ShiPu Wang will discuss the paintings of three trailblazers of Japanese descent who leveraged portraiture to build communities and make their presence visible in the Exclusion-era California. By revisiting these women’s critically acclaimed careers, Wang advocates for a more nuanced and inclusive account of American art that recent attention on Ruth Asawa and Chiura Obata has begun to produce.

ShiPu Wang, the Coats Endowed Chair in the Arts and Professor of Art History at the University of California, Merced, is the author of three books, including: The Other American Moderns. Matsura, Ishigaki, Noda, Hayakawa, which won the 2018 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Book Prize; and Chiura Obata: An American Modern, an exhibition catalog accompanying the artist’s retrospective that Dr. Wang curated and toured to five museums in the U.S. and Japan, including a final stop at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2019–20. Prof. Wang currently serves on the Board of Commissioners of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.