2019 Create Change Artist-in-Residence | 2020 Creative Action Fund Awardee | 2021 Creative Action Fund Awardee
Artist Bio
Philippine-born Jevijoe is a project-based artist whose work ranges from painting and performance to installation and community engagement. Drawing from his experience as a working-class immigrant of color, his practice connects to the notion of labor, migration, and visibility of people of color.
Jevijoe earned his MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 2015 and has participated in international exhibitions/ projects including Flux Residency at AroS Museum, Denmark (2018), S.T.E.P. at Queens Museum, NY (2018), Agency of Unrealized Projects by e-flux (2011), Thirteen Artists Awards at Cultural Center of the Philippines (2006). His work was featured in Brooklyn Rail’s Architectures of Blue: Race, Representation, and Black and Brown Abstraction in October 2017. Jevijoe is a member of Museum Union Art Workers, District Council- 37 Local 1503 and lives and works in New York City.
Artist-in-Residence Project Description
The Tunnel Mobile Karaoke celebrates the abundance of labor and diversity by honoring working-class immigrants of color, will orchestrate a series of karaoke-style musical events perform in bridge tunnels of East Harlem. In this project, tunnels will be activated as transient sanctuary spaces for immigrants of color by encouraging them to sing songs in their ‘mother tongue”. The series of karaoke events will also serve as an archive of shared experiences and struggle by working-class immigrants of color who are hard-working individuals and providers of their families both here in the United States and their countries of origin.
What place in your neighborhood is personally meaningful to you and why?
I find tunnels very historically and symbolically meaningful. A tunnel signifies hope and entering a new stage of life. My Tunnel Mobile Karaoke is inspired from the tunnels at Park Avenue and 105th st. in East Harlem where Joe Bataan used to rehearse/ sing and called them “echo chambers”.
2020 Creative Action Fund | Social Distan-Sing!
2021 Creative Action Fund |Bahay Kubo painting project
Bahay Kubo painting project is a series of paintings about the little known history of the stilt houses built by Manila men in Saint Malo, Louisiana in 1763, also known as the first Asian American settlement in the United States. Saint Malo is a significant place for freed persons of color because it was named after Jean Saint Malo, a leader of a group of runaway plantation enslaved known as Maroons in Spanish Louisiana. This project is in line with the celebration of Filipino American History Month to amplify the Filipinx history through the medium of painting.