bio

Marci Kwon is an award-winning art historian, writer, and teacher.  Her work explores alterity, minorness, value, and the ethics of relation in art and material culture, with a special focus on the history of Asian American/diasporic artists and makers.  She is Assistant Professor of Art History at Stanford University, and co-director of the university’s Asian American Art Initiative.  

Kwon’s writing has appeared in Third Text,  Modernism/Modernity Print+, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, and in edited volumes about the early history of the Museum of Modern Art, social art history, folk and self-taught art, and the K-pop group BTS. She has contributed catalog essays to exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. She is a co-editor of the online Martin Wong Catalogue Raisonné, and an editorial advisor to May’s Photo Studio and the Golden Age of San Francisco Chinatown, a forthcoming Google Arts & Culture Project. Kwon’s first monograph, Enchantments: Joseph Cornell and American Modernism was published by Princeton University Press in 2021.

Her current book project, Making Chinatown (advance contract, Princeton University Press), is the first in-depth account of the artists who lived and worked in San Francisco Chinatown.  Drawing on unexamined private and community archives, as well as dozens of new oral history interviews, Making Chinatown illuminates the rich history of artistic production by those who lived and worked in the neighborhood after the 1906 earthquake. 

At Stanford, Kwon is on the steering committee of Modern Thought & Literature and American Studies, and is affiliated with Asian American Studies, East Asian Languages & Cultures, and the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.  She is the recipient of numerous teaching awards, and was named an Emerging Faculty Leader by the Mellon Foundation in 2023.  Kwon has held positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.  She received her Ph.D. in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU.