Shining a Light on Asian Americans in Art History

Students in 1969 began what would be a decades-long quest to get Stanford to offer an Asian American studies major; in 1971, Gordon Chang, an advisor to the AAAI today, taught the school’s first Asian American history course. In 1989, students stormed the university president’s office, demanding the school hire more minority faculty members and create an Asian American Studies major.

The AAAI should be understood as the culmination of these efforts. Its focus on art history offers a particularly helpful paradigm through which to grasp an experience that is, literally, not black or white.

“If art is both abstract and concrete, referential and performative, so too is race. Art’s ability to embody this paradox makes it a potent site of investigation for a racialized subject,” Kwon writes in an introduction to a collection of essays on Asian American Art. “The ethical challenge of writing about Asian American artists is to respect, rather than to solve, the paradox of their existence.”

Read the full article via JoySauce here.