The IMU UR2 Symposium hosted by AAAI. Photo credit: Harrison Truong.
Welcome to the Asian American Art Initiative
‘East of the Pacific: Making Histories of Asian American Art’, 2022, installation view. Courtesy: Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University; Photograph: Johnna...
Explore Our Projects & Exhibitions
Scholars looking at AAAI's archives during the IMU UR2 Symposium. Photo credit: Harrison Truong.
Explore Our Education & Research
Artwork © 2024 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy David Zwirner. Photo courtesy of Andrew Brodhead.
Explore Our Collections
The Asian American Art Initiative (AAAI) advances research, education, community engagement, and public access to the work of Asian American/diasporic artists and makers. Primarily based at the Cantor Arts Center, the AAAI strives to build one of the most significant museum collections of Asian American art and make it available to all through the museum’s curatorial program. We model an innovative art history that centers primary sources (works of art, archives, oral histories) to generate collaboration among artists, scholars, students, and community members; and across the museum, classroom, archive, and public.
Explore the AAAI
Noriko Yamamoto, Tiki, 1960. Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University. The Michael Donald Brown Collection, made possible by the William Alden Campbell and...
About Us
Artwork © 2024 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy David Zwirner
Our Team
Martin Wong, Chinatown Dragon, 1993. Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University. Gift of The Martin Wong Foundation, 2019.202
Projects & Exhibitions
Dai Song Chang, San Francisco Chinatown, c. 1930s. Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University. The Michael Donald Brown Collection, made possible by the William...
News & Events
Hung Liu. Published by Tamarind Institute American, founded in 1970. Children at Work: Boy with Pots, 2000. Gift of Eleanor F. Rosenberg, 2001.88
Education & Research
Toshio Aoki, Swallows Over Waves, c. 1900. The Michael Donald Brown Collection, made possible by the William Alden Campbell and Martha Campbell Art Acquisition...
AAAI Collections at the Cantor Arts Center
Land Acknowledgement
Stanford occupies the ancestral land of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe. The land was and continues to be of great importance to the Ohlone people. On this land, Chinese migrant laborers helped construct the university and worked in the Stanfords’ residence. As president of Central Pacific Railroad Company, Leland Stanford employed Chinese migrants to do the more hazardous, backbreaking work of building the transcontinental railroad. Between 1863 and 1869, fifteen to twenty thousand Chinese laborers helped execute one of the most ruthless engineering ventures in American history, a colonial project that displaced countless Indigenous people and allowed the Stanfords to amass significant wealth.
Featured Exhibitions
Korakrit Arunanondchai, Shore of Security, 2022. Courtesy the artist and C L E A R I N G, New York / Brussels / Los Angeles. Photo: JSP Art Photography
Spirit House
Throughout Southeast Asia, various belief systems and cultural practices make the consideration of life and death—and the permeability between these worlds—a daily exercise. In Thailand, a commonplace mode of engagement with the spiritual realm comes in the form of spirit houses, dollhouse-size devotional structures rooted in Buddhist and animist beliefs and found outside virtually every home or building.
Inspired by these structures, Spirit House surveys how thirty-three contemporary artists of Asian descent are exploring modes of making that exceed rational understanding and enter haunted dimensions. Challenging the privileging of data-driven, scientific methods of understanding the world around us, the artists represented in Spirit House instead foreground inherited, embodied, and psychic forms of knowledge.
Artwork © 2024 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy David Zwirner. Photo by Terry Schmitt.
The Faces of Ruth Asawa
The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University acquired Untitled (LC.012, Wall of Masks) in 2020. These 233 masks, which originally hung on the exterior of Ruth Asawa’s family home in Noe Valley, have never been shown in their entirety outside their original context. After two years of conservation treatment and careful planning, they were mounted as part of the long-term installation, The Faces of Ruth Asawa, at the Cantor. This focused exhibition, curated by Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, PhD, Robert M. and Ruth L. Halperin Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and co-director of the Asian American Art Initiative, explores Asawa’s intimate relationship with clay and offers a new context with which to understand her diverse body of work.
TT Takemoto, Looking for Jiro, 2011. © TT Takemoto. Courtesy of the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco. Photograph by Maxwell Leung.
TT Takemoto: Remembering in the Absence of Memory
This single gallery exhibition features two video works and two complementary series of small handmade objects and works on paper by San Francisco Bay Area-based artist TT Takemoto. Takemoto’s videos Looking for Jiro (2011) and On the Line (2018) uniquely center queer experiences of intimacy in prewar and WWII contexts. The Gentleman’s Gaman series (2009–23) and an installation of handcrafted kokeshi dolls (2023) offer sculptural, expanded modes of engagement with challenging and overlooked narratives in Asian American history, as reimagined by Takemoto.
Livien Yin, Thirsty No. 1, 2022. Collection of David Liu and Michael Fountas. Image courtesy of the artist and Micki Meng.
Livien Yin: Thirsty
Livien Yin: Thirsty is the first museum solo exhibition of the work of Brooklyn-based artist Livien Yin, a 2019 Stanford MFA. This single-gallery exhibition showcases new and recent paintings by Yin and their sensitive, researched-based approach to creating scenes of contemporary subjects alongside historical Asian Americans and their environments. In their paintings, Yin often casts their friends as models, collapsing the distance between the past and present to create new connective threads between Asian Americans across generations.
Events
328 Lomita Drive, Stanford, CA
Please join us for the spring 2025 Distinguished Lecture in Asian Art in Honor of the Lijin Collection, featuring Tiffany Sia in a discussion with…