Digital Commons Network^™

What Moves You?: Georges Didi-Huberman’S Arts Of Passage And Pittsburgh Stories Of Migration, Alexandra Irimia

Languages and Cultures Publications

Contemporary art historian, critic, and theorist Georges Didi-Huberman thinks of images not as static objects, but as movements, passages, and gestures of memory and/or desire. For the French “historian of passing images,” as he has been called, “all images are migrants. Images are migrations. They are never simply local” (D2017). His book, Passer, quoi qu'il en coûte ("To Pass at Any Price"), co-written with the Greek poet and director Niki Giannari, takes on precisely the visual dynamics of passages, passengers, and passageways in the context of contemporary migration flows. In April 2018, only several months after the launching of the …

Kazua Melissa Vang, Justin Beales

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Kazua Melissa Vang is a Hmong American filmmaker, visual artist, photographer, teaching artists, production manager, and producer based in Minnesota. Melissa is currently a lead artist as well as a teaching artist for In Progress. Her most two most recent photography works were showcased at In Progress under the exhibit, “NEXUS: Honoring the Self-Taught Photographic Artist” (2016), and “Hmong Tattoo,”(2017). Her current photography project is taking portraits of Hmong refrigerators and freezers. From her collection “F R I D G E S,” was featured in the exhibit, “Foodway”(Summer 2018) at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and is currently …

Kai Duc Luong Interview, Stuart Hutson

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio Born in 1975 in Phnom-Penh, KAI-DUC LUONG fled the oppressive Khmer Rouge regime from Cambodia to Vietnam to France, where his family settled in Paris, in 1978. KAI-DUC operates between Chicago and Paris. His artistic projects include video (art / doc / film), photography, and mixed media installations. His unconventional path as a self-taught outsider artist, trained in digital communication & systems engineering, gives him a unique perspective, at times questioning subject matters through the understanding of transmission and systems (e.g. the primary emotions, the five senses, the stages of grief, the art industry). His works have been …

Youngsun Choi Interview, Adam Martinez

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio: YoungSun Choi was born in Seoul, South Korea and is currently living in Chicago, IL. She received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 2018 and her Bachelor of Arts from San Francisco State University majoring in Studio Art with an emphasis in Photography in 2015 where she was awarded the Strauss Scholarship for Photography as well as the Sher-Right Art Scholarship.

Ua1c6/7 Entertainment Photos, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Images of entertainment events.

Jon Yamashiro Interview, Ciera Stokes

Asian American Art Oral History Project

BIO: Jon Masuo Yamashiro was born the oldest son and raised as a third-generation Okinawan American in the “cultural pastiche” of Honolulu, HI. He traveled from the islands to study at Washington University in St. Louis and received his BFA in 1985, then went on to earn an MFA in photography from Indiana University in 1991. Since the fall of 1993, he has had the privilege of teaching photography to college students at Miami University. Jon lives in Liberty, Indiana, with his wife Jennifer and their daughter Lydia and son Luke. http://yamashirophoto.com/

Renluka Maharaj Interview, Steven Zych

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Renluka Maharaj grew up in the country of Trinidad and Tobago and moved to New York as a child where spent most of her life. Her Eastern and Western background wrapped with modern sensibilities is evident in her bodies of work. Her interests are centered on gender roles, sexuality, colonialism, mythology, iconography and fetishism. Some of the artists that have influenced her work are Yinka Shonibare and Yasumasa Morimura.

Ms. Maharaj completed her BFA at the University of Colorado Boulder and is currently completing her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she received the …

Jun-Jun Sta.Ana Interview, Jackson Hughlett

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Jun-Jun Sta.Ana is a self-taught multi-disciplinary artist born on September 19, 1963 to Remigio Benavidez Sta.Ana and Emma Cecilio Catral in Manila, Philippines. He moved to the United States at the age of 24, shortly after finishing a degree in Dentistry. He started his art career late just before he was turning 40- having a solo show of digital works using appropriated images from free porn sites which he deconstructed and embellished with images and symbols culled from Filipino talismans. His practice has become multi-disciplinary, and while still utilizing found images and materials, he also employs the technique of …

Kevin J. Miyazaki Interview, Anthony Santoro

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Bio: Kevin J. Miyazaki is an artist and photographer born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Japanese American parents originally from Hawai‘i and Washington state. His artwork often focuses on issues of ethnicity, family history and memory. The incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II is of particular interest to Miyazaki, whose father spent time at both Tule Lake and Heart Mountain camps. His work has been exhibited in a variety of locations, including The Center for Photography at Woodstock (New York), The Haggerty Museum of Art (Milwaukee) The Rayko Photo Center (San Francisco) and Photographic Center Northwest (Seattle). …

Reframing The Archive: Vietnamese Refugee Narratives In The Post-9/11 Period, Mai-Linh Hong

Faculty Journal Articles

This article considers how recent narratives about Vietnamese refugees engage with the Vietnam War’s visual archive, particularly iconic photographs from the war and ensuing “boat people” crisis, and contribute to present-day discourses on American militarism and immigration. The article focuses on two texts, a National Public Radio special series about a US naval ship (2010) and Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out & Back Again (2011), which recounts a Vietnamese child’s refugee passage. By refiguring famous photojournalistic images from the war, the radio series advances a familiar rescue-and-gratitude narrative in which the US military operates as a care apparatus, exemplifying a cultural …

Braithwaite, John, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

Summarized by Concetta Gleason

John Braithwaite moved with his family fromManhattaninto theBronxontoKelly Streetin 1945 when he was two years old. His parents learned of theBronxandKelly Streetfrom their friends. Braithwaite’s parents and many of his neighbors were fromBarbados. The neighborhood and schools were very diverse with Italians, Jews, Spanish and blacks (both from the South and the Caribbean), and that did not change until the Cross-Bronx Expressway divided theBronxin half. The family was associated with St. Margaret’s Protestant Episcopal Church. His family has a great love for the arts; his father was a tailor, but painting was his passion, his older …

Shtetl, Franklin I. Lieberman

Lawrence University Honors Projects

Shtetl looks at the Jewish community as a whole by focusing on the individuals within it. Jews are an incredibly diverse people. They come from all walks of life and racial backgrounds. Contrary to popular belief, there is no stereotypical Jewish person. Not all Jews are rich, nor do they all have curly dark hair and big noses. By being forced to look at the individuals within the community together, it becomes clear that while all of these individuals are Jewish, and therefore bound to each other because of it, they are all different and break this stereotypical mold.

Pipo Nguyen-Duy Interview, Emily Flanagan

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio:

Pipo Nguyen-duy was born in Hue, Vietnam. Growing up within thirty kilometers of the demilitarized zone of the 18th Parallel, he describes hearing gunfire every day of his early life He immigrated to the United States as a political refugee.

Pipo has taken on many things in life in pursuit of his diverse interests. As a teenager in Vietnam, he competed as a national athlete in table tennis. He also spent some time living as a Buddhist monk in Northern India. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics at Carleton College. He then moved to New …

The Catholic Schoolgirl & The Wet Nurse: On The Ecology Of Oppression, Trauma And Crisis, Jade E. Davis

Publications and Research

This paper explores the idea of facing oppression by exploring how two photographs, one of a Catholic schoolgirl and one of a wet nurse, were received as they made their way through social media. In addition, the paper looks at a blog post that was made about photographs from a similar time period as the photos. By exploring how the photos were received through Fanon, visual studies, and psychoanalytic theory, the paper proposes a new way to view these photographs outside of the narratives of Oppression and Trauma. Instead, by understanding the re-inscription of the dominant narratives as an ongoing …

Lorna Simpson, By Joan Simon Et Al., Prestel: Munich, 2013 (Book Review), Vittorio Colaizzi

Art Faculty Publications

[First paragraph] The images and essays in this catalogue, which documents Lorna Simpson's (b. 1960) first museum exhibition in Europe,¹ trace an increasing emphasis on the enigmatically personal at the expense of the linguistic, although her work remains concerned with the discursive behavior of images as they reveal assumptions about race and gender. Simpson, as the author and contributors show, activates looking by short-circuiting the possessive aspects of the gaze.

Fearless: Eric Lee, Eric J. Lee

SURGE

Snapping pictures of his fellow Gettysburgians around campus as the visual communications intern, and fearlessly working with other students to create, organize, and lead the new Asian Student Alliance (ASA) group on campus, Eric Lee ’15 finds himself at the crossroads of art and activism.

New to campus this year after two years in the making, the ASA is a student-led, -run, and -organized group focused on celebrating different Asian cultures and heritages, closing the gap between international and domestic students, and creating a social, cultural, and political forum for students to dialogue, specifically about issues facing Asian communities. [ …

Pao Hoau Her Interview, Bentley "Libby" Christenson

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio: Pao Houa Her is a visual artist base in Minnesota. She studied at Minneapolis College of Art and Design and at Yale University School of Art. She can be reached at pher.82@gmail.com. Bio from- http://phphoto.nfshost.com/?page_id=33

Pao Houa Her was born in Laos. In 1986 after the Vietnam War ended, Pao and her family moved to Thailand and a year later moved to Minnesota. Pao is the oldest of seven and currently resides in Minneapolis, MN. She has received a B.F.A. in photography at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and was the first Hmong individual …

Many Worlds Converge Here: Vision And Identity In American Indian Photography, Alicia L. Harris

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

Photographs of Native Americans taken by Frank A. Rinehart at the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in 1898 were then and continue to be part of the construction of indigenous identities, both by Anglo-Americans and Natives. This thesis analyzes the ramifications of Rinehart’s portraits and those of his peers as well as Native American artists in the 20^th and 21^st centuries who have sought to re-appropriate these images to make them empowering icons of individual or tribal identity rather than erasure of culture.

This thesis comprises two sections. In the first section, the analysis is focused on the historical …

Liat Smestad, Amy Dosen

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio:

"Coming from a family of architects, I saw how closely related the functions of fashion and architecture are. I wanted to explore the function of fashion further and began my coursework in fashion design, focusing on the protective aspect of clothing. My focus on the protective function of clothing led me to a 25+ years career in fur design. My artistic explorations have led me in some interesting directions. I continually reshape my idea as an artist and the boundaries of my art. I've recently branched out into photography and also returned to my childhood passion: painting. I …

Identidades Por Negociar: La Presentación De La Piel Humana En La Fotografía De René Peña., Ilka Kressner

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

This paper analyzes several works by Cuban photographer René Peña from the point of view of his depiction of the human skin. Peña, one of Cuba’s most renowned photographers, with an impressive list of exhibits in Cuba, the US, and Europe, became known as an artist of sharp and formalistic black and white photographs, mostly focusing on the human body. Through his idiosyncratic staging and estranging juxtapositions on the photographic paper, Peña’s work is never solely artistic: it challenges for instance the binary opposition between black and white, the concept of fixed sexualities, or the process of aging.

In many …

Female Iconography In Invisible Man, Shelly J. Eversley

Publications and Research

Argument concerning female visuality in Ralph Ellison's novel, Invisible Man.