Drawing on her current research focusing on transnationalism and contemporary Asian American and Indigenous Pacific Islander artists, Machida presents a keynote lecture highlighting individual artists’ practices in an increasingly cosmopolitan art world, where issues of identification remain fluid, as they were for Noguchi and Hasegawa. Bay Area artists Michael Arcega, Ranu Mukherjee and Weston Teruya then join Machida for a panel discussion about how such themes manifest in their own practices. 

 

The Asian Art Museum is committed to making its events accessible to all. This event is wheelchair accessible and assistive listening devices (ALDs) will be provided. ASL interpretation or open captioning are available upon request; please email [email protected] two weeks prior to the event to request an interpreter. 

 

Margo Machida is Professor Emerita of art history and Asian American studies at the University of Connecticut and the author of many books on Asian American and Pacific Islander artists, including “Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary.”  

 

Michael Arcega is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in sculpture and installation whose work revolves largely around language. Directly informed by research, historical narratives, materiality and the format of jokes, his work addresses sociopolitical circumstances where power relations are unbalanced.  

 

Ranu Mukherjee employs drawing, painting, animation and choreography to create hybrid installations that blur the line between the moving and the still image by imbuing each with qualities of the other. Her work investigates the construction of culture through the forces of creolization, migration, ecology, speculative fiction and desire as a collision of events that mark what she calls “shadowtime,” a sensation of different timescales coalescing into one. 

 

Weston Teruya is known for his paper sculptural installations that examine the social dynamics, textures and histories of specific sites. Teruya is a founding member of Related Tactics, a collective of artists, writers, curators and educators of color creating projects and opportunities at the intersection of race and culture.