11/5 - MARGO MACHIDA: 'Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary'
Asian American Visual Cultures seminar series Margo Machida, 'Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary' When: Thursday 5 November 2009, 12.30-1.45pm Where: Room 471, 20 Cooper Square (Bowery and East 5th) Free and open to the public "For years, Margo Machida was practically the only person to bring Asian American artists into what were then the ‘multicultural’ debates, and the only writer/ participant to cover their activities and art with a high degree of social vision and intellectual passion." (Lucy Lippard) Margo Machida, widely renowned as one of the foremost scholars of Asian American art, will be talking through some of the issues explored in her new book, ‘Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary’, that revisits the watershed decade of the 1990s, a time when surging new migration flows from Asia, the growing prominence and hipster embrace of ‘Asian’ cultures, and the heightened rhetoric of ‘post-identity’ spurred a generation of Asian artists to rethink and re-engineer their choice of representational strategies. Looking at a diverse body of work – including the shape-shifting personae of Vietnamese-born photographer Pipo Nguyen-duy who incarnates himself as biblical figures from Western art history such as the Virgin Mary, Adam, and Eve; Chinese-born sculptor Ming Fay who populates his gardens with mutant, hybridized ‘species’; Kenyan-born Allan deSouza who depicts international transit lounges and Northern Irish cartographies pocked by sectarian violence – she explores the endurance and recoding of tropes of social memory, postcolonial trauma and immigritude in an era characterized by new forms of globalized contact and conflict. Dr Margo Machida is Associate Professor of Art History and Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut. An independent curator and an activist cultural critic, her books include ‘Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary’ (2009) and (co-edited) ‘Fresh Talk/ Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art’ (2003). She curated the groundbreaking 1994 Asia Society group exhibition ASIA/AMERICA: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art. She is also a co-founder of the Diasporic Asian Art Network (2008-) and Godzilla: Asian American Art Network (1990 - 2001). In February 2009, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Women’s Caucus for Art. Part of the Asian American Visual Cultures series organized by SS Sandhu and Thuy Linh Tu Queries: ss162@nyu.edu
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NYU’s PROGRAM FOR ASIAN PACIFIC AMERICAN STUDIES presents:
