We chatted with Sonia Mak about the role that the arts play in strengthening community imagination for more vibrant neighborhoods.

To start, can you share a bit about your background and your new role at Asian Arts Initiative?

Sonia: I come from an immigrant, working-class background, a first-generation college student, studying art history and Asian American studies. I am excited to put my community-driven curatorial and fundraising background to use in my new role as Executive Director of Asian Arts Initiative (AAI).

AAI was founded by Gayle Isa in 1993. She was working at the Painted Bride when the Rodney King trial verdicts were delivered. Gayle and a group of Black and Asian American poets wanted to call on our communities to come together. They knew that our system designs communities of color to work against one another, a divide and conquer strategy that hurts us. So they created, literally, an initiative, the Asian Arts Initiative. People’s spirits were so buoyed by what these programs offered, and so that was really the genesis of the organization. It came organically, around this ethos of solidarity and empowerment and creativity. I tell people that art is the only thing that I believe in, because it has courage to tell the truth and it has courage to imagine.

How do you see imagination, arts, and community development intersecting?

Sonia: Community development offers different lenses to understand what our communities need right now. My primary lenses are the arts, Asian American communities, and activism. I’m coming into community development seeing a fresh lens to support our communities.

We live in the oxygen of racism and capitalism. They’re tightly braided together; they always have been here in this country. That’s very much what’s at stake in our imagining a better future. We have to imagine ways, we have to problem solve, how to keep that braid from choking us, how to keep that braid from choking our futures.

How do we unbraid it? How do we loosen its grip, and how do we liberate ourselves from it? Relationship building is like the oxygen of how we build and maintain and care for community, how we listen, how we show up. It’s absolutely vital.

Art is the only thing that I believe in, because it has the courage to tell the truth and it has the courage to imagine. Very few other activities do.

In an immigrant community and a community of color, the traditions of racism and systemic disinvestment, policies that are made for our communities keep communities apart. They shroud us in smoke and mirrors. They tell us we are disempowered.

This world that we live in was imagined into being. People built this up over a long time with a lot of money and influence. So we know that imagination is powerful. We have to come up with a better world, a better future that’s capacious and inviting and where all of us will belong. I know that the future belongs to us. We have to imagine it.

I believe we need to build imagination in our community members, so that they can invest their time and their energy in it, and know that it’s replenishing, know that it affords them freedom and rest. It’s a necessary exercise in the journey of realizing collective liberation for our communities. We can’t just protest with the picket sign; we also have to come up with ideas about what we want our future to look like, how we want to show up in that future. It’s a cycle, and we have to feed that cycle.

What’s happening right now at Asian Arts Initiative and in Chinatown that excites you?

Sonia: Our location in Chinatown is critical – when public projects have been built, it was important for Asian Arts Initiative to not only stay in the neighborhood, but in 2007, to purchase and renovate a vacant building and to become Asian Arts Initiative’s permanent home for workshops, art gallery, and black box theater. This allowed us to become a meaningful player in how Chinatown continues to develop.

This is a neighborhood with very few public amenities, limited play space, no library, and extremely limited public space. So in 2012, Asian Arts Initiative started to create public amenities that connected our diverse community along our alley, Pearl Street. We’ve hosted an annual block party since then, a street festival to bring the community together around our cultural assets. This year we are hosting at the Rail Park, the one urban green space in Chinatown.

Chinatown has a history of being hemmed in and cut off due to major public infrastructure projects, from the Convention Center to the Vine Street Expressway. Most recently, Asian Arts Initiative was part of a coalition to stop another major project, a basketball arena, from developing in the neighborhood. What is exciting is that the Chinatown Stitch project is happening, a vision that community leaders have stewarded for decades, which will cap part of the Vine Street Expressway, which literally cuts through Chinatown. That will help to stitch the neighborhood back together and provide more green space for Chinatown.

When you say AAI sits at the intersection of many communities, what does that look like in practice?

Sonia: One of the things that I’m really proud of about AAI is the way that we show up for community. We are at the intersection of many communities.

Oftentimes, when we say “community,” we mean the immediate local vicinity, a one-mile radius. But the way that we practice community is actually manifold. It’s the arts community, it’s the Philadelphia community, it’s the Asian American and Pacific Islander community. There are many spheres in our Venn diagram that we sit at the center of.

It’s also all the people that come to our building, who bring their communities and their audiences to us, because we’re a landlord. We have tenants, we do event rentals, and for individuals and organizations who are mission aligned, they can expect to receive deep discounts and preference. So we practice community development in micro ways, and all of it is mission aligned – our exhibitions, our youth education, public programs.

This moment of crisis is rich with opportunities to show up for our communities in a way that we haven’t but that we need to. There’s a level of demand that we’re being called into.