Shining a Light on Asian Americans in Art History

The Filipina film actress, vaudeville dancer, and singer Rosario Cooper never got her big break. But in artist Miljohn Ruperto’s work, featured in At Home/On Stage: Asian American Representation in Photography and Film, she’s the star of her own show. The exhibit seeks to help right the historical wrong of Asian American erasure and exclusion from film, photography, and video—essential mediums through which to understand historical representation.

At Home/On Stage, now on view at Stanford University's Cantor Arts Center, is one of three inaugural exhibitions of the Asian American Art Initiative (AAAAI), which launched last year and was co-founded by Marci Kwon and Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander. The initiative addresses, through art, these and other intertwined histories between the country, the Asian American community, and the university. Stanford’s gains in recent decades in the field of Asian American studies make it uniquely well placed—and perhaps even ethically inclined—to host such an initiative dedicated to the art and history of Asian Americans.

Kwon began formulating the ideas behind the project when she arrived to teach at Stanford in 2016 and taught a class on Asian American art. “It was the class I wanted to see as an undergrad, so I thought I’d just teach it,” she says. In planning her lectures, she was struck by the disparity in publications and documentation between artists in “the cannon”—which has historically been dominated by white men—and Asian American artists.

This was right as former President Donald Trump, new to the White House, was coming through on his promises of bigotry. Like many others, Kwon understood the country had made a U-turn on racial equality and progressivism in general. Meanwhile, Kwon was immersed in her research on historical and contemporary Asian American art, which she saw as further endangered in this increasingly xenophobic political environment.

“We realized there was a real need, especially in a museum context, for a lot of this work to be cared for and preserved. I kept meeting families of artists who didn’t know what to do with the work, and there was a desire to have it placed in an intuitional context,” Kwon says.

Now, AAAI comprises a series of long-term installations, exhibitions, research, and education projects that operate alongside Cantor’s expanding collection of works by Asian American and Asian diaspora artists. Its mission is to prioritize extensive engagement with primary source materials, foster critical scholarship, produce public programs, and help uplift another generation of art historians, curators, and leaders in the field.

“As a historian, it’s never enough just to have the work; you want the contextualization—the artists’ lives and their words,” Kwon says. This is especially true for Asian American artists whose work and lives have been under-documented. AAAI has the research and scholarly capacity to provide that context, deepening its contribution to the community. “A big goal for the initiative is to generate new research on these works using primary sources. It’s a commitment, not just to having artists in the collection, but continuing research on them. The archives make that possible,” she says.

The AAAI will also engage with communities who aren’t part of the art world or formally conducting art historical research, including people from the Bay Area as well as Asian American visitors from elsewhere. “The people who know the most about the artists are in the community they belong to,” Kwon says. “That’s intrinsically part of good art history; to be responsible stewards of this work requires conversations with community members and trust building.”

Cantor is free and the AAAI is in the process of developing a comprehensive website so the collections can be viewed remotely. Kwon also mentions the importance of partnering with community organizations to create dialogue that takes into consideration more than the formal or art historical contribution of a work and situates it within a broader community. Next month, the AAAI will host a public symposium with artists, community members, and academics on the pasts and futures of Asian American artists.

“Like many people of color who have been in the art world or academia, on the one hand, it’s great to see there’s renewed attention to these issues. But it can feel quite tokenizing to be put in these categories,” Kwon says. While those who frequent galleries or universities are more engaged with Asian American art, Kwon says at times she feels intentions can be suspect. While Asian American artists were around a decade ago, she explains, the art world was not nearly as interested in them.

Meanwhile, the conversations she has about works of art with the families and friends of artists, or members of the community, are fundamentally different from similar discussions with those immersed in art. For them, the work of Asian American artists “is not a new thing; it’s about a lifetime of dedication.”

These conversations, Kwon says, have helped her see that there are alternatives to the “tokenizing, racializing, essentializing approach the art world can take when it comes to POC.” Taking the time to do the research and adhere to the work of the artist, whether it engages with race directly, indirectly, or not at all, is one goal of the AAAI.

Another is more inward. Stanford’s namesake comes from its founder—one of the leaders of the Central Pacific Railroad company, former California governor and senator Leland Stanford. In 1942, the university’s first professor of Asian descent, Yamato Ichihashi, was sent to a Japanese internment camp—along with 24 students with Japanese last names. Stanford students, like many others, protested the Vietnam War throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, and in 1968 the term “Asian American” was coined by a UCLA scholar and brought to Stanford’s campus. East of the Pacific, a newly opened exhibit at the Cantor Arts Center curated by AAAI co-founder Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, engages with the experience of detainment in America’s wartime Japanese internment camps.

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.”