The 1980s had marked a time of pronounced growth within the Asian population. No longer limited to East Asian countries, immigration in the 1980s and 90s began to trend towards both Southeast Asian and South Asian nations as well. Between 1990 and 2007, the Asian and Asian American population nearly doubled in New York City, growing to almost a million.

Correspondingly, the 1990s were a decade of huge growth and expansion for A4. It began publishing the Dialogue newsletter to inform constituents about community arts events, advocacy issues, and funding opportunities. In 1991, A4 organized Defining Our Culture(s), Our Selves, a conference in partnership with the Asian Pacific Student Alliance at Hunter College. That same year, Amy W. Chu took over as the new executive director. Two years later, A4 organized the first national Asian American conference, Beyond Boundaries, in collaboration with the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, which brought together more than 250 artists, writers, activists, funders, and representatives from cultural organizations, advocacy organizations, museums, and academia nationwide.

June Choi was hired as executive director in 1992 and in 1994 A4 received a $325,000 multi-year grant from the Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation to launch the Technical Assistance & Regrant Initiative (TARI), allocating cash grants and technical assistance to help stabilize Asian American arts groups in NYC. This would be the first of many regrant programs spanning almost 15 years. A4 continued to publish its monthly Arts Calendar and added a Corporate Funding Guide for constituents. It began publishing a Resources & Opportunities listing of jobs, workshops, resources, competitions and grant opportunities to complement the calendar. Also added to these resources was a directory of Asian American touring artists, Asian American Artists Ready to Tour!. In 1995, A4 moved to 74 Varick Street and in 1996, Lillian Cho was hired as the new executive director.

Looking to further expand services for the Asian American artistic community, A4 started a new program called Artist Series, a number of roundtables and seminars about topics such as public art/public spaces, commissions, community-based teaching artists, and the impact of arts in education in the Asian American arts community. In 1998, the TARI regrant program completed its third and last round after having awarded a total of $204,789 in grants and thousands of hours of technical assistance to more than 25 organizations. In the same year, A4 began a new initiative funded by Chase Manhattan Bank for small Asian American arts groups. The Chase SMARTS Regrant Program provided cash grants of $2,000-$3,000 for projects or equipment which supported organizational development of Asian American arts groups. Chase SMARTS ran for 4 years and provided 34 grants, totaling $96,400. Next, A4 made another step towards more nationwide community building by publishing a new Asian American Arts Resource Directory, listing nearly 200 arts organizations and touring artists nationwide.

In the same year, 1998, A4 refashioned Dialogue into a magazine to serve as a forum for expressing the views, ideas, and works of Asian American artists, featuring interviews, articles, and artwork. With the emergence of the internet, A4 moved many of its resources online, making items like the Arts Resource Directory and Arts Calendar available on the very first official A4 website. In addition, A4 continued to offer a series of technical assistance workshops and Meet the Funders events through a new program called Nuts & Bolts. At the close of the decade, A4 received increased support from Chase Manhattan Bank to continue its work.

The 2000s marked a period of great fluctuation for the New York City artistic community. All throughout New York and beyond, each individual was impacted deeply by the events of September 11, 2001. Combined with the already escalating U.S. recession, the effects of 9/11 on personal lives and communities heightened the fragile financial situations of many individual artists and arts organizations. In order to ensure that the arts would continue to prosper within the New York City community, emergency funding and service organizations from across the United States came together to form funding consortia or foster other means of aid.

As a service organization, A4 acted as a steering committee member for the New York Arts Recovery Fund, a consortium effort headed by the New York Foundation of the Arts which provided funding, information resources, advocacy, and public programming to individual artists and arts organizations most affected by September 11th. In addition, A4 hosted its own series of roundtables with member artists and art groups to discuss the impact of 9/11 on their work and lifestyle and to assess artists’ needs. Through the September 11th Fund, A4 received funding to launch the Chinatown Arts Marketing Project (CAMP) to help redefine Chinatown as an arts and cultural destination for local New Yorkers and to increase attendance and patronage at local cultural events and businesses downtown. A4 also became part of C.R.E.A.T.E., a coalition of downtown organizations dedicated to finding a cultural space for the arts in Chinatown.

Thanks in part to the in-pouring of arts support post 9/11, A4 experienced another period of growth and continued to nurture its many other programs. In 2002, A4 received major support from the Ford Foundation to spearhead a research initiative on technology use within the Asian American/Pacific Islander arts community nationwide, ending in a report, Connect the Arts: An Internet Initiative for the Asian American/Pacific Islander Arts Community, which addressed the ways in which the internet could be best leveraged to build partnerships within the community. 2003 marked the beginning of a monthly series called A4 Salon which featured artist talks, panels, and presentations to encourage community networking. By 2005, the Arts Calendar had become electronic and A4 was reaching a record 4,000 subscribers to its eVOICE e-newsletter and online calendar. A4 began producing an annual Culture Pass booklet to broadcast events and shows going on within the Asian American NYC artistic community in an attempt to reach new audiences, distributing up to 10,000 Culture Passes a year. By 2006, A4 had expanded its staff and membership had grown to more than 100 members. In 2007, A4 received a major grant from the Rockefeller Philanthropic Advisors’ New York State Music Fund to support local Asian American musicians at Soundfest, an all-day outdoor concert in Chinatown. As part of the ongoing CAMP project, A4 hosted a series of events and produced a short video, Creating Spaces for the Arts in Chinatown, to highlight key organizations and raise the profile of Chinatown arts and culture. In addition, it co-sponsored a holiday marketing campaign with Chinatown Partnership called SEE Chinatown – Shop, Eat, & Explore.

In the meantime, A4 was able to strengthen and expand its regrant programming. Between 2002 and 2008, the JPMorgan Chase SOAR Regrant Program, a continuation of the previous Chase SMARTS Regrant Program, was dedicated to awarding cash grants to small groups. In 7 rounds, SOAR awarded $246,020 in a total of 88 grants. In 2003, A4 partnered with the Rockefeller Foundation to run Technical Assistance for Organizations (TAO), a special one-time regrant initiative awarding $72,000 in grants and technical assistance to support Asian American arts organizations struggling to survive post 9/11. Starting in 2006, A4 partnered with Harlem Arts Alliance, Association of Hispanic Arts, Queens Council on the Arts, New York Foundation of the Arts, Association of Hispanic Arts, Amerinda, National Museum of the American Indian and Bronx Council on the Arts, creating an unprecedented coalition to regrant funds to artists of color with the Urban Artist Initiative (UAI). UAI jointly granted more than $150,000 with A4 alone granting $68,400 to 46 individual artists over two years. Lastly, in 2007 A4 created the Chinatown Arts Initiative (CAI), which provided technical assistance and production grants to performing arts groups contributing to Chinatown’s cultural life. Through CAI, A4 granted a total of $50,500 over two years to 25 groups. Since 1995, A4 has granted a total of $761,609 to 105 different arts organizations and 56 individual artists.

The close of the 2000s was characterized by the massive crisis in the world financial markets, signaling a sustained downward spiraling of the international markets and a huge shift in the funding and employment of both artists as well as institutions throughout the U.S. By 2007, Asians and Asian Americans accounted for nearly 12% of New York City’s population, up from just 7% of the population in 1990. Asian America brought together more cultures, histories, and artistic traditions than ever before.

In a new socioeconomic atmosphere, and with the gradual elimination of its re-granting funds, A4 had to think strategically about new ways to serve its members and the Asian American arts community. In late 2008, A4 embarked on a twelve-month research initiative to take stock of its constituents’ conditions in the wake of the recession. Among other major findings, A4 found that 60% of artists in the community were making less than $10,000 a year from their art and that 40% of artists were accruing up to $5,000 each year in debt in order to create their work. These and other findings culminated in A4’s report:* Asian American Arts in NYC: A Snapshot of Current Trends and Issues.* Building upon its deep roots in the community, A4 endeavored to work as a connector, connecting people to each other and people to resources.

In early 2009, A4 launched Town Hall, a monthly series for artists, arts organizations, arts appreciators, and funders to come together and show their work, share news, learn about opportunities, and collaborate. In its first year, Town Hall brought together more than 600 people, including hundreds of individual artists across all disciplines and representatives of organizations with opportunities for artists such as Asia Society, Brooklyn Arts Council, Carnegie Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Joe’s Pub, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and New York Foundation for the Arts, among many others.

After a stewardship of 13 years, executive director Lillian Cho left A4 and was succeeded by interim executive director Janice Won. In May 2010, A4 launched a4Hub, the online counterpart to Town Hall. Following in the long lineage of information hubs that A4 has created through the years, a4Hub was a fully interactive online platform for artists and arts organizations to promote their work and events and share resources with each other. Also in 2010, A4 created and implemented Brainstorm!, a series of lively case-study based themed discussions on the artist as producer.

In August of 2010, the Asian American Arts Alliance welcomed Andrea Louie as the new executive director. Andrea spearheaded Locating the Sacred, a twelve-day festival in 2012 that presented artists in a variety of disciplines all across the city. She also launched new civic engagement initiatives; new professional development programs for individual artists; and a new fellowships and awards program for Asian American artists and arts administrators, which included the Wai Look Award for Outstanding Service to the Arts, the Jadin Wong Award for emerging Asian American dance artists, and Van Lier Fellowships for artists in the fields of theater, music, and visual arts. After eight years, Andrea stepped down from A4 and Lisa Gold was named the new executive director in the fall of 2018.