NEH Summer Institute Schedule
Re-envisioning American Art History:
Asian American Art, Research, and Teaching
July 9-28, 2012
Host: A/P/A Institute at New York University
Please note: additional readings will be posted on the NEH Summer Institute’s
NYUwiki: https://wikis.nyu.edu/x/twKXAg
WEEK 1. EARLY 20TH CENTURY THROUGH POST-WAR ASIAN AMERICAN ART
July 9, 2012 —
9h30am
MONDAY MORNING: Registration/ Orientation tour for participants
Location: Gramercy Green 2nd Floor Lounge, 310 Third Ave (btw. 23rd and 24th
Streets)
1:30pm
MONDAY AFTERNOON KEYNOTE: Mark Johnson, Professor of Art and Gallery
Director, San Francisco State University on Asian American Art: A History
Location: SCA Flex Space, 20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor
Mark Johnson will provide an overview of the emerging field of Asian American art
history, discussing the fifteen year research initiative that resulted in the publication
of Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970 (2008) and the exhibition at San
Francisco's de Young Museum, “Asian/American/Modern Art: Shifting Currents,
1900-1970” (2008), for which he was co-curator. This landmark project helped
define the field of Asian American art and the publication that resulted from it
Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970 will serve as important background for
this session as well as for others during the Institute. This keynote will introduce the
field and outline key issues of accessibility, archives, teaching, and other recent
developments in the field that will be discussed throughout the Summer Institute.
A response follows with Keynote Discussant Vishakha N. Desai, President and
CEO of Asia Society.
Readings:
From the publication Chang, Gordon H., Mark Dean Johnson, and Paul D. Karlstrom,
eds. Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press,
2008.
Gordon H. Chang, "Foreword: "Emerging from the Shadows: The Visual Arts and
Asian American History" (pp. ix-xv);
Mark Dean Johnson, "Beyond East and West: Introduction, Artists of Asian Ancestry
in America" (pp. xvii-xxiii);
Ibid., "Uncovering Asian American Art in San Francisco, 1850-1940," (pp. 1-29)
July 10, 2012 —
9:30am
TUESDAY MORNING: Karin Higa, Senior Adjunct Curator at the Japanese
American National Museum on “At the Margins of American Modernism: Los
Angeles, Little Tokyo, and Japanese American Artists, 1919-1945, A Case Study”
Location: SCA Conference Room, 20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor
The artistic activity centered in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo between the two World
Wars presents a dynamic nexus of artists, art, audiences, and intellectual exchange
that has been scantily explored. Using the neighborhood as a case study, Higa will
situate the work of the Little Tokyo Japanese American artists within broader
cultural and artistic discourses in Los Angeles, the United States, and internationally.
The artists in Little Tokyo grappled with what it meant to be modern and explored
the contours of modernist form in their art.
Readings:
Karin Higa, "Hidden in Plain Sight: Little Tokyo Between the Wars"; in Asian
American Art: A History, 1850-1970, eds. Gordon Chang, Mark Johnson, and Paul
Karlstrom (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), 31-53.
Wanda M. Corn, “Coming of Age: Historical Scholarship in American Art,” in Critical
Issues in American Art: A Book of Readings, ed. Mary Ann Calo (Boulder, Colo.:
Westview Press, 1998), 1-34.
Karin Higa, “The Search for Roots, or Finding a Precursor,” in Asian American
Modern Art: Shifting Currents, 1900-1970, eds. Daniell Cornell et al (Berkeley, Calif:
University of California Press, 2008), 15-22.
1:30pm
TUESDAY AFTERNOON: Tom Wolf, Professor of Art History at Bard College.
Part 1. Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889-1953) and Isamu Noguchi (1905-1988).
Location: SCA Conference Room, 20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor
The first of two lectures on these artists defines their careers in the context of the
U.S. and other Japanese American artists creating during their time.
Reading for the lectures 1 and 2:
Christopher Benfy’s The Great Wave, Random House, 2003, pages 75-139.
Ayako Ishigaki’s Restless Wave, My Life in Two Worlds, The Feminist Press, CUNY,
2004, pages 184-248.
Asian American Art 1850-1970 anthology, Stanford University Press, 2008: pages 83109.
This session will provide a brief survey of Japonisme, the European and American
vogue for Japanese art, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Wolf will look at
Yasuo Kuniyoshi, perhaps the best known early Japanese artist besides Noguchi,
reviewing his career and relating him to other lesser-known artists, such as Eitaro
Ishigaki and Toshio Shimizu, both of whom were born in Japan and worked in the
United States.
July 11, 2012 —
WEDNESDAY: Devoted to field research, reading, and consulting with Institute
directors.
July 12, 2012 —
9:30am
THURSDAY MORNING: Tom Wolf, Professor of Art History at Bard College.
Part 2. Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889-1953) and Isamu Noguchi (1905-1988).
Location: SCA Conference Room, 20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor
The second of two lectures on these artists examines their work in the international
artistic and political milieu.
Wolf will explore the art and careers of Isamu Noguchi, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Tsuguharu
Foujita, Hideo Noda, and Eitaro Ishigaki, Japanese nationals who lived in America
but worked in Paris and Mexico as well as New York. Selections from Asian
American Art: A History, 1850-1970 illuminate their art in the context of both
American and international artistic and political developments. The session will also
consider the lives of several of these Japanese American artists during World War II
and how this period is reflected in their art.
1pm
THURSDAY AFTERNOON: Meet at SCA Lobby to all travel together to the
Whitney Museum located at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street. Talk and
viewing with the curator Frances Morris, Tate Modern Head of Collections
(International Art), of the exhibition “Yayoi Kusama”
Well known for her use of dense patterns of polka dots and nets, as well as her
intense, large-scale environments, Yayoi Kusama works in a variety of media,
including painting, drawing, sculpture, film, performance, and immersive
installation. Born in Japan in 1929, Kusama came to the United States in 1957 and
quickly found herself at the heart of the New York avant-garde. After achieving fame
through groundbreaking exhibitions and art “happenings,” she returned to her
native country in 1973 and is now one of Japan’s most prominent contemporary
artists. This retrospective features works spanning Kusama’s career and includes
Kusama’s immersive installation Fireflies on the water (2002), a work in the
Whitney’s collection.
July 13, 2012 —
9am —Meet at Gramercy Green downstairs lobby to all travel together to the
Noguchi Museum or meet at the Museum by 10am
FRIDAY MORNING: Karin Higa, Senior Adjunct Curator, Japanese American
National Museum on “The Long and Curious Life of Isamu Noguchi: Monographic
Approaches in Asian American Art History”. This lecture will take place at the
Noguchi Museum.
Location: Noguchi Museum, 9-01 33rd Road, LIC, Queens
Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) was a polymath whose work in sculpture, landscape,
and design made a profound and lasting impact on American culture. Born to an
American mother and Japanese father, Noguchi literally and figuratively lived
between the spheres of “East” and “West,” navigating multiple identities, modes of
working, and critical responses to his art. This session will survey the literature on
Noguchi to evaluate the ways in which Noguchi’s Asian American heritage was
treated at different historical moments.
Readings:
Louise Allison Cort and Bert Winther-Tamaki, eds., Isamu Noguchi and Modern
Japanese Ceramics: A Close Embrace of the Earth (Washington, D.C.: Arthur M.
Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 2003).
Amy Lyford, “Noguchi, Sculptural Abstraction, and the Politics of Japanese American
Internment,” The Art Bulletin 85, no. 1 (March 2003): 137-151.
Isamu Noguchi, A Sculptor's World (New York: Harper & Row, 1968).
James Oles, “Noguchi in Mexico: International Themes for a Working-Class Market,”
American Art 15, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 10-33.
Bert Winther, “The Rejection of Isamu Noguchi's Hiroshima Cenotaph: A Japanese
American Artist in Occupied Japan,” Art Journal 53, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 23-27.
FRIDAY AFTERNOON TOUR: The Noguchi Museum
The Noguchi Museum was founded and designed by Isamu Noguchi for the display
of what he considered to be representative examples of his life’s work. Participants
will tour the museum with the administrative director of the museum Amy Hau and
view the permanent collection and open-air sculpture garden. The museum
regularly presents temporary exhibitions that offer a contextualized view of
Noguchi’s work.
July 14, 2012 —
9:00am— Meet at Gramercy Green Lobby to travel together to the Museum of
Chinese in America or meet at the Museum by 10am
SATURDAY MORNING: John Kuo Wei Tchen, Director, Asian/Pacific/American
Institute, NYU, will lead a tour of the Museum of Chinese in America and discuss
“Opening Up Dialogues and Interpretations of the Visual Arts”
Location: MOCA, 215 Centre Street
This session will take place within the Museum’s core exhibition “With a Single Step:
Stories in the Making of America” and the nearby Manhattan’s historic Chinatown. It
will consider visual art within the larger realm of Asian American visual culture and
the impact of visuality (whether in photography, art, film, advertising, tourist goods,
or propaganda) in shaping Western audiences’ perceptions of their historical
moment, place, social position, and attitudes toward Asian peoples. The readings
set forth a theoretical framework for considering how individuals come to perceive
and engage with the world around them and the role that visuality plays in either
constraining or liberating them to see their social environment in new ways.
Readings:
Pierre Bourdieu, “Classes and Classifications” in Distinction: A social critique on the
judgement of taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984) 466-84.
Michel Serres, “Visit” in The Five Senses, translated by Margaret Sankey and Peter
Cowley (London: Continuum Book, 2008) 236-310.
Loic J. D. Wacquant, “Toward a Social Praxeology” in An Invitation to Reflexive
Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) 1-60.
WEEK 2: FRAMEWORKS FOR SCHOLARSHIP, TEACHING, & CURATORIAL
PRACTICE
July 16, 2012 —
9:30am
MONDAY MORNING: Jeffrey Wechsler, Senior curator at the Zimmerli Art
Museum, Rutgers University on “American-type Painting” and/or “Asian
American-type Painting”: an East/West Synthesis
Location: SCA Conference Room, 20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor
This session will focus upon American artists of East Asian ancestry (China, Japan,
Korea) whose work comprises a still largely unnoticed section of Abstract
Expressionism. For these artists, many of the formal, technical, and even
philosophical aspects of Abstract Expressionism had predecessors within traditions
of East Asian artistic practice. It will re-examine the Asian American painterly
abstractionists who, between 1945 and 1970, brought together their personal
experience of Asian aesthetics with American abstract modes, creating a modern
artistic synthesis of East and West.
Readings:
Jeffrey Wechsler, Asian Traditions / Modern Expressions: Asian American Artists and
Abstraction, 1945-1970, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1997)
Seth McCormick, Reiko Tomii, Hiroko Ikegami, Jeffrey Wechsler, and Midori
Yoshimoto, with a response by Alexandra Munroe, “Exhibition as Proposition:
Responding Critically to The Third Mind,” Art Journal 55, No.3 (2009)
David J. Clarke, The Influence of Oriental Thought on Post-war American Painting and
Sculpture (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988)
1pm — Meet at SCA lobby and travel together to the Museum.
MONDAY AFTERNOON: Visit to the Museum of Modern Art
Location: MoMA, 11 West 53rd Street
Midori Yoshimoto will lead a visit to the Museum of Modern Art to view the new
holdings of the Silverman Fluxus Collection. Yoshimoto will also arrange a rare
opportunity to view Asian American artists’ works from the museum’s collection.
July 17, 2012 —
9:30am
TUESDAY MORNING: Midori Yoshimoto, Associate Professor of Art History, New
Jersey City University on “Fluxus Nexus/Tokyo-New York”
Location: SCA Conference Room, 20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor
Fluxus included an unusually large number of Japanese artists such as Yoko Ono, AyO, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi, Sigeko Kubota, Takehisa Kosugi, and Yasunao Tone,
as well as a Korean artist Nam June Paik. Through frequent travels and
correspondence, these artists bridged communities in Tokyo and New York, infusing
Fluxus concepts and events with new artistic developments in Japan. This session
will illuminate artistic exchanges that forged a nexus between New York and Tokyo
and beyond. Readings will inform a discussion of how Fluxus established its
transnational network in the early 1960s and if the Fluxus mode of transnational
collective is still valid today.
Readings:
Midori Yoshimoto, Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005).
Midori Yoshimoto, ed. “Women & Fluxus: Toward a feminist archive of Fluxus,”
Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Nov. 2009): 287293, 369-389.
Jon Hendricks, “Yoko Ono and Fluxus,” in Alexandra Munroe and J. Hendricks, eds.,
Yes Yoko Ono (New York: Japan Society and H. N. Abrams, 2000), 38-50.
Hannah Higgins, “Border Crossings: Three Transnationalisms of Fluxus,” in Not the
Other Avant-Garde: The Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance,
James Harding, ed., (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 265-284.
Moira Roth, “The Voice of Shigeko Kubota: ‘A Fusion of Art and Life, Asia and
America…’,” in Mary Jane Jacob, ed. Shigeko Kubota Video Sculpture (New York:
American Museum of Moving Image, 1991), 76-87.
12:00pm Lunch break — Please bring or purchase your lunches and regroup
in the SCA Conference room to have a briefing with NEH Division of Education
Programs deputy director Wilsonia Cherry.
1:30pm — Meet at the Sylvia Wald & Po Kim Art Gallery
TUESDAY AFTERNOON: Panel discussion led by Jeffrey Wechsler, Curator,
Zimmerli Museum, featuring Asian American artists Chinyee, Chuang Che, Po
Kim, and Ralph Iwamoto
Location: Sylvia Wald & Po Kim Art Gallery, 417 Lafayette Street 4th Floor
This panel will provide the opportunity for Institute participants to interact with
senior Asian American artists. The artists will speak of their experiences during the
Abstract Expressionist era, offering a “living history” of the creation of work that
bridged two cultures. The artists will focus upon the difficulties they had in
presenting hybrid art in an art world tied to the concept of the “Americanness” of
Abstract Expressionism.
July 18, 2012 —
WEDNESDAY: Devoted to field research, reading, and consulting with Institute
directors.
July 19, 2012 —
9:30am
THURSDAY MORNING: Margo Machida, Assoc. Professor, Art History & Asian
American Studies, Univ. of CT, on “Orality, Art Histories, and Interpretation in
Asian American Art”
Location: SCA Conference Room, 20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor
Art objects provide a highly visible platform for the intersection of subjectivity and
the social imaginary, and interviews and dialogue with artists offer a primary means
of drawing out and articulating the distinctive sensibilities, life experiences, and
world views that catalyze and shape such creative production. This session
addresses different uses of evidence from direct oral exchange with living visual
artists of Asian heritages in the United States.
Key questions will focus on the place and orientation of the interviews, the type of
information that was elicited, the passages that are especially incisive in
understanding the artist and the work, as well as unexplored lines of inquiry that
suggest directions for future research.
Readings:
Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral History
and Public History (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1990), xv-
xxiv, 1-27, 81-88
Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai, editors, Women's Words: The Feminist
Practice of Oral History (New York: Routledge, 1991), 1-5, 11-26, 61-62, 77-92, 121136, 137-153.
Archives (Source: Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Oral History Collection,
online transcripts)
Note: students will be assigned to read the entire online transcripts listed below.
Oral History Interview with Carlos Villa, 1995 June 20-July 20, by Paul Karlstrom,
for the Archives of American Art.
http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-carlos-villa5561
Oral History Interview with Hung Liu, 2010 April 25-29 by Joann Moser, for the
Archives of American Art's U.S. General Services Administration, Design for
Excellence and the Arts oral history project, at Liu's studio in Oakland, Calif.
Note: scheduled for transcription
Social and Intellectual History
Richard Cándida Smith, Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), xvii-xxvi, 172-211, 439-458.
Orality and Interpretation
Margo Machida, selected interview transcripts with Asian American and Pacific
Islander artists in the United States, private archive, ca. 1995 to present
Oral History, Supplementary Readings:
Ronald J. Grele, editor, Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History (New York:
Praeger, 1991)
Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning
in Oral History (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1991)
Donald A. Ritchie, Doing Oral History (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995)
Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (Oxford, England: Oxford
University Press, 1988)
1:30pm
THURSDAY AFTERNOON: Dipti Desai, Associate Professor and Director of the
Art Education Program, NYU, on “Teaching, Archives, and Asian American Art”
Location: SCA Conference Room, 20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor
Recently, several Asian American contemporary artists have examined archives
through the medium of exhibitions, art books, and symposiums -- interpreting,
contesting, redefining, and even reinventing our understanding of these collections.
Institute participants will examine the ways these artists, including Institute Faculty
member Tomie Arai, have referenced the archive in their work and in doing so raise
questions about the nature and meaning of archives.
Readings:
Desai, Dipti and Jessica Hamlin. “Artists in the Realm of Historical Methods: The
Sound, Smell and Taste of History.” History as Art, Art as History: Contemporary Art
and Social Studies Education. New York: Routledge, 2010. 47-66.
Enwezor, Okuwi Archive Fever: Uses of documents in contemporary art. London &
New York: Stedil Publishing and International Center of Photography, 2008. P
(introduction)
Merewether, Charles. The Archive (Documents of Contemporary Art). Boston: MIT
Press. 2006.
Sekula, Allan. “The Body and the Archive,” October, Vol. 39, Winter,1986. pp. 3-64.
Optional:
Schaffner, Ingrid et al, eds. Deep Storage: Collecting, storing and archiving in art. New
York: Prestel, 1998.
July 20, 2012 — Meet at NYU Fales Library & Special Collections
9:30am
FRIDAY MORNING: Marvin Taylor, Director at NYU Fales Library & Special
Collections on “Collections Building: Artist papers and Archives at Fales Library
& Special Collections”
Location: NYU Fales Library & Special Collections, on the 3rd floor of Bobst
Library at 70 Washington Square South
Fales Library & Special Collections include important Asian American artists’ papers
such as those of Martin Wong, Yun Gee, and Godzilla: Asian American Art Network.
As participants view selected items from the archive, they will explore issues related
to their acquisition, preservation, and access as well as their use for teaching and
exhibitions. Known for leading the Downtown Collection initiative at NYU, Taylor
will discuss the methodology of building key resources for art historical research
and scholarship.
Reading:
The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984, Ed. Marvin Taylor,
Princeton University Press, 2005.
1pm — Meet in front of Bobst Library to travel together to the Estate of Tseng
Kwong Chi
FRIDAY AFTERNOON:
Arrive at 2pm —Visit to the home of choreographer Muna Tseng and the estate
of her brother, artist Tseng Kwong Chi. Discussion led by Dipti Desai.
Location: The Estate of Tseng Kwong Chi, 115 Christopher Street, 4th floor
Tseng Kwong Chi (born 1950, Hong Kong; died 1990, New York) is internationally
known for his photographic Expeditionary Self-Portrait Series a.k.a. East Meets West.
In over 100 images, he poses in front of iconic architecture, dressed in a classic Mao
suit, as his invented artistic persona -- a Chinese “Ambiguous Ambassador”. Tseng
was also an important documentarian and denizen of the downtown 1980s New
York club and art scene. He created more than 100,000 color and black-and-white
photographs of his contemporaries Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel,
Jean-Michel Basquiat, McDermott and McGough, Kenny Scharf, Philip Taaffe,
Madonna, Grace Jones, the B-52’s, and Fab Five Freddy, among others. The Estate’s
collection includes over 75,000 photographs and slides and numerous publications
on the artist. Participants will view the archives and Dipti Desai will lead a
discussion with Muna Tseng about the historical and creative uses of artists’
archives.
July 21, 2012 —
9:30am
SATURDAY MORNING: Lectures with Artists Tomie Arai and Jaishri
Abichandani.
Location: SCA Flex Space, 20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor
A Lecture with Tomie Arai
Arai is a printmaker and installation artist who has worked collaboratively with
diverse communities for over two decades. Her collaborative work includes projects
with Vietnamese and Cambodian youth in South Philadelphia; Chicano and Asian
artists from Little Tokyo and East Los Angeles; prints about the internment
experience of Japanese Americans on the Pima and Colorado River Indian
reservations in Arizona during World War II; a mural memorializing the discovery
of an African Burial Ground in New York City; and installations about the emerging
community of Chinese Latinos in Miami. Arai will discuss her work as communitybased social practice that explores themes of displacement, migration, hybridity,
and cultural history.
Readings:
Chang, Alexandra. Envisioning Diaspora: Asian American Visual Arts Collectives
(2008; pp. 54-56; 171-172)
Machida, Margo. Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the
Social Imaginary (2009; pp. )
A Lecture with Jaishri Abichandani
Jaishri Abichandani will be speaking on her art and her work in arts activism in
New York and internationally. Born in Bombay, India, Jaishri Abichandani
immigrated to New York City in 1984. Jaishri has continued to intertwine art and
activism in her career, founding and leading the important South Asian women’s
Creative Collective in New York and London since 1997. She has exhibited her work
internationally and has curated exhibitions including Fatal Love: South Asian
American Art Now and Queens International 2006 Everything All at Once. Sultana’s
Dream, Exploding the Lotus, Artists in Exile, Shapeshifters and Aliens, Anomalies and
Transitional Aesthetics.
WEEK 3: TRANSCULTURAL FLOW
July 23, 2012 —
9:30am
MONDAY MORNING: Alexandra Chang, Curator of Special Projects and Director
of Global Arts Programs, A/P/A Institute, NYU, on “The Art of Cosmopolitanism:
Contemporary Asian American Art”
Location: SCA Conference Room, 20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor
This session looks at post-1990s Asian American art, exploring transcultural flows
of art production and artists. It will investigate international artist collectives and
artistic production as they relate to theories of globalism. Examples will be drawn
from a range of post-90s artists and collectives including Tomokazu Matsuyama,
Godzilla, The New Grand Tour, and Tomato Grey. Readings related to this session
explore ideas of art and diaspora, transculturality, hybridity, localism,
cosmopolitanism, and globalism and its critiques.
Readings:
Chang, Alexandra. Envisioning Diaspora: Asian American Visual Arts Collectives
(2008; pp. 96-162)
Machida, Margo. Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the
Social Imaginary (2009; pp. 17-25, 46-49, 194-199)
Wolfgang Welsch’s “Transculturality – the Puzzling Form of Cultures Today” in the
edited volume Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World (1999, pp.194-213)
Modernity at Large by Arjun Appadurai (2008, pp. 1-23; 178-199)
1:00pm — Meet at SCA lobby to travel together to the studio of Zhang Hongtu
MONDAY AFTERNOON: Studio visit with artist Zhang Hongtu. A lecture by the
artist and discussion led by Alexandra Chang.
Location: Studio of Zhang Hongtu, 3825 Woodside Avenue, Woodside, Queens
Participants will meet Chinese American artist Zhang Hongtu during a visit to this
home and studio in Queens. Zhang is known for his “Pop Mao” work created after
the 1989 student protests as well as his involvement with New York Asian Diasporic
art scene and Chinese artists who moved here in 1989. Zhang will address the
themes of hybridity and agency in his work as well as in Asian American art, more
generally and engage in a discussion with the participants.
July 24, 2012 —
9:00am — Meet at Gramercy Green Lobby to travel to the Museum together or
at the Museum lobby at 10am.
TUESDAY MORNING: Melissa Chiu, Museum Director & Curator for
Contemporary Asian and Asian-American Art, Asia Society, will lead a tour of
The Asia Society Gallery and Museum
Location: Asia Society Gallery and Museum, 725 Park Avenue
Melissa Chiu will talk to the participants about the Asia Society Museum and its
global mission (in particular the relationship between Asia and NYC), focusing on
shows that include Asian diasporic artists and Asian American artists. Chiu will
address the issues that surround ethnic-specific museums and lead a gallery and
collections tour, showing selected works by Asian American artists from the
Museum’s collection.
Reading:
The primary resource for this session will be One Way or Another: Asian American
Art Now (2006), an exhibition catalogue which discusses the shifting meaning of
Asian America over the last decade and looks at the way that the Asia Society’s
curators frame the work of Asian American artists in an increasingly globalized
society.
1:00pm — Lunch in/around Asia Society and travel together to the Bronx
Museum of the Arts lobby by 2:00pm.
TUESDAY AFTERNOON: Visit to the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Tour and
discussion led by Sergio Bessa, Director of Curatorial and Educational Programs
at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.
Location: Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1040 Grand Concourse at 165th Street
Participants will be given a tour of the Bronx Museum and will view Museum’s
extensive Asian American art collection. The Museum’s Asian American art
acquisitions initiatives are singular and follow a dedication of the museum to the
collecting and display of works by diverse artists.
July 25, 2012 —
WEDNESDAY: Devoted to field research, reading and consulting with Institute
directors.
July 26 & 27, 2012 —
10:00am-5:00pm
THURSDAY and Friday: Full-day Colloquia on Participants Research.
Location: NYU 19 University Place, Auditorium 102
During the last two days of the Institute, participants will share their research and
curriculum development projects and discuss how to integrate research and
materials from the Summer Institute into their teaching.
5pm FRIDAY EVENING: Reception for participants and faculty.