Fell in love with some sculptures at an
exhibition at the Wallach Art Gallery dedicated to work by Asian American and African American artists who worked in abstraction 1950-1980. As they're sculptures, a static photo can give only a hint but here are Taiwan-born Leo Amino's 1950 "Jungle,"
Hawaii-born Joseph Goto's spectacular and impossible to photograph "Landscape III" (c. 1956-69; it has a sibling at
Fallingwater) with San Francisco-born Win Ng's 1959 "Directions" in the background, and Seoul-born John Pai's "The Way" (1985). The exhibition challenges the standard narrative of American abstraction and raises fascinating questions about how abstraction might appeal differently and for different reasons to artists from racialized communities marked by visibility and invisibility, displacement, disposs-ession, race and kinship.
Hawaii-born Joseph Goto's spectacular and impossible to photograph "Landscape III" (c. 1956-69; it has a sibling at Fallingwater) with San Francisco-born Win Ng's 1959 "Directions" in the background, and Seoul-born John Pai's "The Way" (1985). The exhibition challenges the standard narrative of American abstraction and raises fascinating questions about how abstraction might appeal differently and for different reasons to artists from racialized communities marked by visibility and invisibility, displacement, disposs-ession, race and kinship.