See Us: Portraits of Community in the Exclusion Era by Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Miné Okubo

Location: Osher Theater, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) (note: this talk will not be live-streamed or recorded)

ShiPu Wang, Professor and Coats Endowed Chair in the Arts, UC Merced, and Commissioner of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery
In Conversation with Atreyee Gupta, Assistant Professor of Global Modern Art and South and Southeast Asian Art in the History of Art Department at the UC Berkeley.

ShiPu Wang and Atreyee Gupta will discuss the paintings of three trailblazers of Japanese descent who leveraged portraiture to build communities and make their presence visible in the Exclusion-era California. By revisiting these women’s critically acclaimed careers, Wang advocates for a more nuanced and inclusive account of American art that recent attention on Ruth Asawa and Chiur Obata has begun to produce. 

This talk is part of a year-long program of performances, exhibitions, and talks that use Angel Island as an observatory from which to view landscapes of migration, incarceration and resistance. The Angel Island Immigration Station has sometimes been called “the Ellis Island of the West.”  But Angel Island was an ambivalent gateway, a place of incarceration and exclusion for migrants as well as an entry for half a million newcomers from 80 countries, mostly from Asia. A Year on Angel Island is organized by Future Histories Lab and Berkeley Arts and Design. Sign up to hear about future lectures, performances and exhibitions here.

ShiPu Wang, the Coats Endowed Chair in the Arts and Professor of Art History at the University of California, Merced, is the author of three books, including: The Other American Moderns. Matsura, Ishigaki, Noda, Hayakawa, which won the 2018 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Book Prize; and Chiura Obata: An American Modern, an exhibition catalog accompanying the artist’s retrospective that Dr. Wang curated and toured to five museums in the U.S. and Japan, including a final stop at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2019–20. Prof. Wang currently serves on the Board of Commissioners of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.

Atreyee Gupta is Assistant Professor of Global Modern Art and South and Southeast Asian Art in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research and teaching interests cluster around visual and intellectual histories of twentieth-century art; the intersections among the Cold War, the Non-Aligned Movement, and art after 1945; new media and experimental cinema; and the question of the global more broadly. Gupta’s research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, New York; the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; the Goethe Institut and Haus der Kunst, Munich; the Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices at Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin, an initiative of the Kunsthistorisches Institut Florenz, Max-Planck-Institut; and the Townsend Center for the Humanities, the University of California, Berkeley.

Free and in-person; see COVID safety protocols here.