Envisioning Diaspora: Asian American Visual Arts Collectives

Author Alexandra Chang investigates “Asian American Art” through the formation, membership, and artwork of three important post-90s artist collectives: Godzilla: Asian American Art Network, Godzookie, and the Barnstormers. Through in-depth interviews with artists, arts administrators, and writers, as well as the search for archival documents from university and museum archives to the storage shelves of participant artists, Chang traces the shifts within the changing historical contexts of the initial coinage of the term “Asian America.” We see how the term began as an outgrowth of the late ’60s civil rights movement, to its integration into mainstream multicultural discourse and its legacy today. Envisioning Diaspora peers into the nuances of artist collective formations and communities of affinity, and ultimately the core issues of identity politics, aesthetics, and diaspora involved in Asian American Art. (Publisher's website)

Design by Jonathan Lo.