Search results for ""author shipu wang""

In The Other American Moderns, ShiPu Wang analyzes the works of four early twentieth-century American artists who engaged with the concept of “Americanness”: Frank Matsura, Eitarō Ishigaki, Hideo Noda, and Miki Hayakawa. In so doing, he recasts notions of minority artists’ contributions to modernism and American culture.Wang presents comparative studies of these four artists’ figurative works that feature Native Americans, African Americans, and other racial and ethnic minorities, including Matsura and Susan Timento Pose at Studio (ca. 1912), The Bonus March (1932), Scottsboro Boys (1933), and Portrait of a Negro (ca. 1926). Rather than creating art that reflected “Asian aesthetics,” Matsura, Ishigaki, Noda, and Hayakawa deployed “imagery of the Other by the Other” as their means of exploring, understanding, and contesting conditions of diaspora and notions of what it meant to be American in an age of anti-immigrant sentiment and legislation.Based on a decade-long excavation of previously unexamined collections in the United States and Japan, The Other American Moderns is more than a rediscovery of “forgotten” minority artists: it reconceives American modernism by illuminating these artists’ active role in the shaping of a multicultural and cosmopolitan culture. This nuanced analysis of their deliberate engagement with the ideological complexities of American identity contributes a new vision to our understanding of non-European identity in modernism and American art.

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Chiura Obata (1885-1975) was one of the most significant Japanese American artists working on the West Coast in the last century. Born in Okayama, Japan, Obata emigrated to the United States in 1903 and embarked on a seven-decade career that saw the enactment of anti-immigration laws and the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. But Obata emerged as a leading figure in the Northern California artistic communities, serving not only as an influential art professor at UC Berkeley for nearly twenty years, but also as a founding director of art schools in the internment camps. With a prodigious and expansive oeuvre, Obata's seemingly effortless mastery of, and productive engagement with, diverse techniques, styles, and traditions defy the dichotomous categorizations of American/European and Japanese/Asian art. His faith in the power of art, his devotion to preserving the myriad grandeur of what he called "Great Nature," and his compelling personal story as an immigrant and an American are all as relevant to our contemporary moment as ever. This catalogue is the first book surveying Chiura Obata's rich and varied body of work that include over 100 beautiful images, many of which have never been published. It also showcases a selection of Obata's writings and a rare 1965 interview with the artist. The scholarly essays by ShiPu Wang and the other contributors illuminate the intense and productive cross-cultural negotiations that Obata's life and work exemplify, in the context of both American modernism and the early twentieth-century U.S. racio-ethnic relations-a still-understudied area in American art historical scholarship. Published in association with the Art, Design and Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara. Exhibition dates: Art, Design and Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara: January 13-April 29, 2018 Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City: May 25-September 2, 2018 Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art, Okayama, Japan: January 18-March 10, 2019 Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento: June 23-September 29, 2019

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This unprecedented exhibition reintroduces three trailblazing Japanese American artists of the pre–World War II generations. Pictures of Belonging: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Miné Okubo brings together over ninety works by three pioneering Japanese American artists from the pre–World War II era. Despite long careers and critical acclaim, Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Miné Okubo have largely been overlooked in traditional American art history. This groundbreaking exhibition reintroduces their work and explores their deep connections with each other for the first time. Through three chronological sections, the exhibition traces the careers of these artists from the 1920s to the 1990s. "Faces & Communities" presents pre–World War II portraiture and figurative works, while "Belongings & (dis)Locations" showcases landscapes and still lifes from the prewar and wartime periods. The final section, "Explorations & Rediscoveries," features postwar abstractions. Pictures of Belonging foregrounds the rich and heterogeneous oeuvres of Hayakawa, Hibi, and Okubo, which spanned eight decades and four states, highlighting the diverse communities in which these trailblazing artists flourished before, during, and after World War II. Published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name, this book shifts the spotlight from the injustice and tragedy of Japanese American incarceration toward a broader picture of the so-called American experience through the compelling, divergent lives and artworks of these women of Japanese descent. Published by the Japanese American National Museum in association with University of California Press and with support from the Terra Foundation for American Art and the National Endowment for the Arts. Exhibition dates: February 24 to June 30, 2024, at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, Utah November 15, 2024, to August 17, 2025, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, District of Columbia October 2, 2025, to January 4, 2026, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania February 5, 2026, to April 19, 2026, at the Monterey Museum of Art, Monterey, California Fall 2026 at the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, California

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