When Grace Aneiza Ali moved to New York in 2006 forgraduate school, she found herself immersed in a contradiction. There were 140,000 Guyanese immigrants in the city, the fifth-largest foreign-born population. Yet most New Yorkers knew little about her home country, she said. “They know Jim Jones and the Jonestown massacre,” she said. “Or they confuse it with Ghana.” Ms. Ali, 32, now an adjunct professor in the department of interdisciplinary arts and sciences at the City College of New York, has set out to change that — by founding Of Note magazine, an online journal about the arts and social activism; and curating a photography exhibition, “Guyana Modern,” scheduled for Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art, in Newark in 2015. She lives alone in Harlem, where she worries about becoming too Manhattan-centric.
Grace Aneiza Ali, 32, is an adjunct professor in the department of interdisciplinary arts and sciences at the City College of New York. She founded Of Note magazine, an online journal about the arts and social activism.
CHURCH AND SUBWAY I’m usually up at 6:30 every morning, so I try not to break that on a Sunday. And my church is in Brooklyn, so I’m on the train by 7:30, heading from Harlem to Brooklyn. The church is Brooklyn Tabernacle in Downtown Brooklyn. I’m a big believer in signs and signifiers, and the first time I went to that church as a guest, the pastor started talking about the work that the church does in Guyana. So I’ve been going ever since. And not only does the church do a lot of work in Guyana, but they also have a huge Guyanese membership. It’s like being in the United Nations, because people are from all over the world. But I’m also always running into Guyanese people. It’s like a second home. Also, my mother always instilled in us, growing up in Guyana, that Sundays you start the day in church, start the day with God. It’s something I never lost, even here in the States.
Read More: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02...d-the-body.html?_r=0
