Icons of Presence: Asian American Activist Art — curated by Margo Machida — exhibition info

Icons of Presence: Asian American Activist Art
Exhibition Site: Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco, 750 Kearny Street, 3rd floor
Dates: TBD; opening scheduled for October 24, 2008

Icons of Presence: Asian American Activist Art showcases important graphics and posters by Jim Dong, Nancy Hom, and Leland Wong, three Chinese Americans whose art and cultural activism during the 1970s and 1980s were pivotal in the San Francisco Bay Area’s burgeoning Asian American arts movement. Organized for Chinese Culture Center in conjunction with the major art historical survey exhibition, “Asian/American/Modern” at the de Young Museum, this show highlights pieces that mark a critical turning point in Asian American artistic production, as matters of identification, community, self and collective representation, and local history increasingly came to the forefront for a new post-war generation of artists. To understand how this landmark cultural transformation unfolded in San Francisco during this period, Icons of Presence emphasizes the central role of graphic art and printmaking as a powerful means of social expression, in building a foundation for an emerging Asian American visual culture. To recognize the continuing evolution of these artists’ visions, the show will also incorporate examples of their more recent work.

This exhibition is inspired by ongoing research on Bay Area Asian American artists by East Coast-based guest curator and scholar Margo Machida. It is an outgrowth of her recent essay, “Art and Social Consciousness: Asian American and Pacific Islander Artists in San Francisco 1965-1980,” to be published in the forthcoming book, Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970 (Stanford University Press, 2008), edited by Gordon Chang, Mark Johnson, and Paul Karlstrom. Because this book, and the related “Asian/American/Modern” exhibition at the de Young Museum, chiefly trace the rise of Asian American artists involved with modernism through the 1960s, Icons of Presence provides a counterpart in signaling the historic turn toward social and cultural activism in the tumultuous 1970s – an era which touched off a new “wave” of artistic production and social consciousness in Asian America.

ABOUT THE CURATOR
Margo Machida is Associate Professor of Art History and Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from SUNY Buffalo (2002). A scholar, independent curator, and cultural critic specializing in Asian American art and visual culture, her most recent book is the co-edited volume Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art (University of California Press, 2003). In 2005 this volume received the Cultural Studies Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies. Among her current publications are: “Reframing Asian America” in the exhibition catalogue, One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now (New York: Asia Society, 2006), and “Object Lessons: Materiality and Dialogism in the Art of Flo Oy Wong” in the exhibition catalogue Seventy/Thirty—Seventy Years of Living, Thirty Years of Art (Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center, San Francisco, May 2008). Her forthcoming books and articles include: Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary (Duke University Press, February 2009); “Diasporas in Motion: The Visual Arts and Communities of Affinity,” in Alexandra Chang, Envisioning Diaspora: Asian American Artist Collectives Godzilla, Godzookie, and the Barnstormers (Timezone 8 Art Books, Beijing, China, 2008); and “Convergent Conversations – The Nexus of Asian American Art” in the Blackwell Companion to Asian Art, Rebecca Brown and Deborah Hutton, eds. (2010).