Edited with introduction by Julie Ault. Foreword by Pamela M. Lee.

Edited by artist/curator/writer Julie Ault, this book brings together essential writings by the trailblazing art historian  and curator Karin Higa (1966–2013). The selected essays, written between  1992 and 2011, focus on the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans in  Western US states to specially constructed concentration camps, the  artistic production and communities that took root within them and the  individual and collective narratives of Asian American artists amid  discriminatory policies, restricted political agency and racism. While  exploring issues of identity and immigration, Higa recuperates  significant artists and oeuvres from historical neglect and engages  contemporary artists to examine how art acts as a source for and  transmitter of cultural identity.

This book reveals how Higa’s  conviction that art and lived experience are indissolubly linked was at  the root of her methodological modeling of an Asian American art  history. Moving between portrayals of artists’ networks in the camps and  Little Tokyo communities and case studies of oeuvres and biographies,  Higa recovers vital art practices and hidden histories of creative  struggle and efflorescence. In the process, she maps—across ethnic,  geographic, and stylistic boundaries—the fertile creative milieux of  individual practices and communities. Higa shows how artists of Asian  descent have negotiated the divide between the United States and their  ancestral homes by using their freedom as artists to define their  culture more broadly. 

Hardbound: 416 pp.

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