Spring 2025 Programming at the Workers Arts & Heritage Centre

VALU CO-OP, House of 9 Dragons, installation (2022).

Join WAHC for In the Wake of Work, a group exhibition exploring how Asian diasporic labour bridges space, tradition, and culture across generations.

In the Wake of Work: Asian Diasporas, Labour, and Living Memory

Featuring the work of
Holly Chang
mihyun maria kim
VALU CO-OP

Curated by JoJo Chooi-Harley

May 9 – July 26, 2025
Opening Reception & Performance: Friday, May 9, 6:30 – 8:30pm
WAHC’s CUPE/SCFP Gallery

The exhibition In the Wake of Work, curated by JoJo Chooi-Harley and featuring the work of Holly Chang, mihyun maria kim and VALU CO-OP, explores how the Asian diasporic experience bridges space, tradition, and culture across generations, revealing how diasporic people hold collective memory around the confluence of identity loss, unresolved grief, and labour pains. Through the artwork on display, this exhibition celebrates the love of culture, community, and creativity expressed by this diaspora, demonstrating their strength, resilience, and unity in the face of adversity.

About the Curator and Artists:

JoJo Chooi-Harley is a self-taught artist currently residing in Hamilton, Ontario. As a first generation Canadian that is Chinese-Malay, her work investigates how immigration causes diaspora in familial relationships in Pan-Asian migrant families with respect to familial values, culture, and identity in Canada. JoJo weaves storytelling, photo-voice photography, and printmaking techniques to share personal autobiographical stories of her family that challenge western dominant singular narratives. She is committed to decolonizing stereotypical narratives of Canadian Born Chinese by promoting dialogue on family identities shaped by hope, resiliency, sacrifice, labour, and unity in the face of adversity.

Holly Chang is an interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto/Tkaronto. Chang makes use of a variety of artistic mediums including textiles, photography, ceramics, and natural dyeing. Her practice is rooted in intersectionality where she often explores her mixed-race—Jamaican-Chinese and white Canadian—and queer identity. Her overall artistic work explores the themes of her second-generation identity. She has exhibited her work with Gallery 44 and participated in the Banff Artist in Residence program. In 2023 Holly received the Middlebrook Prize for social innovation and curatorial excellence in Canada. She currently works as a freelance artist and takes commissions.

VALU CO-OP is a Vancouver, BC based, democratically operated organization of artist-members. We are a values-driven unionized arts cooperative that believes in empowering artists and cultural workers through fair, secure, and flexible employment that supports artists to do what they do best—make art. We strive to do our work and organizing in an intersectional and anti-oppressive framework that supports our members’ needs, and which contributes meaningfully to our communities.

mihyun maria kim is an interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto, researching (un)translatable affects shaped by languages entangled with unresolved historical grief and transmissions of longing. Exhaustion of the body, repetition of movement, fragments of hi/stories, and suspended feelings are explored between memory and imagination across space and time. Through relational methodology, her multivocal outcomes take in/visible form in poetry, painting, performance/activations, audio/video, site-specific installation, community-based round tables and public art.

Ancillary Programming:

Opening Reception and Performance by mihyun maria kim
Friday, May 9, 6:30 – 8:30pm

Second Saturday for Families with Holly Chang
Saturday, May 10, 1 – 4pm

Unions and Racism: Asiatic Exclusion League virtual talk with Jonny Sopotiuk of VALU-COOP and a community facilitator
Thursday, June 19, 6:30pm – 8:30pm ET

Love Intersections, an artist collective with David Ng and Jen Sungshine.

Love Intersections
Artist Residency at WAHC

June 6 – June 13, 2025

Love Intersections is a media arts collective made up of queer artists of colour dedicated to using collaborative art-making and relational storytelling to address systemic racism in our communities. They produce intersectional and intergenerational stories from underrepresented communities of colour – centering the invisible, the spiritual, the metaphysical and the imaginary.

During their time at WAHC, Love Intersections will foster community engagement and social praxis through two workshops where they will share skills and invite participants to engage with embodied sensory experiences to facilitate memory work and healing.

Ancillary Programming:

Queer Oral Histories Masterclass
Saturday, June 7, 1 – 4pm

Missing Medicine Workshop
Thursday, June 12, 6:30 – 8:30pm

Love Intersections’ artist residency is made possible by incite Foundation for the Arts.

Posters, photographs, pins and a t-shirt representing the history of Mayworks and the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre. From the collection of the Workers Arts & Heritage Centre.

Parallel Histories: An Anniversary Exhibition

May 9 – July 26, 2025
WAHC’s Community Gallery

Curated by Florencia Berinstein

2025 marks the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre’s 30th anniversary and the Mayworks Festival’s 40th! Both have provided a unique space for cross sectoral gathering and art making within a progressive framework of inclusion and social justice.

Having a combined 20 years of involvement with both organizations, Parallel Histories curator Florencia Berinstein says “I love them profoundly for the spaces they have opened up for representation by equity deserving communities and marginalized issues, and for highlighting the many tensions and complexities inherent in this work.” Encompassing many diverse communities of workers, artists, and activists, both organizations have made a material difference to labour, community and cultural spheres.

This exhibition of archival materials is a small act of love and gratitude to two monumental organizations that provides an important reflection of the value that creating these alternative spaces can hold, and the value for presenting issues of labour, work, and social justice into the future.

Visit WAHC’s website for more information about Parallel Histories’ ancillary programs.

This exhibition is presented in partnership with Mayworks Festival, with support from CAWLS and the McMaster School of Labour Studies.

WAHC wishes to acknowledge the Ontario Arts Council, the City of Hamilton, the Province of Ontario, CUPE National, the Canada Council for the Arts, Canada’s Building Trades Unions, OPSEU/SEFPO and Teamsters Local Union 879 for their support of our exhibitions and ancillary programs.

Workers Arts & Heritage Centre
51 Stuart Street
Hamilton, ON L8L 1B5
www.wahc-museum.ca

Workers Arts and Heritage Centre is accessible. For more information, visit wahc-museum.ca/accessibility.

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Image descriptions:
1. Elder Orville Lim providing tours and interviews of VALU CO-OP’s House of 9 Dragons installation, featuring video recorded oral history interviews and hanging textured monoprints and calligraphic fabric prints.
2. Artist David Ng and Jen Sungshine are depicted wearing black swim attire with turquoise hair on a dock. In their hands are fishing nets and finishing rods, as they look off into the distance.
3. A collage of colourful objects from the history of WAHC and Mayworks, including a black and white photograph of WAHC’s founders, a yellow Mayworks t-shirt, two pinback buttons, and a poster.