ShiPu Wang, Professor of Art History and the Coats Family Chair in the Arts in the Global Arts Studies Program, is the 2018 winner of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Book Prize for his second book, The Other American Moderns. Matsura, Ishigaki, Noda, Hayakawa (Penn State University Press, 2017). Given every three years, the Book Prize honors the author of a book that influences ideas about American Modernism.
Professor Wang joined UC Merced in 2006 and is an art historian specializing in pre-WWII American art and visual culture produced by diasporic artists of Asian descent. A 2014 Terra Foundation for American Art Senior Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, he received the museum’s 2008 Patricia and Phillip Frost Essay Award for his essay in American Art, the museum's academic journal; he was invited to join its editorial board in 2018. Professor Wang has published and lectured internationally, and was recently featured in a symposium celebrating the publication of the 50th-anniversary special volume for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.
In addition to The Other American Moderns, Wang has authored two more books: Becoming American? The Art and Identity Crisis of Yasuo Kuniyoshi (2011); and Chiura Obata: An American Modern (2018), an exhibition catalog published by the University of California Press to accompany a retrospective of the same name that he curated. The exhibition, organized by UC Santa Barbara’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum, is touring internationally, thanks to a major exhibition grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art. After a successful run at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in the summer of 2018, the retrospective travels to the Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art in Japan (January 18—March 10, 2019), the Crocker Art Museum in California (June 23—September 29, 2019), and the Smithsonian American Art Museum (November 1, 2019—April 10, 2020).
Link #1. Book - https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-07773-4.html
Link #2. Book prize press release - https://www.okeeffemuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Georgia-OKeeffe-Museum-Announces-Winner-of-2018-Book-Prize.pdf
Link #3. Symposium video - https://youtu.be/1gRbYVwLpJo
Link #4. Book review - https://editions.lib.umn.edu/panorama/article/the-other-american-moderns/
Links #5 & 6. UC Press - https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520296541/chiura-obata
Link #7. Press coverage - https://faculty.ucmerced.edu/spwang/read-press-coverage-chiura-obata-american-modern
Link #8. Terra - https://www.terraamericanart.org/events/event/exhibition-chiura-obata-an-american-modern/
