“Asians have been here longer than cowboys”

Stop DiscriminAsian
Billboard, approximately 14 x 65 feet
May—June 2021 @ Norwalk, Los Angeles, off the Santa Ana Freeway (I-5), CA
Sept.—Nov. 18, 2022 @ Oxy Arts, Los Angeles, CA
Dec. 10-11, 2022 @ LA3C, Los Angeles State Historic Park, CA
Commissioned by For Freedoms, part of the AAPI Solidarity campaign
https://bit.ly/asians-cowboys

Long before immigrants sought fortune during the Gold Rush, Asians have been on the land we now call the United States. It was 1587 when Indigenous Kapampangan and Tagalog sailors from Manila Bay (some employed and others enslaved by Spanish colonizers), landed on Chumash land on the California Coast. By the 1700s, migrants from India had arrived and Filipinos established permanent settlements in present-day Louisiana.

It wasn’t until 1849 that the “cowboy,” which is based on Mexican vaquero traditions, came to be associated with the American West.

Asians are more American than apple pie, which is derived from an English recipe featuring a fruit that originated in Central Asia. And the iconic cinnamon and nutmeg flavors? Courtesy of Sri Lanka and Indonesia.

Billboard created by Stop DiscriminAsian, with image from Kenneth Tam; text by Astria Suparak; accompanying text and research by Suparak, Jen Delos Reyes, and Margaret Liu Clinton (updated in 2022 by Anuradha Vikram and Suparak); and design by SDA. Installation photos by Job Piston.

To create a new billboard for For Freedoms, Stop DiscriminAsian collaborated with member Kenneth Tam to adapt an image from his recent work “Silent Spikes,” which focuses in part on Chinese railroad workers — who famously connected the rest of the country to the “Wild West.”

For LA3C, the billboard was sited in Los Angeles County, which includes land that is the unceded territory of the Chumash, Kizh, Serrano, Tataviam (Fernandeño), Tongva, Gabrielino-Tongva, and Luiseño peoples.

* Text has been updated to better reflect the specific identities and employment and enslaved statuses of the sailors. (2022)

EXHIBITIONS

Asians-have-been-here_billboard_StopDiscriminAsian_OxyArts_2022_Photo-Lee Painter-Kim — “Asians have been here…” billboard by Stop DiscriminAsian outside Oxy Arts, Los Angeles, 2022. Photo by Lee Painter-Kim.

Voice a Wild Dream:
Moments in Asian American Art and Activism, 1968-2022
OXY ARTS, Los Angeles

Organized by Kris Kuramitsu
Sept. 8–Nov. 18, 2022
Artists: Auntie Sewing Squad, Basement Workshop, Chinatown Art Brigade, Giant Robot, GIDRA, Godzilla, the Linda Lindas, Stop DiscriminAsian, and The W.O.W. Project.

Voice a Wild Dream highlights collectives of Asian American artists and activists and their work toward social change over the past six decades. Sharpened by a recent interest among artists in remaking systems in ways that harken back to the revolutionary impulses of the late 1960’s, many exhibitions and publications trace the lineages of feminist, queer, black, and Chicanx arts and activism; however, the story intertwining strands of art, activism, and community aid is significantly less visible within the Asian American community.

Voice a Wild Dream traces connections—both literal and philosophical—between Asian American collectives that intersected art and community service in past decades and their relationship to current art and mutual aid collectives today. By centering artists and their work in a conversation about community care, the exhibition illuminates the power of the artistic act to catalyze belonging, participation, and, most crucially, intersectional connection.

Featuring historical, archival and contemporary works, the exhibition considers an expansive notion of artists’ roles in cultural work, incorporating zine culture, grassroots organizing, non-profit art spaces, and self-organized networks as equally important participants in an effort to realign our social relations.

LA3C
Los Angeles State Historic Park

Dec. 10-11, 2022

“In collaboration with LA’s museums, celebrated artists and rising stars, LA3C will feature interactive pieces, large-scale murals and one-of-a-kind sculpture that represent the limitless talent of the city and beyond.”
Artists: Tiffany Alfonseca, Amanda Ross Ho, Patrick Martinez, Edgar Ramirez, Jacolby Satterwhite, For Freedoms (with Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Takaaki Okada, Claudia Pena, Kamal Sinclair, StopDiscriminAsian, and Women from California Federal Prison), and more

PRESS

ARTNEWS:

Excerpt:
“Work with For Freedoms went further a year later when they [Stop DiscriminAsian] collaborated to adapt stills from Kenneth Tam’s video Silent Spikes for display on a billboard over a Los Angeles freeway. With a title referring to Chinese men who constructed the Transcontinental Railroad, the billboard featuring three figures wearing cowboy hats and swinging imaginary lassos amid the words ASIANS HAVE BEEN HERE LONGER THAN COWBOYS- sends unexpected opponents into the ring to compete against the Marlboro Man archetype that romanticizes the lone white patriarch.”
– Danielle Wu, “Haters Need Not Apply: The collective network Stop DiscriminAsian aims to to end a long legacy of racism in the art world”, Dec. 2021