Please join us for a presentation and conversation with Dr. ShiPu Wang, curator of the special exhibition Pictures of Belonging: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Miné Okubo. A Q&A will follow the talk.

Dr. ShiPu Wang is Professor of Art History and the Coats Family Chair in the Arts at the University of California, Merced. His scholarship thus far centers around rediscovering and reevaluating the work and legacy of diasporic Asian American artists in the pre-World War II United States, with a special focus on Nikkei artists and their cross-racial/cultural collectives and alliances during the Exclusion Era. Winner of the 2018 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Book Prize for his The Other American Moderns. Matsura, Ishigaki, Noda, Hayakawa (Penn State University Press, 2017), Wang was the curator of the retrospective, Chiura Obata: An American Modern, which toured internationally (2018–2020) and concluded at the Smithsonian American Art Museum; he also edited its exhibition catalogue that was published the University of California Press in 2018. He has since curated another exhibition, Pictures of Belonging: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Miné Okubo, an unprecedented survey of artworks by trailblazing American artists of Japanese descent of the pre-World War II generations that will tour to five U.S. museums (2024–2027), including the Smithsonian American Art Museum as well. The accompanying exhibition catalogue will be co-published by the Japanese American National Museum and the University of California Press in 2023. In addition to teaching and curating, Wang currently serves on the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s Board of Commissioners.