Join us at NorthPark Center

for the Crow Museum’s 20th annual Chinese New Year Festival, celebrating 2019—the Year of the Earth Pig. Pigs are considered a symbol of wealth; their chubby faces and big ears are both signs of good fortune. This year’s festivities will include a wealth of activities and festivities to help ring in the New Year, including dragon and lion dances, art making for all ages, and giveaways throughout the Center.

Apply here to be a vendor!

Image: Aki Onda. Photo by Brian Whar

New York-based artist and composer Aki Onda will create a site-specific performance inspired by Jacob Hashimoto’s Nuvole installation and the museum’s permanent collection. Using light, sound, and other media, the complex relationship between the concrete and the ephemeral is explored. Featuring Queens-based vocal artist Samita Sinha. 

This exclusive performance is co-commissioned by the Crow Museum of Asian Art and the Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Family SOLUNA International Music & Arts Festival.

About the Artists: 

Aki Onda is a New York-based artist and composer. He is particularly known for his “Cassette Memories” — works compiled from a “sound diary” of field-recordings collected by using the cassette Walkman over a span of last quarter-century. He creates compositions, performances, and visual artworks from those sound memories. Onda often performs in interdisciplinary fields and collaborates with filmmakers, visual artists, and choreographers, including Ken Jacobs, Michael Snow, Raha Raissnia, Akio Suzuki, and Takao Kawaguchi. Onda’s work has been presented numerous institutions such as MoMA, The Kitchen, documenta 14, Pompidou Center, Louvre Museum, Palais de Tokyo, Bozar, and many others.

Samita Sinha combines tradition and experiment to compose vocal performance works that investigate cultural inheritance and the experience of being a body in the world. Works include This ember state (2018, commissioned by Asia Society), bewilderment and other queer lions (2016, commissioned by Performance Space 122 and Invisible Dog Art Center for COIL Festival) and Cipher (2014-15), a solo work that toured nationally. She has composed and performed original scores for dance and theater works by Dean Moss, Fiona Templeton, and Preeti Vasudevan, vocal directed for Daria Fain and Robert Kocik, and performed with Sekou Sundiata and Robert Ashley. Sinha teaches voice extensively, including at the Rubin Museum of Art, Centro Nacional de las Artes (Mexico City), Swarthmore College and Womankind (formerly New York Asian Women’s Center).