Cantor’s In Focus shows 21 works from its Asian American Art Initiative collection

The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University is presenting In Focus: Asian American Art from the Collection in its Ruth Levison Halperin Gallery from 27 August 2026 to 22 February 2027. The group exhibition brings together 21 works acquired through the museum’s Asian American Art Initiative (AAAI), several of them shown in public for the first time.

The AAAI was co-founded in 2018 by Marci Kwon, professor of art history at Stanford, and Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, the Cantor’s associate curator of modern and contemporary art. The museum describes it as one of the country’s leading museum programmes devoted to research, education, community engagement and public access in the field of Asian American art. Its holdings have grown from about 30 objects to more than 800, built up through acquisitions, exhibitions, publications, archival research and work with communities, and the Cantor counts the area among the fastest-growing parts of its collection.

The exhibition avoids presenting a single story of Asian American art. Instead, it stresses the range of individual practices and moves away from the idea that work by Asian American artists must address only racial or ethnic identity. The artists on view span several generations, and their works reflect a wide variety of histories, viewpoints and concerns.

Painting, photography and prints are all represented, in works dating from the 1950s to the present. Featured artists include Pacita Abad, Ching Ho Cheng, Tseng Kwong Chi, Young Joon Kwak, Masami Teraoka and Rupy C. Tut. Abad’s If My Friends Could See Me Now (1993), a lithograph with pulp-painted chine-collé and metallic powder on handmade paper, is among the acquisitions the museum highlights.

Alexander calls the presentation “a celebration of Asian American art” and an example of the wide spectrum of creativity within the initiative.