Marci Kwon’s Making San Francisco Chinatown will be the first book-length study of the artists and makers who lived and worked in the Chinatown neighborhood after the 1906 Great San Francisco Earthquake. It will elucidate forms of accommodation, resistance, community, and refusal engendered by living in a place shaped by American orientalism.
Marci Kwon is assistant professor of art history at Stanford University. Her research and teaching address a range of topics in twentieth-century art, including the intersection of fine art and vernacular practice, theories of modernism, discourses of “folk” and “self-taught” art, and Asian American/diasporic art. She is the author of essays on artists including Joan Brown, BTS, Isamu Noguchi, and Martin Wong.