MAYORAL ADVISORY COMMISSION
City Art | Monuments | Markers
Audra Simpson
Dr. Audra Simpson is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University who
researches and writes about Indigenous and settler society, politics and
history. She is the author of Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the
Borders of Settler States (Duke University Press, 2014), winner of the Native
American and Indigenous Studies Association’s Best First Book in Native
American and Indigenous Studies Prize, the Laura Romero Prize from the
American Studies Association, and the Sharon Stephens Prize from the
American Ethnological Society (2015). She is co-editor of Theorizing Native
Studies (Duke University Press, 2014). She has articles in Postcolonial Studies,
Theory & Event, Cultural Anthropology, American Quarterly, Junctures, Law
and Contemporary Problems and Wicazo Sa Review. In 2010 she won
Columbia University’s School for General Studies Excellence in Teaching
Award. She is a Kahnawake Mohawk.
John Kuo Wei Tchen
Dr. John Kuo Wei Tchen is an urban cultural historian, Associate Professor
at New York University, and in 2018 the inaugural Clement A. Price Chair of
Public History and Humanities, Rutgers at Newark. He is the founding
director of the Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program and Institute at
NYU. He co-founded the Museum of Chinese in America in 1979–80, where
he continues to serve as senior historian and authored the award-winning
books New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of
American Culture, 1776–1882 and Genthe's Photographs of San Francisco's
Old Chinatown, 1895–1905. He co-authored, along with Dylan Yeats,
Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear. He has been the senior
historian for the New-York Historical Society exhibition “Exclusion/
Inclusion” and the Steeplechase Films “Chinese Exclusion Act” showing on
PBS’s American Experience. He was awarded the Charles S. Frankel Prize
from the National Endowment for the Humanities and, in 2012, received
the NYU MLK Jr Humanitarian Award.
Mabel O. Wilson
Dr. Mabel O. Wilson, Professor of Architecture at Columbia University
GSAPP and Research Fellow at the Institute for Research in African
American Studies, co-directs Global Africa Lab and leads a transdisciplinary
practice Studio &. She is a founding member of Who Builds Your
Architecture? (WBYA?), an advocacy project educating about the problems
of globalization and labor. She is the author of Negro Building: Black
Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums and is currently developing
the manuscript Building Race and Nation: How Slavery Influenced
Antebellum American Civic Architecture and collaborating on a collection of
essays on race and modern architecture. Mabel has received numerous
awards, fellowships, and residencies, including from the Getty Research
Institute and the New York State Council for the Arts, and was Ailsa Mellon
Bruce Senior Fellow at the National Gallery of Arts Center for Advanced
Photo by Justin Beck Study in Visual Arts and United States Artists Ford Fellow in architecture and
design.