Abstract
This chapter describes how Asian American art in San Francisco evolved in the 1990s, connecting the then prominent discourse of multiculturalism with the attention given to “minority” artists and their identity (especially those who do not fit clearly in the predominant conceptions of Asianness in California).
The chapter also develops an analysis of the Asian American Women’s Artists Association (AAWAA) founded in San Francisco in the 1980s. By interviewing two core members, Nancy Hom and Cynthia Tom, the author examines how the association promoted solidarity and strength among artists by using the term Asian American, reviving its connection to 1970s politics of creative assertion in terms of community visibility. Asian American artists whose works is labeled as “ethnic and feminist” have become part of multicultural spaces, ending up representing a community, while struggling with ghettoization and limited identity labels.
While there is now a plethora of Asian American organizations and institutions, nothing was handed to us. We had to fight to create what is now taken for granted, … that despite many frustrations and setbacks, mistakes and misunderstandings, we are making Asian America.
—Karen Ishizuka 2016 , p. 211
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Notes
- 1.
While the word empowerment has been crucial for activists who intended it to be useful for self-emancipation and autonomy, over time, in the context of gender policies, it has become stale and often co-opted by top-down institutions, like NGOs, with a superiority complex of saving the poor, marginal women of color. I am slightly wary when I hear how much currency it still has among community groups, including feminist groups.
- 2.
Source: aawwa.net, 2009; statement elaborated by Tom, Arai, Hom and other members.
- 3.
I interviewed Betty Kano in Berkeley in 2010, the very place where the first AAWAA meeting had been held. Her commitment to Afro–Asian alliances, in terms of politics and creative endeavors was unchanged. She showed me recent abstract paintings she had been working on, during jazz music concerts she hosted in her beautiful house. Betty Kano remains a radical in her political views, and a woman of strong vision in terms of creativity, social justice and racial equality.
- 4.
Betty Kano at this point joins the collective Godzilla, creating a West Coast Chapter, continuing on to become the director of another diverse art organization named ProArts, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. These choices attest Betty Kano’s political vision and commitment.
- 5.
Source: Terry Cohn, in Women Artists of the American West edited by Susan R. Ressler 2003. McFarland.
- 6.
The website created by the Women Artists of the American West hosted by Purdue University, where Susan Ressler teaches. A precious resource today, kept alive at Purdue University, keeping visible many early work by AAWAA’s members: https://www.cla.purdue.edu/waaw/asianamerican/Artists/WONGGal8.htm.
- 7.
As Chinese leader Mao ZeDong famously said in 1968.
- 8.
SOMArts is still today a fairly industrial warehouse next to a freeway border zone even if increasingly gentrifying area, still far from artists’ areas like North Beach, or the Mission, yet committed to celebrating community events such as Dia de Los Muertos, connecting art and politics with shows on Palestinian artists, feminists, gay and lesbian artists.
- 9.
Gordon Chang and Mark Johnson’s book Asian American Art: A History 1850–1970 was truly a complete source. For my gendered perspective, I found inspiration and vast, in-depth information on the work of artist Yun Gee and his wife, and I was especially drawn by the essay by Valerie Matsumoto on women artists Haruko Obata, Miné Okubo, Hisako Hibi and Helen Gee. It appears that during those years, women figured mainly when connected biographically to a male artist (which is why I chose to focus my book on the 1960s and successive generations).
- 10.
Some of their poems and writings show a resonances with specific themes expressed by Asian American artists presenter here.
- 11.
This is essentially the first time in which limitations to immigration from Asia are removed in American immigration law since the 1880s. Congress did not foresee how fast and diverse the influx of immigrants from Asia and the Americas would be, as a consequence of this law. The demographics of Southern and Western states in particular were changed creating the foundations for increasing Latino and Asian Americans.
- 12.
Interestingly there is a Facebook group comprising a few AAWAA members called “Born in SF Chinatown,” created by KWS artist Leland Wong. This group, increasingly relevant in these years of furious displacement and gentrification of San Francisco, is particularly focused on sharing what is being lost of the old SF Chinatown.
- 13.
An organization that goes back to the 1970s, and for whom Nancy Hom designed the logo originally, in a great, multigenerational connection showing how AAWAA’s activities and members overlap.
- 14.
I think here of the incredible work of historian Him Mark Lai. For further sources, see also: Sucheng Chang, Chinese American Transnationalism, Temple University Press, 2006.
- 15.
I use the term pan-ethnic here keeping in mind the poignant analysis by Yen Le Espiritu in her work titled Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (1992). Le Espiritu argued that vast diversity of immigrants’ origins, arriving in the USA after 1965, and the total relatively low numbers of Asians, led to various difficulties in claiming ethnic and cultural continuity under the label of Asian. In the 1960s and 1970s, embracing a pan-Asian identity became a reactive political and social strategy to avoid isolation, despite the fact that the label Asian comprises vast cultural, linguistic, ethnic, skin-color differences, and it was always purely translated into a racial category by the US institutions. Le Espiritu’s book also raises interesting concerns about issues of identity, and how it is used to negotiate with institutions.
- 16.
One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now, 2007, BAM-PFA, curated by Suzette Min, Karin Higa and Melissa Chiu. Originally hosted by the Asia Society in New York City, it gave visibility to a generation of Asian American artists mainly born in the 1970s and 1980s. A discussion of some of the art presented in such a show will be developed in Chap. 5.
- 17.
See latest information at http://aawaa.net/programs/a-place-of-her-own/.
- 18.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 110–114, [1984] 2007.
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Fantone, L. (2018). AAWAA: Visibility, Pan-Asian Identity and the Limits of Community. In: Local Invisibility, Postcolonial Feminisms. Critical Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50670-2_4
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