Date of Award
Spring 5-22-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
Sculpture
First Advisor
Derrick Woods-Morrow,
Second Advisor
Lisi Raskin
Third Advisor
Dr. Thea Quiray Tagle
Abstract
Archives Of The Future is a practice-based thesis that invokes the archive and the future as simultaneous.
This research insists on the recentering of HMong Indigeneity and its own rooted traditions of HMong Queerness and HMong Feminism as ancestral knowledge systems.
They are the medicine. To recover their cosmological capacity is to traverse centuries of systematic eradication by empires and patriarchy.
I treat artistic making, community encounter, memory, and materials as equally valid ways of knowing and as collaborators. Field research from 2020 to 2026 moves through kinship and artisan teachings. It spans Southeast Asia, France, the United States, and China, alongside institutional negotiations I continue to contend with.
This unresolved tension is part of the work. Without clear protocols, I reach toward discernment: learning to tell what has always been indigenously present from what has been colonially imposed. This is the ongoing attempt to reconnect what genocide, forced migration, and settler colonialism have severed and to manifest futures still being called into form.
Recommended Citation
Ly, Ka Oskar, "Archives of the Future" (2026). Masters Theses. 1706.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1706
Creative Commons License
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