Yoland Skeete, artist and author of “When Newark Had a Chinatown” was Director artist and co-founder of the Sumei Multidisciplinary Arts Center in Newark, one of Newark’s leading artist run alternative spaces from 1993 to 2015. She received awards from the city of Newark for her outstanding cultural contributions and her organization received recognition by New York Foundation For The Arts and New Jersey State Council on the Arts for outstanding arts programming.
In California and New York City, she worked as a reporter and editor for radio, television and newspaper and as a documentarian on historical subjects. In 2001, she worked on the documentation of the lost history of African American culture in Cape May, New Jersey and in 2015 she published the history of her research on the lost Chinatown of Newark, NJ which lasted from from 1870s to the 1970s. The work is available on Amazon.
She is a contributing member to the Museum of Chinese in the Americas, where her photo documentation of the Chinatown in Havana, Cuba is in their permanent collection. She has worked with Prof John Kuo Wei Tchen, Director of Asian Pacific American Institute at NYU, where her Newark Chinatown collection is among the permanent archives in NYU Tamiment Library
Ms. Skeete immigrated to the US as a child, attended the School Of Visual Arts for undergraduate studies in film, video and photography, continued and completed her graduate studies at Tufts University/MIT Graduate program in Anthropological Filmmaking under Jean Rouche, and at Hunter College. She is certified in the business of Arts Administration at Seton Hall University and had been adjunct professor at Rockland Community College, Raritan Valley Community College, New Jersey City University and Rutgers University, Newark until 2009.
Ms. Skeete has exhibited her video and photography works in galleries and museums in the US and abroad including the African American Museum of Life and Culture, Dallas, Texas; African American Museum in Los Angeles CAAM; Museum of Modern Art; the Queens Museum of Art; the Newark Museum; Museum of Contemporary Arts and Crafts in New York City; Biblioteque Nacional de Paris and The Musee D'Art Moderne De La Ville De Paris; Husby Konsthalle, Stockholm, Sweden; and Estesio Gallery, Beddingstrande, Sweden.
Her photographs, video and multimedia works are in the print collection of the Museum of Modern Art, African American Museum in Los Angeles CAAM ; African American Museum of Life and Culture, Dallas, Texas, Alexander Bonin Gallery in Chelsea, and American Express Corporation, the Bilha Museum in Portugal, Chínese American Museum of Los Angeles. She has been a recipient of the Glide Memorial Grant, The Graff Travel Grant, The New Jersey Council on the Humanities Grant and the Melon Grant distributed through New Jersey Performing Arts Center’s Humanities program. She has been an Artist in Residence at Art In General, The Arts Council of the Essex Area, and has received educational grants and awards for her work with youth and media.
Her work appeared in a major exhibition in fall of 2017- winter 2018, entitled Circles and Circuits: Chinese Caribbean Art at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles and in the Catalog Publication by Duke University Press and book by that name written by Alexis Chang. This publication is available on Amazon. In 2019 her work also appeared in two exhibition catalogs: 24 Annual Art Ability Exhibition and sale and also in Verum Ultimum Art Gallery Fall Catalog for 2019. Yoland Skeete continues to write, exhibit her work locally, nationally and internationally.
