Artists Kay Sekimachi, Carlos Villa, Jay Xu, Valerie Matsumoto, and Wucius Wong are joined by author and professor Margo Machida and curator and author Daniell Cornell.
Hosted by guest curator Mark Dean Johnson and the International Center for the Arts at San Francisco State University- de Young Museum
Bio
Daniell Cornell
Daniell Cornell is Deputy Director for Art and Senior Curator, Palm Springs Art Museum.
Cornell is also the Curator of American Art and Director of Contemporary Art Projects at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Mark Dean Johnson
Mark Dean Johnson was educated at Yale where he worked with Josef Albers, and at the University of California where he studied with Elmer Bischoff. Although trained as a painter, he has worked in arts administration as well as a teacher of painting. After teaching during the 1980s at Humboldt State University in Arcata, CA, he became the Associate Dean of Academic at the San Francisco Art Institute.
He is currently gallery director at San Francisco State University. His curatorial work includes a focus on California contemporary and historical art, and several of his projects have explored under represented contributions to regional art history. He is the project director of the California Asian American Artists Biographical Survey, funded by the NEH in association with the Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art, and has co-curated exhibitions on the work of Chang Dai-chien (catalog available through the University of Washington Press), Dong Kingman and others.
He is also the editor of several books including Brian Tripp, At Work: The Art of California Labor and an upcoming anthology surveyed California Asian American Art. Mark Johnson is also a research fellow at the Stanford University Research Institute for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity.
Margo Machida
Granted tenure and promoted to Associate Professor in 2006, Margo Machida received her Ph.D. in American Studies from the State University of New York at Buffalo.
In 2004, she received a major grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for a Symposium on Contemporary Asian American Art, Creativity and Culture Division (2003-2005), and the School of Fine Arts New Scholar Award.
She is a scholar, educator, independent curator, and cultural critic specializing in Asian American art and visual culture. Dr. Machida was Director of the Cultural Dialogue Project at the Asian / American Center, Queens College, CUNY, from 1994-96, where she developed interdisciplinary programs and humanities-based scholarship devoted to the study of Asian diasporic communities in the Americas. Prior to her appointment at UConn, she had been teaching courses on contemporary Asian and Asian American art and social issues for the A/P/A Studies Program at NYU.
She most recently co-organized two exhibitions: Uncommon Traits: Re/Locating Asia for the CEPA Gallery in Buffalo, NY; and Japanese and Japanese American Contemporary Printmaking for Brandywine Workshop, Inc., Philadelphia, PA.
Valerie Matsumoto
Valerie Matsumoto is a professor of history and Asian American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Her teaching and research interests include Asian American history and art, United States twentieth-century history, women's history, and oral history. Matsumoto has been the guest editor of a special issue of Amerasia Journal on histories and historians in the making, and she is coeditor of Over the Edge: Remapping the American West.
In addition to her book, Farming the Home Place: A Japanese American Community in California, 1919-82, she has published articles on oral history fieldwork in the Japanese American community, Japanese American gender roles, and Nisei women of the 1930s. She is currently working on the topic of Japanese American youth culture during the Jazz Age and the Great Depression.
Kay Sekimachi
Kay Sekimachi (b. 1926) is a fiber artist and weaver. Known as a weaver's weaver, Sekimachi uses the loom to construct three-dimensional sculptural pieces. She attended the California College of Arts, where she studied with Trude Guermonprez, and at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, where she studied with Jack Lenor Larsen.
Her work can found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Renwick Gallery, the Museum of Arts and Design, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She is recognized as a pioneer in the resurrection of fiber and weaving as a legitimate means of artistic expression.
Carlos Villa
Villa Carlos is a painter and post war artist Carlos Villa was born in San Francisco. He studied under Diebenkorn, Lobdell and Bischoff at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he earned his BFA in 1961.
He then went on to receive his MFA from Mills College two years later, studying under Ralph Du Casse While in school, and into the early 1960s, Villa painted in an Abstract Expressionist style. He moved to New York in 1963, and then returned to San Francisco 5 years later. The following year he began teaching at the San Francsico Art Association.
He began in the late 1960s to paint swirling arcs and coils of color in acrylic on unstretched canvases, adding to them such materials as feathers and broken glass. Following the feathered, cape-like works for which he became known in the early 1970s, he turned to imprinting canvases directly with images of his face, hands, and other parts of his body, during quasi-primitive dances and other ritualistic actions that he performed.
Wucius Wong
As an arts educator and administrator, Wucius Wong is among the first to bring Western Modernist theories and concepts to Hong Kong through his critical writings and organized events. He has helped develop and implement a comprehensive and systematic course of design which had nurtured a generation of outstanding designers.
The integration of design geometry and majestic landscape characterise the paintings of Wucius Wong. The principles of graphic design form the backbone of his composition. Mountainous masses heave to align themselves with mirroring planes and neatly folding lines; winding rivers turn course to defer to geometry.
Jay Xu
A dedicated scholar of Chinese antiquities and a curator committed to sharing his extensive knowledge of Asian art with a wide audience, Mr. Xu, 45, brings a variety of international museum experience to the Asian Art Museum.
He has been the Pritzker Chairman, Department of Asian and Ancient Art at The Art Institute of Chicago since 2006, after serving as Pritzker Curator of Asian Art since 2003. While at The Art Institute, Mr. Xu worked with two of America's most respected art museum directors, James Wood and James Cuno.
Prior to that, he served as Head of the Department of Asian Art, and Foster Foundation Curator of Chinese Art at the Seattle Art Museum, where he worked from 1996 to 2003. Before his appointment at the Seattle Art Museum, Mr. Xu was a fellow in the Department of Asian Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and an assistant curator at the Shanghai Museum. Mr. Xu studied Chinese Literature at Shanghai University, and Art History in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University.
During his tenure at The Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. Xu led the expansion of the Department of Asian and Ancient Art, doubling the size of its staff. He spearheaded significant acquisitions in many areas of Asian art, such as ancient Chinese bronzes, Korean screens, Japanese ceramics, Indian and Southeast Asian sculptures, and developed a collecting strategy for tradition-inspired contemporary Asian art. He curated or supervised a number of remarkable exhibitions including both traditional and contemporary Asian art.
Since 2005, Mr. Xu chaired The Art Institute's major expansion and renovation of its Asian art galleries.
Daniel Cornell, the curator of Asian/American/Modern Art: Shifting Currents, 1900-1970, discusses Asian American artist Alfonso Ossorio and his impact on modern American expressionism.
Ossorio was a friend of Jackson Pollack and their influence upon each others work is clearly evident in their art.
