Art of the State Symposium

2022: Critical Issues in California’s AAPI Arts Communities

Saturday, January 8, 2022
10:00AM – 2:00PM
Virtual Event

Join MMA as leading artists, historians, and curators gather online for the fourth annual Art of the State symposium on January 8, 2022. Learn from our selected presenters who will share their experiences regarding critical issues that impact Asian-American/Pacific Islander communities.

Presenters

Susette Min (she/her) is a curator, writer, and Associate Professor at the University of California, Davis where she teaches Asian American Studies, art history, and cultural studies. She has curated for Asia Society, Whitney Museum of American Art, apexart, Berkeley Art Museum, Blaffer Art Museum, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, and Drawing Center in New York City where she served as Associate Curator before coming to UC Davis. Susette is also an accomplished author. Her first book, Unnamable Encounters: The Ends of Asian American Art (NYU, 2018), received critical acclaim, and she has published in numerous publications, including Panorama, Trans-Asia Photography Review, Art Journal, Amerasia Journal and the Journal of Asian American Studies. She is currently working on a book about art, immigration, and terrorism.

Scott Tsuchitani (he/him) is an interdisciplinary visual artist and Ph.D. candidate in Cultural Studies at University of California, Davis. His guerrilla art interventions combine tactical media and performance with intellectual activism. Scott’s work explores the relationship between how museums can create change around racial discourse and mobilize civic participation. His art has been featured in mainstream and community media, shown in museums around the U.S., presented in Europe and Asia, and cited in academic books and journals regarding art history, museum studies, social policy, and Asian and Asian American studies. Scott has worked on documentary films alongside Oscar and Emmy Award-winning filmmakers in Cambodia and South Korea. His own film, Meeting at Tule Lake, distributed by the Center for Asian American Media, aired on national cable and regional PBS.

Nancy Hom (she/her) is an award-winning artist, writer, curator, and arts consultant. Born in Toisan, China and raised in New York City, she has been an influential leader in the San Francisco Bay Area art scene since 1974. Over the years, Nancy has created many iconic images for community cultural events and political and social causes. Through her posters, poetry, illustrations, installations, large-scale mandalas, and curatorial work, Nancy has used the arts to affirm the histories, struggles, and contributions of communities of color. She has also nurtured the creative and organizational growth of over a dozen Bay Area arts organizations. Nancy served as Executive Director for the Kearny Street Workshop, an Asian American arts organization, from 1995 to 2003.

Eryn Kimura (she, they) is a mixed media artist based in San Francisco. She considers her work visual symphonies, composed of collaged fragments from print media and found ephemera. Her work scrutinizes mechanisms of hegemony in visual culture and memory, adopting the process of collage to reimagine and archive her ancestral pasts and futures. Eryn Kimura was born and raised in San Francisco, on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone land. She is a fifth generation Japanese and Chinese American, via Hawai’i and California. She has lived and worked in Kyoto, Japan and Paris, France. When she is not collaging, she is writing in her notebook with a fine-tip pen, whale-watching, or baking French pastries.

Eimi Tagore-Erwin (she/her) is a first generation Japanese-Bengali-American artist, researcher, and curator primarily raised between northern California, Honolulu, and Osaka. In her artistic work she uses mixed media collage and neon to create compositions that explore commodity culture, transnational living, and the contrasting feelings of anxiety and hope that accompany the experience of living with doubled (and tripled) identities. Eimi holds a B.F.A. in studio art and Asian Studies from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and an M.A. in visual culture from Lund University, Sweden. She is currently a third-year Ph.D. student in East Asian Studies at New York University, where she researches contemporary Japanese art with a focus on transpacific colonial legacies, war memory, and crisis. She has presented her research in Honolulu, Hawai’i; Wakayama, Japan; Vancouver, Canada; and Aarhus, Denmark. Eimi is a 2021 Fellow for PoNJA WIkipedia Initiative led by PoNJA-Genkon and Asia Art Archive in America. She recently started working for Alison Bradley Projects gallery in NYC, where she curates exhibitions of post-war Japanese artists for a wider audience.

Honorary keynote speaker

Tina Takemoto (they, them) is an artist, scholar, and Dean of Humanities and Sciences at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Her work explores Asian American queer history, the hidden dimensions of same-sex intimacy, and queer sexuality for Japanese Americans incarcerated by the US government during World War II. Her work has been exhibited and performed in museums such as Oakland Museum of California, Chinese Culture Center, Asian Art Museum, Oceanside Museum of Art, GLBT History Museum, New Conservatory Theatre, Sabina Lee Gallery, Sesnon Gallery, SOMArts, SFMOMA, and Vargas Museum. Her research has appeared in several publications, including Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, Densho Encyclopedia, and the anthologies Queering Asian American Art. Tina has received numerous prizes and film awards for her work. She currently serves on the board of the Queer Cultural Center and is co-founder of Queer Conversations on Culture and the Arts.

Our wonderful advisory committee for this event includes; Curator Lance Fung, SFSU Asian American Art History professor and Ph.D academic Santhi Kavuri-Bauer, MMA Collections and Exhibitions Assistant Noelani Castro, and Ph.D academic in visual art and anthropology, Lydia Nakashima Degarrod.

The symposium marks the culmination of MMA’s exhibition Shadows from the Past: Sansei Artists and American Concentration Camps, on view through January 9, 2022. Curated by Gail Enns, the exhibition explores the work of Sansei artists (third-generation Japanese American artists) whose works confront the injustice of U.S. Executive Order 9066, which resulted in the forced relocation and incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.

Thank you to our program supporters!
This program is made possible by a grant from the Arts Council for Monterey County–thanks to support by the Monterey County Board of Supervisors.

This program is also made possible with the support of Hayashi Wayland, Central Coast Full Service Accounting Firm. 

2021: Change=Action/Time: Generational Activism in Chicanx and Latinx Art

Participants joined Latinx and Chicanx artists and scholars including MacArthur Fellow Amalia Mesa-Bains, Ph.D., renowned collector Armando Durón, and internationally recognized Chicana artist Dr. Judith F. Baca  for personal accounts, live Q & A, and a live panel discussion with presenters, moderated by Susana Smith Bautista, Ph.D. MMA was also proud to welcome United States Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera as the invocation speaker for this year’s Art of the State Symposium. The Symposium coincided with the Califas exhibition opening January 8, in partnership with Museo Eduardo Carrillo. Califas artists hosted the morning discussion about generational experiences and activism in and around the Monterey Bay Crescent. 

Thank you to our sponsors House of 8 Media and Museo Eduardo Carrillo

This project was made possible with support from California Humanities, a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Visit www.calhum.org.

Este proyecto fue posible con el apoyo de California Humanities, un asociado sin fines de lucro del National Endowment for the Humanities. Visite www.calhum.org.

View Full Symposium Program

Participating Speakers and Panelists

Land Acknowledgement 

DeLanna Studi, Artistic Director, Native Voices at the Autry Museum of the American West

Invocation

Juan Felipe Herrera, U.S. Poet Laureate

Revisit MMA’s third annual Art of the State Symposium “Change = Action/Time: Generational Activism in Chicanx and Latinx Art”

Click here for all Symposium videos

Image: Califas Legacy Project, Victor Cervantes and Irene O’Connell

2020: California Community: Artist Colonies and Collectives Past, Present, and Future

Participating Speakers and Panelists

Susan M. Andersen Independent Curator and Art Historian Borderline Collective
Jeff Gunderson Adjunct Faculty and Librarian San Francisco Art Institute 
Robert Pierce Independent Curator and Art Historian
Berit Potter, Ph.D.

2019: Women Who Changed California Clay

Participating Speakers and Panelists

Martha Drexler Lynn Ph.D., Curator/Art Historian 
Cynthia de Bos Manager of Collections Artists’ Legacy Foundation 
Leslie Ferrin Director of Ferrin Contemporary Gallery