payal kumar (they/them) is a multidisciplinary cultural worker, sexual and reproductive health justice advocate, and organizer whose work is rooted in the in-betweens. Currently based on Massachusett, Pawtucket, and Wampanoag territories, they invoke the power of intergenerational community building to construct tender new possibilities of being beyond borders and capital.

Their illustrations, zines, spoken word pieces, and workshops have found a home across Chinatown walls and grassroots protests, in gallery spaces like the Museum of Fine Arts and international TRANS* Future Archives, and through collaborative learning spaces like the Allied Media Conference and the School of Arts and Social Justice Boston. payal's visual work weaves together folk art from their ancestral villages in Bihar with traditional Americana motifs to amplify peoples’ movements and explore the in-between spaces of trauma, coloniality, queerness, and embodiment. They are an organizer with Subcontinental Drift Boston, a monthly multilingual open mic centering South Asian diasporic voices, and with the Boston South Asian Coalition (BSAC), a transnational organizing collective fighting for labor, race, caste, and gender equity. Through creative strategies, they cultivate playful spaces that challenge the state's monopoly on Imagination so that we may all fully unearth and activate our collective power.

Instagram@riotlrrrkhi

bite the hand that feeds you
2021
watercolor, ink, acrylic, chai on cotton rag
15 x 15

Artist Statement

There's often a worry in sci-fi that if we go back in time and disturb something ever so slightly, it will have cataclysmic effects on the future/present as we know it. Unknowingly, we fear changing the world…but curiously, we don't trust our actions in the now to be as impactful towards the worlds we are moving into. Why do we forget how powerful we are?

Through the height of the COVID lockdown, I found power in the leadership and learnings of those who are and have always been facing apocalypses- disability justice activists, Black working class women, queer and trans people of color, indigenous and rural folk, immigrant elders. Communities on the margins that have been continuously practicing survival teach us that we can show up for each other by excavating ancestral memories of mutual aid and alchemizing them into new collective care structures.

History/another present shows us that the solidarity of the working class people is powerful, that these material solidarities move us past our individual moments. This ongoing pandemic teaches us that we can and must be our own talismans. We will protect each other because we know that barbed wire and brick walls and documents and borders and the status quo won’t.

Every dreamer, organizer, healer, revolutionary, political prisoner, worker, ancestor is in our collective intention to choose liberation, even in moments where the world may seem stuck or hopeless. We can choose liberation, and keep choosing liberation as the only way to keep existing. Why do we forget?