An opening reception for “California Collectives: Asian American Moderns, 1924-1965 will be held on Saturday, Nov. 21, from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Vincent Price Art Museum, East Los Angeles College, 1301 Avenida Cesar Chavez, Monterey Park.
The reception, which will also celebrate the opening of “Francis and Anthony Almendárez: Navigating the Archives Within, Vol. 2,” will include a short performance by musician/choreographer Nobuko Miyamoto, public access to the galleries, a vinyl DJ set by Central American Sound Archive, and a cash bar with specialty cocktails by Chicas on the Rocks.
Admission is free but reservations are requested. Go to: https://vpam.org/event/opening-reception-for-end-of-year-exhibitions/
“California Collectives” features more than 50 paintings, drawings, watercolors, prints, and photographs by American artists of Asian descent. Drawn from the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), including several new acquisitions, the exhibition examines the wide-ranging influence of Asian American artistic networks in California during the Exclusion Era (1882-1965) — a period that witnessed the spread of anti-immigration and anti-Asian laws, notably the Asian Exclusion Act (1924) and Executive Order 9066 (1942), authorizing the incarceration of Japanese Americans.
Yet amidst xenophobia and racial discrimination, American artists of Asian descent created thriving networks of artistic exchange, forming collectives and staging high-profile exhibitions across the golden state — from the San Francisco Bay Area to Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo, including the East West Art Society, the Shaku-Do-Sha, the Japanese Camera Pictorialists of California, and the Los Angeles Oriental Artists’ Group, among several others.
The exhibition examines how many of these artists, some American citizens born to immigrant parents, leveraged art making as a critical tool to participate in, contribute to, and shape the development of modern American art. But why do we know so little about these artists and see so few of their works represented in major American museum collections?
By retracing their prolific careers, the exhibition highlights their far-reaching accomplishments and expands our understanding of their diverse artistic output. It thus adds to recent scholarly efforts to present a more accurate, and hence more inclusive, history of 20th-century American art, revealing how Asian American moderns leveraged their collectivity to prominently assert their power and place within California’s art world.
The exhibition will run through March 6, 2027. Museum hours: Tuesday through Friday, 12 to 4 p.m.; Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m; closed Sunday and Monday. For more information: https://vpam.org/exhibitions/california-collectives-asian-american-moderns-1924-1965/