Mixed Race Studies

Miscegenating Racial Representations: Critical Mixed Race Strategies and the Visual Arts

College Art Association 102nd Annual Conference
Hilton Chicago
720 South Michigan Avenue
International South, 2nd Floor
Chicago, Illinois 60605
2014-02-15, 14:30-17:00 CST (Local Time)

Chairs:

Laura Kina, Associate Professor Art, Media and Design
DePaul University

Margo Machida, Associate Professor of Art History and Asian American Studies
University of Connecticut

This session will examine critical mixed race strategies for the miscegenation of racial representation in the visual arts. The 2000 U.S. Census was first to allow individuals to self enumerate as more than one race. Making multiracial populations visible both expanded the borders, blurred and posed a potential threat to existing monoracial categories. Beginning in the early 2000s there was a simultaneous neoliberal and conservative push for a postidentitarian/ postracial moment posed against the putative ossification of multicultural racial identity constructs. Curatorial frameworks and studio practices centered on race as a locus of investigation were challenged if not rendered invisible and seemingly obsolete. And yet race and attendant cultural issues have demonstrably remained pertinent for artistic production and analysis. A double tension has resulted in moves to both recognize the continuing importance of race and the critical push to reframe and disarticulate categories that cannot contain the complexity of increasingly miscegenated peoples, histories, and subjectivities. We will consider how dominant conceptions of race have changed (or not) in the visual arts as a result of the mounting discourses and bodies of artistic production that bring forward mixed race identity in various domestic, transnational and international contexts.

Beyond the Bronze Venus
Alison Fraunhar, Associate Professor of Art and Design
Saint Xavier University

Sensory Miscegenations: Representing Multiracial Bodies
Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik, California College of the Arts

Lacuna
Maya Isabella Mackrandilal, Independent Artist

Liminal Embodiments
Zavé Martohardjono, Independent Artist

Risky Subjectivity: Select Works by Korean Adoptee Artists
Eun Jung Park, Independent Scholar

War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art

University of Washington Press
January 2013
304 pages
63 illustrations, 44 in color, maps
7 x 10 in.
ISBN: 978-0-295-99225-9

Edited by

Laura Kina, Associate Professor Art, Media and Design and Director Asian American Studies
DePaul University

Wei Ming Dariotis, Associate Professor Asian American Studies
San Francisco State University

Cover art by Mequitta Ahuja

War Baby/Love Child examines hybrid Asian American identity through a collection of essays, artworks, and interviews at the intersection of critical mixed race studies and contemporary art. The book pairs artwork and interviews with nineteen emerging, mid-career, and established mixed race/mixed heritage Asian American artists, including Li-lan and Kip Fulbeck, with scholarly essays exploring such topics as Vietnamese Amerasians, Korean transracial adoptions, and multiethnic Hawai’i. As an increasingly ethnically ambiguous Asian American generation is coming of age in an era of “optional identity,” this collection brings together first-person perspectives and a wider scholarly context to shed light on changing Asian American cultures.

Visit the website here.