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As Asian American and Pacific Islander History Month winds down, it’s important to note
how many AAPI artists, architects, collectors, and activists have changed the course of art history in the United States and around the world. Here are 25 Asian American and Pacific Islander artists who have made key contributions to modern and contemporary art in a variety of mediums, styles, and movements.

Please note that we’ve included some non-US citizens who nevertheless spent significant time in the United States. They are marked with an asterisk*.

The two climate activists who protested at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in April by smearing paint on the base and case of a famous Degas sculpture have been indicted by a federal grand jury. The charges from the US Attorney’s Office are “conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States” and injury to an exhibit or property at the museum.

The unsealed indictment alleges that Timothy Martin and Joanna Smith, along with other unnamed co-conspirators, conducted research into potential targets at the National Gallery, alerted members of the media prior, and entered the museum with plastic water bottles filled with paint for the purpose of injuring an exhibit. It further alleges that Martin and Smith smeared that paint on the case, base, and floor surrounding Degas’s Little Dancer, Age Fourteen.

The protest by Martin and Smith, which happened around 11 a.m. on April 27, was aimed at bringing attention to the climate crisis. The protestors, members of the climate group Declare Emergency, also demanded President Joe Biden declare a climate emergency as well as stop issuing new drilling permits and subsidies for fossil fuels.

Federal authorities also allege that Martin and Smith caused $2,400 in damages and for the work to be removed for 10 days for repairs. The incident prompted the museum’s director, Kaywin Feldman, to issue a video statement on Twitter in response.

The two activists both self-surrendered and were taken into custody on Friday, according a press release from the Department of Justice. The release also states the case is being investigated by the Washington field office of the FBI, specifically the bureau’s Art Crime Team, with assistance from National Gallery of Art Police and US Park Police.

Italian police say they have recovered more than 3,500 artifacts as the result of a long-term operation involving hundreds of officers. The operation resulted in the arrest of 21 suspects, according to CNN. The announcement was made at a press conference in Puglia on earlier this week.

The police department for the protection of cultural heritage, the Carabinieri, worked with the special operations group ROS and the “Cacciatori Puglia” airborne squadron to carry out dozens of searches against individuals suspected of looting and illicit excavations as well as the trafficking of stolen archaeology artifacts with “inestimable historical, cultural and commercial value.”

According to the Italian daily newspaper La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno, the operation was nicknamed “Canusium,” a reference to the ancient name of the municipality where the trafficking group based its operations. Investigative work and precautionary measures spanned the regions of Puglia, Basilicata, Campania, Lazio, and Abruzzo, and lasted almost a year.

While 21 suspects have been arrested so far as part of Operation Canusium, investigators said there are a total of 51 suspects, including grave robbers, international traffickers, and a type of middleman known as a fence. The fences placed the illicit archaeology items, among them vases, jewels, oil lamps, and gold coins, up for sale in both domestic and international markets.

The 3,586 artifacts that have been recovered include loom weights, bell-shaped kraters, jugs, cups, plates, miniature vases, oil lamps, and coins from as early as the 4th century BCE.

Following catastrophic floods that have crippled the Emilia-Romagna region, Italy has announced a plan to raise museum admission fees across the country by €1 in an attempt to help save “cultural heritage” that has been damaged during the floods, according to a report by The Art Newspaper.

The price hike is part of a €2 billion aid package announced by Italian culture minister Gennaro Sangiuliano which would run for a scant three months, only at state-run museums, from June 15 through September 15. Still, there is some controversy over how much good the meager price hike would actually do.

According to The Art Newspaper, “some cultural commentators [warn such a measure] could drive Italians away from museums” and, already, only around 20% of the Italian population visited a museum in 2022.

Critics say that the price hike will hurt those who already found museum admission fees too pricey.

“I don’t think that this policy is right, if only for an evident lack of social equality,” Giuliano Volpe, a professor of archaeology at the University of Bari and former advisor to Dario Franceschini, the former culture minister, told The Art Newspaper. “The country should be helping the young and unemployed.”

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) announced earlier this week that it has commissioned Kara Walker to create the first site-specific installation for its Roberts Family Gallery.

For the project, Walker is planning a large-scale installation responding to the gallery’s glass enclosure. The piece will also address historical preservation techniques. SFMOMA curator of contemporary art Eungie Joo is organizing the showing, which will be open to the public with free admission in July 2024.

“Informed by the fear and loss experienced as a global society during the COVID-19 pandemic, Walker’s new commission helps us consider the memorialization of trauma and the objectives of technology. Facing Howard Street and the world, her striking installation will allow us to move towards wonder and healing,” Joo said in a statement.

This is the first time an artist has made a site-specific installation in the space, which boasts floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides. The gallery has previously featured installations by such artists as Richard Serra, Diego Rivera, and JR.

Walker, who examines histories of anti-Black racism and misogyny, sometimes in controversial ways, has shown at the museum over the last 25 years.

Artist Shellyne Rodriguez was arrested on Thursday after the New York Post published video footage in which she appeared to hold a machete up to a reporter.

Rodriguez was arrested at the 43rd Precinct in the Bronx on Thursday morning and was released that same day. The New York Police Department said that Rodriguez had been charged with misdemeanor counts of menacing and harassment in connection with the incident, which took place Tuesday.

That same day, Rodriguez was fired by Manhattan’s Hunter College, where she was formerly an adjunct professor in the art department. Hunter released a statement in which it said that the school “strongly condemns the unacceptable actions of Shellyne Rodriguez.”

After the story was picked up by right-wing publications, Rodriguez released a statement saying that the school had “capitulated” to “racists, white nationalists, and misogynists.”

On Friday, the School of Visual Arts, where she had also been an adjunct professor, “made the decision not to new Shellyne Rodriguez’s contract,” the school wrote in a statement to ARTnews.

For close to 30 years—up until last week—courts have wrestled with the question of when artists can borrow from previous works by focusing in large part on whether the new work was “transformative”: whether it altered the first with “new expression, meaning or message” (in the words of a 1994 Supreme Court decision). In blockbuster case after blockbuster case involving major artists such as Jeff Koons and Richard Prince, lower courts repeatedly asked that question, even if they often reached disparate results.

But in a major decision last week involving Andy Warhol, the Supreme Court pushed this pillar of copyright law to the background. Instead, the Court shifted the consideration away from the artistic contribution of the new work, and focused instead on commercial concerns. By doing so, the Court’s Warhol decision will significantly limit the amount of borrowing from and building on previous works that artists can engage in.

The case involved 16 works Andy Warhol had created based on a copyrighted photograph taken in 1981 by celebrated rock and roll photographer Lynn Goldsmith of the musician Prince. While Goldsmith had disputed Warhol’s right to create these works, and by implication the rights of museums and collectors to display or sell them, the Supreme Court decided the case on a much narrower issue.

When Prince died in 2016, the Warhol Foundation (now standing in the artist’s shoes) had licensed one of Warhol’s silkscreens for the cover of a special Condé Nast magazine commemorating the musician. Explicitly expressing no opinion on the question of whether Warhol had been entitled to create the works in the first place, the Court ruled 7-2 that this specific licensing of the image was unlikely to be “fair use” under copyright law.

This is not necessarily a problematic result, given that Goldsmith also had a licensing market. Yet despite the Court’s attempt to limit itself to the narrow licensing issue instead of deciding whether Warhol’s creation of the original canvases was permissible, the reasoning of the decision has far broader and more troubling implications.

Paint wielded by Joan Brown seems to have been purpose-built and mission-driven, especially when that mission involved dressing down painting’s most grandiloquent sense of self-regard and putting it to pointed and playful personal use. Many of the works in Brown’s feet-on-the-ground, head-in-the-clouds retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art could have been made as gifts for family and friends—or, better yet, as intimate painterly diary entries to be seen and appreciated by no one aside from the artist herself. Where some painters in her 1960s-’80s milieu aspired to change the world, Brown bent the tools of her trade toward chronicling the world she was in a constant state of building and rebuilding around her.

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Brown—whose retrospective closed in San Francisco in March and moved to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where it opens May 27—made her name as a budding Bay Area artist whose thick impasto style turned abstraction toward embodiment, sometimes with the air of a wry aside. The earliest works in the SFMOMA show gleamed at the top of layered oil surfaces that suggest a lot of searching underneath (the catalogue describes formative paintings by Brown “so thick they could weigh 100 pounds and take decades to dry”). But as soon as she scaled certain heights that would thrill so many artists making their way, Brown took a bow—and moved on.

Thanksgiving Turkey (1959) is emblematic of her early work for its mix of mystery and a sort of mastery that can be deceiving. The depiction of a carcass hanging in the air nods toward classicism—wall text describing it included an image of Rembrandt’s The Slaughtered Ox as inspiration—but its strange coloring makes it an evocative oddity while its deadpan matter-of-factness makes it somehow funny in a way that’s hard to pin down. The same goes for Green Bowl (1964), an austerely geometric still life that marked an audacious turn for Brown away from early success (Thanksgiving Turkey had already been acquired by MoMA in New York, and she was secure with a dealer with whom she would soon part ways after her stylistic twists left him bemused) toward a more idiosyncratic calling that took its own cues.

“Brown’s aim was not to undermine the art world in a way that was consciously subversive; she simply did not care, and part of what makes her so interesting is this disregard for acceptance,” Nancy Lim writes in the catalogue. (Lim, an associate curator, worked under SFMOMA chief curator Janet Bishop in organizing the show, which after its stop at the Carnegie Museum travels to the Orange County Museum of Art next year.)

Following Brown’s circuitous trains of thought thereafter leads to different way stations and destinations for indelible visions that never stayed fixed for long. Even more indicative of her more mature years than Thanksgiving Turkey and Green Bowl are works like Noel in the Kitchen (1963), an early instance of Brown painting her son with a mix of motherly wonder and fascination with the dreamier dimensions of domesticity. The work tells a heartwarming story, with a bare-bottomed toddler reaching mischievously toward a too-tall counter while a pair of dogs stand sentry. But it also flies off into aesthetic revelry, with a checkered floor that shakes up the pictorial space and a curious patch of wall on the side rendered with enough acuity and care to make it class as a painting in its own right.

Despite their authoritative-sounding titles, recent editions of the Museum of Modern Art’s recurring “New Photography” series have grown especially diffuse—too conceptual and too slippery to really make a dent. Here’s the good news: the latest “New Photography” show brings an end to that losing streak. Finally, a “New Photography” with signs of life.

For the first time ever, “New Photography” has a geographic purview. All the photographers included this time have ties to the Nigerian city of Lagos, otherwise known to Yoruba speakers as Èkó. That alone would make it notable, since MoMA has rarely given African art, and in particular African photography, the spotlight.

But the art itself matches the ambitions of the show’s curator, Oluremi C. Onabanjo, who is challenging what it really means for photography to document a city, let alone the people who reside in it. She has made the wise choice to go with just seven artists, a much smaller group than the past two editions of “New Photography.” Doing so allows her to dive deeper into their practices, each of which finds intriguing ways to pay homage to Lagos’s citizenry and history, by means both conceptual and other. Guiding all the artists’ explorations is a fascination with photography itself as a medium—what it does, whom it’s for, and what it can reveal.

Logo Oluwamuyiwa, the strongest of these artists, trains his lens on the streets of Lagos, which he sometimes photographs using oblique angles that distort his images beyond recognition. Oil Wonders II (2018) features an upside-down shot of two standing people, their feet visible at the bottom. Look above them to see a puddle reflecting their upper halves. He literally reorients our view of Lagos, then does it again and again in an array of prints, vinyl wallpapers, and films shown nearby.

Oluwamuyiwa’s lush black-and-white photography finds a neat corollary in the work of Akinbode Akinbiyi, an artist roughly half a century older. Working in a mode that’s likewise devoid of color, Akinbiyi turns his attention to Bar Beach, a seaside locale popular at one time with Lagosians. These photos act as records of what once was, with women lounging, men running, and, in one quaint image, a dog slumbering, seemingly unaware of the bathers around it.

Derek Alan Modrok, a 49-year-old Florida resident, admitted to running his car into a tall, blue sculpture of a rabbit titled Thunderbunny by American artist Hunt Slonem, police said earlier this week. The sculpture, which has an estimated value of $300,000, resided in Justin Flippen Park in the city of Wilton Manors, just north of Fort Lauderdale.

Modrok also admitted to vandalized another piece of art, a popsicle statue by Craig Berube-Gray at nearby Rachel Richardson Park, earlier this month. Police arrested Modrok after surveillance footage depicted him in the act.

Slonem, for his part, first heard about the act of vandalism when NBC Miami reached out to him for a quote, and since then he’s been processing the attack. It’s not the first time he’s lost a piece of public art.

“9/11 was worse, I lost an 80-foot mural,” Slonem told ARTnews, somewhat mystified that this kind of violence once again found its way to his work. “I was just shocked. It’s just such a strange thing, the fact that it’s happened before and the fact that it happened again.”

Thunderbunny, at 13 feet-7 inches and made of 6,500 pieces of blue glass, took a year to make and was installed in the park in May 2022 after local gallery Art Gallery 21 worked with the city to loan the sculpture from New River Fine Art in Fort Lauderdale. The sculpture was due to travel to a botanical garden, but those plans have now been stalled. Slonem and the commissioners are reviewing the work to see if repairs are even possible as the work sustained heavy structural damage. Slonem said it would take a couple more days to ascertain what can be done.

April 26 – May 20, 2023