Kenworthy, “We Should Talk” creates space for exploring the complexity of Asian American identity.
upcoming programs
FRIDAY MAY 3, 2024 • 6–8PM ET
Opening Reception
Location: Heurich House Museum, 1307 New Hampshire Ave NW, Washington, DC
Be among the first humans on earth to experience Good Fortunes, artist Xena Ni’s interactive installation about traveling to the future and finding reasons to hope in the present. We’re honored to kick off AAPI Heritage Month with an evening full of time travel, mysterious gifts from the future, Asian American visionaries, and a reception featuring tastings from Lost Generation brewery and a Mini Markt in the biergarten celebrating local AAPI makers. Come toast to the future!
Get tickets to the Opening Reception
MAY – JUNE 2024
Good Fortunes by Xena Xueting Ni
Location: Heurich House Museum, 1307 New Hampshire Ave NW, Washington, DC
In May 2024, artist Xena Ni will transform Heurich House Museum into a portal to the future. Her interactive art installation, Good Fortunes, invites you to travel to the future with visionary Asian Americans and return with reasons for hope in the present.
As a visitor to Good Fortunes, you’ll enter a portal to the future made from mailboxes and cascades of red strings and bells. Inside one of the mailboxes is a message for you – a gift from the future sent to you by the visionary artists and organizers who traveled to the future with Xena to show you that America is still full of possibility, its future still able to be shaped by your hopes, visions, and actions.
Your gift will include an invitation to write your own wish for the future and to send it to the future by ringing the portal bells. As visitors like you leave their own wishes for the future, Good Fortunes will grow into a vessel for sharing hope, curiosity, and dialogue about every person’s role in shaping the future.
FRIDAY MAY 10, 2024 • 5–8PM ET
Open House
Location: Heurich House Museum, 1307 New Hampshire Ave NW, Washington, DC
Heurich House Museum will open its doors for a special Friday evening Open House on May 10, featuring Good Fortunes on view. Join curator and We Should Talk co-creator Philippa Hughes in the garden for informal musings about the future and your questions and reflections about Good Fortunes. Combine an evening in the biergarten with a visit to the future.
Get tickets to the Open House
SATURDAY MAY 18, 2024 • 1-4PM ET
Lion Dance Celebration
Location: Heurich House Museum, 1307 New Hampshire Ave NW, Washington, DC
Celebrate the collective wishes visitors far and wide have added to Good Fortunes, by sending them to the future with a lion dance ceremony! At 2PM, lion dancers will lead us in a joyful procession to bless our wishes to the future with good fortune. Artist Xena Ni will share the story behind Good Fortunes.
Get tickets to the Lion Dance
JUNE – JULY 2024
Cut Fruit by Adele 이슬 Kenworthy
Location: Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, 1050 Independence Ave SW, Washington, DC
Cut Fruit is an expression of lived experience and site specific performance that re-remembers the gestures and rituals of care that examines the hypervisibility and invisibility of labor embodied in the AAPI woman in a post-pandemic existence.
In many Asian/Asian American cultures, fruit is shared as an act of love in abundance: often present at a child’s first birthday celebration in Korea called a doljanchi; given in oversized boxes as housewarming gifts; and placed at altars for even our ancestors to enjoy. And in our transnational and intergenerational cultural memory, Cut Fruit asks what can spacializing love look like for generations to come? For me, it was my mother cutting fruit for us when I was a kid.
Instead of price per pound signs, Cut Fruit invites participants to carry the questions asked between the peels and slices:
What is the first taste you can remember?
What is something you always wished someone had asked and knew about you?
What fruit carries your favorite memories?
Who is allowed to gather?
Who is allowed rest?
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past program
NOVEMBER 8, 2023 – JANUARY 15, 2024
The Greatest Poem by Philippa Pham Hughes
Opening Reception: November 8, 2023 from 6–8pm ET
Location: Gallery Y at Anthony Bowen YMCA, 1325 W St NW, Washington, DC
“The Greatest Poem” is inspired by one of America’s greatest poets Walt Whitman, who said, “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.”
Whitman’s claim stemmed from a belief that both poetry and democracy derive their power from their ability to create a unified whole out of disparate parts. Those who’ve descended from Asian immigrants comprise one of those disparate parts. However, there is no singular Asian American identity because the Asian American identity is also made of distinct parts. The Greatest Poem explores this complexity through poetry, film, and a 20-foot flower garden mural created by artist and poet Thu Anh Nguyen.
The installation features found poems written by Thu Anh using expressions of Asian American identity submitted to us by hundreds of AAPI women. She will continue writing found poems and add them to the poetry wall. Click the button below to submit a response so that she can turn it into a poem!
What does it mean to be an Asian American woman?
NOVEMBER 8, 2023 • 6–8PM ET
Opening Reception
Location: Gallery Y at Anthony Bowen YMCA, 1325 W St NW, Washington, DC
Artist Thu Anh Nguyen and cultural strategist Philippa Pham Hughes are spearheading the creation of an art installation that includes a 20-foot flower garden mural incorporating expressions of identity from hundreds of AAPI women. A recording of Philippa’s short animated film “The Greatest Poem” will play alongside the mural. We hope you will join us for this very special evening.
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DECEMBER 2, 2023 • 3-5PM ET
Reflective Writing Workshop on Flourishing
Location: Gallery Y at Anthony Bowen YMCA, 1325 W St NW, Washington, DC
We will reflect on what it means to create a flourishing world then write together and share our stories. Limited to 10 participants so please send an email to Hello@WeShouldTalk.today to inquire about reserving a space. Writing experience is not necessary!
JANUARY 11, 2024 • 6-8PM ET
Poetry Reading
Location: Gallery Y at Anthony Bowen YMCA, 1325 W St NW, Washington, DC
Join us for a night of poetry with AAPI women from across the DMV.
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the artists
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SHE/HER
Philippa Pham Hughes is a Social Sculptor, Cultural Strategist, Curator, Visiting Fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins, and Resident Artist at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. She applies relational thinking and an aesthetic of care and delight to her work in democracy building, civic engagement, and repairing the social fabric of our country one creative conversation at a time. Philippa draws from the arts and humanities to design spaces for honest conversations across political, social, and cultural differences. She has produced hundreds of creative activations since 2007 for people who might not normally meet to engage with one another in unconventional and meaningful ways. She also curates multi-disciplinary art exhibits & experiences. These relational experiences build social capital, social cohesion, and social discourse. She is a curious and lateral thinker whose multi-disciplinary practice is informed by sociology, psychology, philosophy, political science, history, community organizing, design thinking, creative placemaking, art, and humanities.
Philippa has spoken internationally, including SXSW, TEDxAmericanUniversity, Placemaking Week Amsterdam, University of Michigan's Penny Stamps Speaker Series, Fort Worth Women's Policy Forum. Her work has been featured by artnet, CNN, PBS Newshour, CityLab, and The Washington Post. Philippa’s mission: to create a society in which all humans flourish.
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SHE/HER
Xena Ni is a Washington, DC-based artist, time traveler, and designer who uses public archives and interactive experiences to uplift stories obscured by history, policy, and neglect. She believes that public institutions should work with and for the people they serve. To that end, she creates multimedia installations and interactive experiences to advocate for humane, equitable, and just public policies. Her work has been featured in the Washington Post, Washingtonian, and Bloomberg.
Her participatory installations ask penetrating questions about public benefits, the arbitrariness of government policies, and the role luck plays in American lives. Xena’s journey as an artist-organizer began in 2011 with Pittsburghers for Public Transit, creating bus stop installations that helped stop cuts to transit funding. Her 2019 installation, Transaction Denied, co-created with Mollie Ruskin, advocated for DC food stamp beneficiaries. It’s been installed across the country to raise awareness for food justice: at DC’s Bread for the City, Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh, the Southern Ohio Museum, the Ohio Craft Museum, and the Fuller Craft Museum. Her current projects include the DC Museum of Sidewalk Stuff (a pop-up museum cataloging mutual aid history in DC, co-created with Allison Press) and Futuretelling, a participatory future visioning practice.
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SHE/THEY
Adele Yiseol Kenworthy is an artist organizer and her vulnerability is her superpower. She explores how flowers have dyed, draped, and nourished social movements; what it means for socially engaged art to exist as an embodied practice of care; and tends the spaces of cultural memory and art as reimagined heritage work.
Adele was in the inaugural cohort of the M.F.A. in Social Practice Art at the Corcoran School of Art and Design. In 2022, she was invited to the Washington Project for the Arts Artist Organizer Spring Residency and Transformer’s Exercises for Emerging Artists Program. They’ve exhibited at Transformer Gallery, DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Brentwood Arts Exchange, The Fearless Artist Pop up Gallery at Art Basel Miami, Gallery 102 at George Washington University and NEXT (2022) Festival at the Corcoran School of Art and Design. Their work has been featured in The Washington Post, District Fray, Washingtonian, Hyperallergic, and NBCWashington.
She currently works at Monument Lab — a nonprofit public art and history studio.
Her art practice and community is located on the traditional lands of the Piscataway and Nacotchtank (Anacostan) people, also referred to as Washington, D.C.
“WE SHOULD TALK” TEAM
Philippa Pham Hughes
Xena Ni
Adele 이슬 Kenworthy
COLLABORATING ARTIST
Thu Anh Nguyen
PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Rosana Vollmerhausen
DESIGN
Ashley Wu
This project received Federal support from the Asian Pacific American Initiatives Pool, administered by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center.
VENUES
Gallery Y at the Anthony Bowen Branch YMCA
Heurich House Museum
National Museum of Asian Art