Art and Activism in Our Time of Crisis
JUNE 17, 2020
NOON CST / 1 PM EST / 10 AM PST
Art and Activism in Our Time of Crisis
Join us for a conversation about the critical role played by art, artists, art historians, and museums in addressing racism against people of Asian descent and the importance of community building during this time of the COVID-19 pandemic. Speakers include art historian Michelle C. Wang, who critiqued the misappropriation of an 18th-century Chinese textile on the cover of the CDC's Emerging Infectious Diseases journal, and artist Kenneth Tam, who initiated at the beginning of the pandemic the open-source spreadsheet “WE ARE NOT COVID” to document the rapid escalation of anti-Asian incidents.
Panelists:
Michelle C. Wang, Associate Professor, Department of Art and Art History, Georgetown University
Kenneth Tam, Artist
Vivian Li, Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art, Dallas Museum of Art
Jacqueline Chao, Senior Curator of Asian Art, Crow Museum of Asian Art of The University of Texas at Dallas
Michelle C. Wang is Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Georgetown University. A specialist in medieval Chinese art, her first book Mandalas in the Making: The Visual Culture of Esoteric Buddhism at Dunhuang (Brill, 2018) examines Buddhist mandalas of the 8th-10th centuries at Buddhist cave shrines in northwestern China. In addition to her research on mandalas, she has also written about art and ritual, miracle tales of animated statues, the transcultural reception of Buddhist motifs, and text and image. Her current work concerns Buddhist sculpture and materiality.
Kenneth Tam is a Brooklyn-based artist born in Queens, NY and received his BFA from the Cooper Union, and MFA from the University of Southern California. His work primarily takes the form of video installations, and is concerned with the private rituals practiced by men. Tam has had solo exhibitions at the MIT List Center for Visual Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Visual Arts Center at UT Austin. Later this year he will be in residence at The Kitchen in NYC, and will have a solo exhibition at the Queens Museum in the spring of 2021. He is currently a Lecturer at Princeton University.
Vivian Li is the Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art at the Dallas Museum of Art and a specialist in postwar and contemporary art in Asia. A Dallas native, she served as associate curator of Asian Art and Global Contemporary Art at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts for four years before returning to Dallas last fall. She has also previously worked at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Guggenheim Museum and has contributed to various publications, including the forthcoming anthology, Postwar—A Global Art History, 1945–1965 edited by Okui Enwezor and Atreyee Gupta.
Jacqueline Chao is Senior Curator of Asian Art at the Crow Museum of Asian Art of The University of Texas at Dallas. Her curated national and international exhibitions have presented works ranging from the historical to the contemporary in all medias from emerging and established artists from across the globe. A specialist in Chinese art and Buddhist art, she has written and contributed to various publications. Before joining the Crow, she previously taught Asian Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was Director of Exhibitions and Residencies at Chicago Artists Coalition, and contributed research to the Chinese painting collection at the Art Institute of Chicago.