Author Alexandra Chang investigates “Asian American Art” through the formation, membership, and artwork of three important post-90s artist collectives: Godzilla: Asian American Art Network, Godzookie, and the Barnstormers. Through in-depth interviews with artists, arts administrators, and writers, as well as the search for archival documents from university and museum archives to the storage shelves of participant artists, Chang traces the shifts within the changing historical contexts of the initial coinage of the term “Asian America.” We see how the term began as an outgrowth of the late ’60s civil rights movement, to its integration into mainstream multicultural discourse and its legacy today. Envisioning Diaspora peers into the nuances of artist collective formations and communities of affinity, and ultimately the core issues of identity politics, aesthetics, and diaspora involved in Asian American Art. (Publisher’s website)

This title is included in “Holding Space: A Shortlist Exploring the Complexity of Asian American Identity”. Publications that address the complexities of the Asian American and Asian diasporic experience in the field of contemporary art are few and far between. As an organization based in the U.S. and serving a diasporic Asian community, we have experienced firsthand both the desire for knowledge in this space as well as the frustration due to its paucity. “​​Holding Space” is a shortlist composed of a selection of publications housed at our reading room that begins to redress this scarcity. This list is by no means exhaustive; rather, it represents the start of a continued commitment to fill this gap.