projects and community
initiatives
Asian American Art Initiative
Based at the Cantor Arts Center, The Asian American Art Initiative (AAAI) is dedicated to the study of artists and makers of Asian descent. The AAAI encompasses a range of activities, including: collecting and exhibiting works of Asian American/diaspora artists; preserving archival materials; fostering undergraduate and graduate education; and cultivating community collaboration and dialogue through public programming.
Since 2018, the AAAI has brought over 400 works of art by Asian American/diaspora makers into the collection of the Cantor Arts Center. We have also worked with Stanford Special Collections to acquire archives of major artists including Martin Wong, Bernice Bing, and James Leong, among many others. The AAAI models an innovative and collaborative art history that stretches across the museum, classroom, archive, and public; and approaches research, exhibitions, community engagement, and education as connected rather than separate endeavors.
convenings organized
College Art Association Annual Conference, 2023
In conjunction with the publication of Hidden in Plain Sight: Selected Writings of Karin Higa, edited by Julie Ault, this roundtable takes Higa’s capacious, adventurous scholarship as a starting point to reimagine the history of Asian American art and the practice of art history. Rigorously historical and deeply observed, Higa’s work refused conventional binaries of form/content, racialized/white, and reflected what Ault describes as the “unfolding of the paradoxical category of Asian American art in the 1990s and 2000s.” In light of the renewed attention to Asian American artists in the contemporary moment, how might Higa’s practice offer a model for reimagining temporalities, geographies and received art historical narratives in academic scholarship and curatorial practice? How might her work help us move beyond questions of categorization when considering the work of Asian American artists and other racialized artists?
IMUUR2: Art, Aesthetics, and Asian America
Stanford University, 2022
IMUUR2: Art, Aesthetics, and Asia America is a two-day convening that brings together artists, curators, and scholars to rethink and reimagine the histories and futures of artists of Asian descent.
IMUUR2 is a phrase coined by Wong, who lived in San Francisco and New York, which phonetically reads “I am you, you are two/too/to,” and captures the imagination, playfulness, and conceptual depth of Wong’s work. Here, the self is not singular but made in relation to others, who are likewise made in relation to us. The phrase encapsulates the convening’s aim of thinking through the myriad ways Asian Americans, and the work they create, are at once connected and distinctive.
Free and open to the public, the convening will comprise six panels on topics including “Race & Aesthetics,” “Global Intimacies,” “Art & Activisms,” “History & Memory,” “Gender & Sexuality,” and “Institutional Interventions.” Each panel will feature a diverse range of participants—art historians, curators, artists, writers, and academics—all of whom will take turns reflecting on an image, object, or text of their choosing that speaks to the topic of their panel. The event includes a keynote conversation between Cathy Park Hong and Jen Liu, moderated by Marci Kwon.