Joan Mitchell Foundation Announces the 2025 Joan Mitchell Fellows, Including Prof. Gerald Clarke

Joan Mitchell Foundation Announces the 2025 Joan Mitchell Fellows, Including Prof. Gerald Clarke

by Keith Miyake Faculty News

Fifteen US-based artists will each receive $60,000 over the five-year span of the program, which also provides learning, peer engagement, and network-building opportunities.

NEW YORK, NY – August 13, 2025 – The Joan Mitchell Foundation is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2025 Joan Mitchell Fellowships: 15 US-based artists working in the evolving fields of painting and sculpture. The artists, who hail from 11 states and range in age from 30 to 74, will each receive $60,000 in direct funding, distributed over five years alongside professional development, peer engagement, and network-building programs. This year’s Fellows announcement coincides with the Foundation’s year-long celebration of Joan Mitchell’s centennial year and a major exhibition, on view for the month of August, marking 10 years of the Joan Mitchell Center residency program in New Orleans. The Fellowship awards represent a $900,000 monetary commitment to the 15 artists, augmented by more than $400,000 in non-monetary services offered over the five years of the program.

The 2025 Joan Mitchell Fellows are:
Gerald Clarke, Anza, CA
Cathy Della Lucia, Boston, MA
Bob Dilworth, Providence, RI
Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez, Lincoln, NE
Sahar Khoury, Oakland, CA
Sammy Seung-min Lee, Denver, CO
Brenda Mallory, Portland, OR
Suchitra Mattai, Los Angeles, CA
Troy Montes Michie, Los Angeles, CA
Sara Rahbar, Great Neck, NY
Eric-Paul Riege, Gallup, NM
Juvana Soliven, Honolulu, HI
Linda Rotua Sormin, New York, NY
Lan Tuazon, Chicago, IL
Anthony White, Seattle, WA

 

Gerald Clarke (b. 1967, lives in Anza, CA), an enrolled citizen of the Cahuilla Band of Indians, draws on his community’s everyday experience to create conceptual artworks that exist within a spectrum of Indigenous expression that is simultaneously ancient and contemporary.

Read the full press release here.

Picturing Black History: Photographs and Stories That Changed the World, featuring Prof. Jasmin Young

Picturing Black History: Photographs and Stories That Changed the World, featuring Prof. Jasmin Young

by Keith Miyake Faculty News

Professor Jasmin Young contributed an entry in the recently published book: Picturing Black History: Photographs and Stories That Changed the World. Prof. Young’s contribution explores the work of “radical revolutionary” Gloria Richardson, a “highly controversial leader for refusing to publicly denounce armed resistance.”

From the publisher’s website:

Picturing Black History uncovers untold stories and rarely seen images of the Black experience, providing new context around culturally significant moments, as part of an ongoing collaborative effort between Getty Images, Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, and the History Departments at The Ohio State and Miami Universities.

Picturing Black History informs, educates, and inspires our current moment by exploring the past, blending the breadth and depth of Getty Images’s archives with the renowned expertise of Origins contributors and The Ohio State’s and Miami’s History Departments, including Daniela Edmeier, Damarius Johnson, Nicholas Breyfogle, and Steve Conn.

You can learn more and purchase the book at https://picturingblackhistory.org/pbh-book/.

Archives of Dissent: First Friday the Unauthorized News and the Legacy of Haunani-Kay Trask

Archives of Dissent: First Friday the Unauthorized News and the Legacy of Haunani-Kay Trask

by Keith Miyake Faculty News

Associate Professor Kēhaulani Vaughn recently published an article, “Archives of Dissent: First Friday the Unauthorized News and the Legacy of Haunani-Kay Trask” in a special issue of American Quarterly. In the article Vaughn traces Trask’s discussions regarding Hawaiian sovereignty and the archive of refusal of Americanness that Trask presented via public access television.

Here is the article abstract:

On March 11, 2022, ‘Ōlelo TV aired its last episode of First Friday: The Unauthorized News, which honored the life and accomplishments of Dr. Haunani-Kay Trask. Running intermittently for over thirty-five years, First Friday covered news and perspectives not discussed by local and mainstream media sources in Hawai’i. The show was initially formed in equal collaboration between John Witeck, Jo Scheder, Haunani-Kay Trask, and David Stannard and cohosted by Stannard, Trask, and later her sister Mililani Trask. First Friday included discussions of Hawaiian sovereignty that unapologetically centered Hawaiian viewpoints. The show aimed to educate and empower its viewers to get involved in local, state, and international politics, and was a significant example of independent news media. Although First Friday covered a range of topics both local and global, this essay begins to trace the legacy of Haunani-Kay Trask through her conversations on sovereignty on First Friday and her refusal of Americanness.

Recent and Upcoming Art Shows featuring Prof. Gerald Clarke

Recent and Upcoming Art Shows featuring Prof. Gerald Clarke

by Keith Miyake Events Faculty News

2024 has been a busy year for Professor Gerald Clarke! Here are some of Professor Clarke’s recent and upcoming shows:

Gerald Clarke: The Door is Open (May 24 – September 1, 2024, Breck Create, Breckenridge, CO)

Desert Forest: Life with Joshua Trees (September 7 – December 29, 2024, Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA)

Fire Kinship: Southern California Native Ecology and Art (January 12 – July 13, 2025, PST ART, Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA)

 

Professor Clarke will also be giving a lecture in October:

Portland Monuments Project Symposium (October 11 – 12, 2024, Converge 45, Portland, OR)

 

Prof. Clarke’s Artist Statement (via Breck Create)

I aspire not to romanticize the subjects or content of my work. I strive to “keep it real” and have found that my best works are inspired by my personal experiences. Beer cans, branding irons, and gourd rattles represent aspects of my reality. These materials reflect who I am and not how the mainstream might understand the contemporary Native American experience. They represent my community as well: a community that struggles with various issues but that also laughs, loves, and continues to evolve.

While my work may not appear “traditional,” it is part of a continuation of creative responses to the world that the Cahuilla have exercised since ancient times. I believe the strict adherence to traditional materials and authentic forms has been forced onto Indigenous expression by Euro-American belief systems that view art and culture through a monetary lens. The result is a narrow conception of Native American art that imposes an eighteenth-century aesthetic and transforms it into a commodity.

As you view my work, I ask that you do not simply compare or contrast it to “traditional Native American art,” but that you understand my work exists within a spectrum of Indigenous expression that is simultaneously ancient and contemporary. I’m proud and humbled to contribute to the Indigenous Intellectual Tradition. I am not simply a contemporary artist that happens to be Indian. I am a Native American artist. I am a Cahuilla artist.

Dr. Anthony Macías’s New Book Receives Honorable Mention, 2024 International Latino Book Award

Dr. Anthony Macías’s New Book Receives Honorable Mention, 2024 International Latino Book Award

by Keith Miyake Faculty News

Dr. Anthony Macías’s new book, Chicano-Chicana Americana: Pop Culture Pluralism Starring Anthony Quinn, Katy Jurado, Robert Beltran, and Lupe Ontiveros (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2023), has earned Honorable Mention, 2024 International Latino Book Award, Best Academic Themed Book, College Level.

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Macias!

Chicano-Chicana Americana is a cultural history of Mexican Americans in film, television, and theater. Through biographical sketches of performers such as Anthony Quinn, Katy Jurado, Robert Beltran, and Lupe Ontiveros, this work asserts Mexican Americans’ proper place in the national narratives of our collective imaginary. Conveying a multicentered, polycultural America, this book shows us intriguing performers in bit parts who steal the scene and redefine what it means to be American.

Each biographical chapter analyzes an underappreciated actor, revealing their artistic contributions to U.S. common culture. Their long-shot careers tell a tale of players taking action with agency and fighting for screen time and equal opportunity despite disadvantages and differential treatment in Hollywood. These dynamic and complex individuals altered cinematic representations—and audience expectations—by surpassing stereotypes.

The book explores American national character by showing how ethnic Mexicans attained social and cultural status through fair, open competition without a radical realignment of political or economic structures. Their creative achievements demanded dignity and earned respect. Anthony Macías argues that these performances demonstrated a pop culture pluralism that subtly changed mainstream America, transforming it from the mythological past of the Wild West to the speculative future of science fiction.

View book on publisher website

In Search of the ‘Tomato King’: Finding a Mexican Migrant Politician, Rooted in California Soil, by Prof. Adrían Félix

In Search of the ‘Tomato King’: Finding a Mexican Migrant Politician, Rooted in California Soil, by Prof. Adrían Félix

by Keith Miyake Faculty News

Ethnic Studies professor Adrían Félix recently published an essay, titled “In Search of the ‘Tomato King’: Finding a Mexican Migrant Politician, Rooted in California Soil” in Zócalo Public Square. Here is an excerpt:

I am writing a biography of Bermúdez, and I am drawn equally to this complex and contradictory figure by his larger-than-life character—in his signature all-black cowboy ensemble—and by the unprecedented transnational movement he ignited. Bermúdez gave migrants a voice in the politics of their homeland. He also reproduced the strongman tendencies and political bossism he fought against, not to mention machismo.

He is both rule and exception: so much like millions of fellow Mexican migrants who anonymously toil in this country, but also remarkable for transcending strictures of citizenship and borders. Tracing his California path through rural swaths of the state is a reminder of how Bermúdez, and others, have made it their home while maintaining lifelong ties to their ancestral motherlands.

You can read the full article on Zócalo Public Square. Image above: Tomato King Andrés Bermúdez by Be Boggs.

Young Oak Kim Center to launch traveling museum on America’s first Koreatown with Mellon Foundation Grant

Young Oak Kim Center to launch traveling museum on America’s first Koreatown with Mellon Foundation Grant

by Keith Miyake Faculty News

UC Riverside has been awarded an $850,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation Humanities in Place to launch a traveling museum showcasing the history of America’s first Koreatown — Pachappa Camp. The museum will preserve and share the story of a community of Korean migrant workers in Riverside who contributed to the city’s citrus development, including Korea’s most influential independence activist, Dosan Ahn Chang Ho.

The traveling exhibition will be presented in collaboration with a consortium of Asian American and civil rights groups based in Riverside, as well as national Korean American community organizations in Washington, D.C., Chicago, San Francisco, and New York. It will highlight the contributions of Korean American labor and provide communities with an opportunity to learn, connect, and grow from this country’s rich narrative.

The three-year grant will allow the program to kick off in San Francisco beginning late 2024, led by Edward Chang, ethnic studies professor and founding director of the Young Oak Kim Center for Korean American Studies at UCR. Strategic counsel will be provided by Daryle Williams, dean of UCR’s College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and co-creator of Enslaved.org, who will provide strategic counsel for the overall project and also oversee the digital exhibition component.

Chang, who has been researching Korean American history for over 30 years, said that finding these critical slices of history and highlighting them at a national level is something he had not expected until 2016, when two visiting Korean graduate students helped him translate documents from old Korean to modern Korean language, that he understood the significance of Dosan Ahn Chang Ho’s presence in Riverside. He is particularly interested in sharing the history of Pachappa Camp with youth as a way to bring back history that has been intentionally omitted from textbooks.

More information can be found at the original article, “UCR to launch traveling museum on America’s first Koreatown with Mellon Foundation grant“.

Photo Credit: UCR/Sandra Baltazar Martínez

Desert X 2023: A contemporary art exhibition featuring the work of Professor Gerald Clarke.

Desert X 2023: A contemporary art exhibition featuring the work of Professor Gerald Clarke.

by Keith Miyake Events Faculty News

Desert X is an international contemporary art exhibition that takes place in desert locations and features site-specific installations by acclaimed artists from around the world. The exhibition is produced by The Desert Biennial, a California-based not-for-profit organization with a mission to present public exhibitions of art that engage with the desert, the environment, and indigenous communities. Eleven artists from Europe, North America and South Asia will present poetic and immersive works that span sculpture, painting, writing, architecture, design, film, music, performance and choreography, education, and environmental activism in the exhibition curated by Artistic Director Neville Wakefield and Co-Curator Diana Campbell.

The exhibition examines social and environmental themes with a focus on the changes that give form to a world increasingly shaped by climate crisis, globalism, and the political and economic migrations that follow in their wake. In the exhibition, which builds on social and environmental themes explored in earlier editions, newly-commissioned works make visible, as instruments of self-awareness and devices of wonder, the forces that we exert on the world: how we design our environments, how we live, and the messages we send that reinforce systems that might or might not be beneficial for us. From the local to the global, from schools and roads to global trade routes that define the ebb and flow of goods and many things in-between, infrastructure has subsumed creative ways of being that are inconvenient to forces of power.

Desert X 2023 features the work of Professor Gerald Clarke, who presents a unique piece called Immersion. The installation takes the form of a traditional Cahuilla coiled basket or ‘chi-pat-mal’ scaled to become a giant game board. The goal of reaching the center can only be achieved by correctly answering questions relating to the traditions and histories of the Cahuilla Indians and other sovereign cultures. By gamifying history Clarke sublimates prejudice. At the same time, he reminds us how unattainable these same goals have become for those for whom such knowledge has been forcibly withdrawn.

The exhibition will be on display at sites across the Coachella Valley from March 4–May 7, 2023. Don’t miss this opportunity to see the work of Professor Gerald Clarke and other world-renowned artists. Visit desertx.org for more information.

Spotlight on Prof. Ed Chang’s Research: Uncovering the History of America’s First Koreatown

Spotlight on Prof. Ed Chang’s Research: Uncovering the History of America’s First Koreatown

by Emily Hue Faculty News

Jill Cowen at The New York Times highlighted Prof. Ed Chang’s groundbreaking research on Pachappa Camp, the first Koreatown in the U.S., which was located here in Riverside, CA. Excerpt below:

The biggest thing that set Pachappa Camp apart, however, was the fact that it was a distinctly Korean community — the first in the United States, predating the founding of Los Angeles’s Koreatown by the businessman Hi Duk Lee by more than half a century.

And while Ahn [Chang-Ho]’s life and legacy have been deeply studied, extensively documented and honored, his role in founding a Korean community in Riverside was virtually unknown until about five years ago, when Chang stumbled across a 1908 map issued by an insurance company. It had a caption labeling a Korean settlement in Riverside.

“I thought, ‘Korean settlement? In Riverside?’” he said.

Chang said it was known that Ahn spent some time in Riverside. He had seen an image of Ahn picking oranges there. And a 1913 episode known as the Hemet Valley Incident — which involved Korean fruit pickers Chang later determined had come from Riverside — has been widely cited as a pivotal moment for the Korean national identity.

But what Ahn was doing in the Inland Empire for more than five years before he moved his family to Los Angeles in 1913 was a puzzle. That puzzle turned into what Chang described as the most gratifying research of his career.

“People said it’s like destiny,” he said. “I’ve been teaching in Riverside for almost 30 years, and I didn’t know anything about it.”

As it turned out, Pachappa Camp was also a place where Ahn honed many of the democratic ideas that he brought back to Korea, which had been a monarchy and was occupied by Japan.

“I was able to trace the birth of whole democratic institutions to here in Riverside,” Chang said. “I was uncovering all of this and I was so shocked.”

With the help of graduate student interns from Korea who translated documents from older Korean, Chang last month published a book of his findings, “Pachappa Camp: The First Koreatown in the United States.”

 

Read the article here. Image above: University of Southern California, Korean American Digital Archive

On Transnational Abolitionist Relationalities: From Mandalay to Minneapolis, by Prof. Emily Hue

On Transnational Abolitionist Relationalities: From Mandalay to Minneapolis, by Prof. Emily Hue

by Emily Hue Faculty News

Ethnic Studies Prof. Emily Hue published an essay entitled, “On Transnational Abolitionist Relationalities: From Mandalay to Minneapolis.” Excerpt below:

These last months, my social media feed has been in constant throes that bounce between disparate coverage of racialized misogynist violence throughout the US and another lineage of state-sanctioned violence against women in Southeast Asia. I write this nearly three months into the most recent military coup in Myanmar, in which military police have detained hundreds of  government officials, have extrajudicially killed 776 civilian protesters, and either maimed or indefinitely detained 3,813 additional protestors. Some of the most visible figures in popular media out of the Civil Disobedience Movement have been youth and women. International calls to support have meant increased visibility for, not just democracy activists, but also garment workers on strike, and advocates from ethnic minority and feminist struggles for sovereignty.

It has been hard for me to separate these simultaneous moments of social upheaval; their connections stem from historical legacies of Asian women’s bodies being indexed as violable, as fungible, and as collateral damage of war and neoliberal globalization. Often, service industries, including sex work, massage work, and garment work have been further entrenched by political and economic equalities wrought by intra-Asian, European, and US imperialisms. More now than ever, a call to transnational feminist internationalist solidarity and sustained attention to workers’ and dissidents’ world-making remain crucial.

In the midst of a global pandemic, increasing global fascism, a spate of mass shootings in the US, and spectacular upticks in masculinist supremacy, what does this call to solidarity entail?

Read the full article here. Image above: Rows of htamein hang above lines of barricades in the Kyaukmyaung area of Tarmwe Township on March 8. The women’s garments are hung to deter superstitious members of the security forces. (Frontier)