Interdisciplinary Artist. Cultural Producer.

Highlights to check out:

• Playing with Ua Si Creative

• Move resources like the Waterers

• Features on Springboard Exchange and Go Mag - 100 Women We Love

Ka Oskar Ly (they/she/nws/nwg) works from where indigenous technologies are futurism. Two decades of community organizing for collective liberation shaped this orientation. Community, place, and materials are collaborators in relation. Ka makes objects, environments, and experiences that ground the senses in the immediate while holding the limitless reachable, arriving softly and staying long.

In HMong lineage, the concepts we call "art" and "queer" are cosmological ways of knowing far too expansive for a single word. The work materializes this through form, ritual, and inherited technologies. That source lives in the self.

HMong dressmaking encodes what language could not name and protect. It is a living archive the body carries when everything else is taken. What begins as dressing the body becomes garments for invisible geographies. Objects migrate between sites and projects, reflecting human transmission and self-determination, each defying distance and time.

In a world that demands everything, the work asks for a different kind of presence. To suspend long enough to hear what is within. From that place, we begin to dream worlds not yet visible but already felt.

Ka is co-founder of Ua Si Creative, HMong artist collective, and an artist career consultant with Springboard for the Arts. They completed an MFA in Sculpture at RISD (2026) and have received fellowships from the McKnight Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the American Craft Council Emerging Artist Cohort.