Maybe these broken artworks are simply waiting to be fixed? (Yes, even the mammoth, rainbow-hued Robert Rauschenberg print that bears a scrape near its center can be fingered.) Movable carts and bold numbering make the setting part art storage facility, part conservation laboratory. Higa is a model for how one can pursue deep cultural transformation that will take real hold for the long-term.The scene is genuinely shocking, tempered only by a tightly conceived display, and the thrilling fact that visitors are allowed to touch the art. This volume, astutely edited by Julie Ault, makes visible that work, beautifully honoring Higa’s intelligence, love of art, political awareness, and no-nonsense attitude. Karin Higa’s pioneering work as curator, art historian, and community leader helped to establish the footing for the Japanese American and Asian American art history that we know today. Patty Chang, artist and professor, University of Southern California She was the writer who could reflect this most fully, most deeply, most poignantly, most directly. In Karin Higa’s writing, I recognize the feeling of paradox in being an artist in Asian America and the commitment to showing the affective complexity in living and art. David Joselit, art historian and professor, Harvard University Higa’s range of study, from the Japanese internment camps to contemporary art, makes clear the persistence of anti-Asian racism and eloquently demonstrates how artists have confronted it. This indispensable book makes Karin Higa’s pioneering writing on Japanese and Asian American art available in a single volume. Higa shows how artists of Asian descent have moved past the divide between United States and their ancestral homes by using their freedom as artists to more broadly define their culture. Moving between portrayals of milieux such as artists’ networks in the camps, Little Tokyo communities, and cities around the world-across ethnic, geographic, and stylistic boundaries-and case studies of oeuvres and biographies, she recovers vital art practices and hidden histories of creative struggle and efflorescence, in the process mapping individual practices, networks, and communal life, as fertile creative contexts. This book reveals how Higa’s conviction that art and the lived experience of the past are indissolubly linked was at the root of her methodological modeling of an Asian American art history. While exploring issues of national identity and immigration, Higa recuperates significant artists and oeuvres from historical neglect and regards works by contemporary artists to examine how art acts as both a source for cultural identity and a transmitter of culture. The selected essays, written between 19, focus on the creation of Japanese internment camps and the artistic production and communities that took root within them, as well as on the individual and collective narratives of Asian American artists in response to discriminatory immigration policies. Edited by the renowned artist, curator, writer, and editor Julie Ault, Hidden in Plain Sight brings together essential writings by the art historian and curator Karin Higa (1966–2013).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |