As CAAAV’s first artist-in-residence, Tomie Arai facilitated art builds, workshops, and visioning sessions with organizers and tenant leaders, helping to develop skillsets while encouraging members to plan, brainstorm and imagine how to integrate cultural practices into their organizing. Under Tomie’s leadership, tenant members learned to use culture to creatively send a message. For one historic action, they shut down the state capitol in Albany with over 1,000 tenants from across the state, with the slogan “Tenant Power” painted on umbrellas. Tenant leaders were provided with the tools and space to express their collective pride and cultural power through Lunar New Year programs, Eid Mubarak, summer celebrations, and monthly tenant meetings that were attended by hundreds of members of the community. Projects generated by the senior and youth membership included tri-lingual posters, stickers, printed fans, bandanas, and storytelling in the form of testimonials, skits, dancing, and videos. By coming together around art, Chinese and Bengali youth and adult members deepened their connection and leadership across generations and languages. Tomie also helped to formalize a Visual/Narrative team on staff, beginning the process for developing a cultural organizing toolkit.

CAAAV’s purpose is to develop the leadership of working class Asian immigrants in Chinatown and Astoria in order to intervene in the gentrification of NYC. Through intergenerational, multilingual organizing, our strategy is to build neighborhood power to defend our neighborhoods by fighting against speculative development, fight for more housing for the working class in our neighborhoods, and constrict our opposition, the real estate industry.