Photography by Melissa Blackall
Lani Asunción (they/she) is a independent Filipinx interdisciplinary artist exploring the intricacies of identity and belonging, confronting the inner weaving of intergenerational trauma with ritualized performance and public art that serve as acts of reclamation. Through transmedia storytelling and research, they create socially conscious work that activates counter narratives of collective resistance to settler colonial foundations and points to collective liberation. Asunción's multimedia practice becomes a conduit for connection and disruption, breaking down barriers and inviting participation. By challenging established narratives and amplifying oppressed and marginalized communities, they seek to create spaces where alternative ethics of care, community healing, and social solidarity can thrive. Asunción was born in the Bay Area in California and raised in Tennessee, Oahu, Hawai’i, and the Ryūkyū Islands (Okinawa, Japan) and currently has a live-work art studio at Midway Artist Studios in the Fort Point Arts Neighborhood on the ancestral and unceded lands of the Wampanoag and Massachusett People, also known as Boston.
BIO
Lani Asunción has had solo exhibitions at the Mills Gallery at Boston Center for the Arts (2024), Real Art Ways (2022), Radial Gallery (2021), Brookline Arts Center (2020), and New Bedford Art Museum (2016). They have participated in the group show CONTACT ZONE: Waikīkī (2018) and was awarded second place in the Cambridge Art Association National Prize Show (2021). They has performed at the Musuem of Fine Arts Boston, 2017 Illuminus Media Arts Festival, the Goethe-Institut Boston with Non-Event, Satellite Art Fair in New York City, and Tufts University Art Gallery.
Asunción is currently working on “SONG/LAND/SEA: WAI Water Warning,” a public sculpture installation commissioned by the The Rose Kennedy Greenway, and is supported by a 2024 Neighborhood Activation Grant from the Mayor’s Office of Arts & Culture with the City of Boston, in addition to the 2024-2025 Expanding Massachusetts Stories-Climate Track Grant from Mass Humanities in support of oral stories project ‘Water Warnings: Stories of Climate Change in Boston.’ Their augmented reality and public performance project Revolutionary AYAT was awarded the 2022 Public Art for Spatial Justice Grant from New England Foundation for the Arts. They have also received support from the 2020 Transformative Public Art Grant, 2020 Live Arts Boston Grant from the Boston Foundation, and 2023 Emergency Grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
Asunción has attend residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Caldera Arts Center, Santa Fe Art Institute, Elsewhere Living Museum, I-Park, Walkaway Residency, Queer Archive Work, The Wedding Cake House, Cerdeira in Lousã, Portugal, and Bilpin International Ground for Creative Initiatives (BigCi) in New South Wales, Australia. They were awarded the 2022 Future Frequencies Fellowship at MASS MoCA Studios, and 2023 Fellowship at Kala Art Institute. Their work has been featured in the Boston Art Review, Artscope, and The Boston Globe. They have contributed essays published with Pacific Arts Association at the University of California, Santa Cruz; and in the online exhibition ‘Balikbayan | Homecoming Filipino Perspectives on the Philippine Collections’ at The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University.
Asunción is a visiting lecturer at Massachusetts College of Art and Design teaching in the Fine Arts 3D and Sculpture Department. They hold a Master of Fine Arts from the School of Fine Arts at the University of Connecticut. They are the Curator and Public Art Manager of the Un-monument Initiative projects at Pao Arts Center (BCNC) in Chinatown, in partnership with the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture with the City of Boston supported by The Mellon Foundation. They are the founding member of the multimedia arts and performance collective Digital Soup, in addition to being a member of Mobius and BCA Studios Residency Program at Boston Center for the Arts.
@ lani.asuncion | @revolutionaryayat | @dfp_dutyfreeparadise | digitalsoup.events | @digital.soup
CURRENT PROJECTS
SONG/ LAND/ SEA | WAI Water Warnings (2024-2025) a commissioned piece by the Rose Kennedy Greenway is a public art and performative series focusing on the climate crisis and the devastating results of global warming, sea levels rising and coastal flooding resulting in environmental racism connected to gentrification and displacement of communities resulting from the construction of the John F. Fitzgerald Expressway (1954-1959), and further impacted by the Big Dig (1991-2006), a mega-construction project which placed the Expressway underground and built a park on top, The Greenway, which opened in 2008. This work implores viewers to confront the realities of climate change and mobilize toward collective resilience and justice. Climate change is not a distant threat but an urgent reality, exacerbating existing inequalities and disproportionately impacting marginalized communities. Along the Greenway this installation resides across from Chinatown where the effects of environmental racism are keenly felt, with neighboring Roxbury and Dorchester facing the brunt of urban heat islands.
This work transcends mere aesthetics, serving as a call to action. Through its evocative symbolism and participatory nature, it implores viewers to confront the realities of climate change and mobilize towards collective resilience and environmental justice.
This project is supported by a 2024 Neighborhood Activation Grant from the Mayor’s Office of Arts & Culture with the City of Boston, in addition to 2024-2025 Expanding Massachusetts Stories-Climate Track Grant from Mass Humanities in support of oral stories project ‘Water Warnings: Stories of Climate Change in Boston.’
