CONFERENCE: Representations of East Asian Migrants and Settlers in the Western United States ca. 1850-1929
Hager Auditorium, Museum of the Rockies, Montana State University, Bozeman
26-28 September 2024
This conference provides scholars from universities, museums, libraries, and archives an opportunity to exchange research on the ways Asian American and Euro-American artists represented Asian migrants and settlers in art between the Gold Rush and the Great Depression. Over the last thirty years, historians have probed Asian American migrants’ experiences of work, settlement, and discrimination in the mining and railroad towns of the West while art historians have explored Asian American artists’ production of original works rooted in transnational dialogues, aesthetic choices, and social experiences on the East and West Coasts. This conference builds on these scholarly trends by ascertaining how Asian and European artists who journeyed through or resided in the American West between 1850 and 1929 contributed to a rich array of representations of Asian sojourners and settlers in different genres—documentary, picturesque, academic, expressive, illustrative, satirical—that promoted a range of views—ethnographic, nationalistic, empathetic, propagandistic, associational, filial, ethnic, gendered. A range of papers illuminate not only how Euro-American artists imposed naturalized, stereotyped, racist, and other identities but also how Asian American artists and individuals deflected, contested, or rejected such images in the construction of their own identities.
In the first half of the conference, “Daily Life in the West,” presenters will discuss images of Asian migrants and immigrants in contexts of labor, leisure, worship, and celebration; in the second half of the conference, “Contested Claims,” presenters will discuss representations of Asians in contexts of association, discrimination, and exclusion as well as visual strategies Asian Americans employed to negotiate hostile surroundings and to construct independent identities. In the last session, contemporary Asian American artists will share how they have engaged with, referenced, or distanced the past in their art. Continue reading Representations of East Asian Migrants conference