By Pam Strudler
The Gift of Remembrance highlights selected local Asian-American artists and their reflections on being Asian-American, raising cultural awareness, multiculturalism and keeping the history of their ancestors alive for future generations. Among the artists included are teachers, local business owners, high school students and women who majored in art and postponed their artistic pursuits for decades before eventually returning to them. Works include photographs, acrylics on canvas, paintings on paper and tactile art for the visually impaired.
The Gift of Remembrance is on view in the Syosset Library Gallery through September. There will be a reception Saturday, Sept. 14, from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. All are invited. The program is made possible with funds from the Statewide Community Regrant Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and is administered by the Huntington Arts Council.
Curator and artist Joan Kim Suzuki said she hopes the exhibition will remind viewers about the importance of remembering their ancestors and of acknowledging the sacrifices their ancestors may have made for them. Her goals are to enlighten those who are searching for their family identities and to spark curiosity in those with forgotten family histories.
In May, Suzuki curated an exhibition at Huntington Town Hall to mark Asian and Pacific Heritage Month.
“This was an amazing experience,” she said. “I had no idea how many Asian-American artists are hiding their work in their basements!”
The Gift of Remembrance builds on this discovery.
”Interestingly, many of these artists happened to be women who had studied art many decades ago, but had put their careers on hold for their families,” Suzuki said.
Born in the United States, Suzuki is the mother of two and a graduate of Syosset High School, with deep cultural roots in Korea and Japan. After attending Pace University, she settled in South Korea, where she married, started a family, and lived for 11 years. She returned to the United States shortly before the pandemic and began painting in 2020.
Much of her work is inspired by her paternal grandmother and her parents, who immigrated to the United States in the early 1980s. Growing up listening to the stories of her grandmother escaping the atrocities of war, Suzuki “felt an urgency to somehow etch those wispy memories into stone” when her grandmother’s health started to decline in 2023 at the age 102.
Suzuki continues to draw her grandmother’s stories into paintings and digital art so that she can give them to her children as a legacy.
Some of Suzuki’s own works are included in the exhibition. Her paintings have been displayed in exhibitions mounted by the Westbury Arts Council and others. She has been featured at numerous “live painting” events, a form of performance art in which artists complete a visual art piece in public; her art has been projected onto public buildings in Patchogue as part of the Museum of Contemporary Art—Long Island Lights event; and she has taught art classes in Brooklyn and Hicksville.
Pam Strudler is the Gallery Exhibit Coordinator at the Syosset Public Library
