Asian American Artists: From 1840 to Now

Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, PhD, is an art historian, curator, and writer based in San Francisco. Born in Bangkok and raised between Thailand, Canada, and the United States, she brings a transnational perspective to her research and curatorial practice, which explores race, Diaspora, and histories shaped by migration. She is the Robert M. and Ruth L. Halperin Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, where she cofounded and codirects the Asian American Art Initiative (AAAI), one of the nation’s leading museum initiatives dedicated to Asian American art.

Alexander has curated the nationally touring exhibitions East of the Pacific: Making Histories of Asian American Art (2022) and Spirit House (2024), as well as The Faces of Ruth Asawa (2022–ongoing), a long-term installation at the Cantor Arts Center. She is the editor of Spirit House, the first major publication of the AAAI, and her writing has appeared in Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, Hyperallergic, the Brooklyn Rail, and various exhibition catalogues. She was a Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and received her PhD in art history from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

John Yau began reviewing for Art in America in 1978. He went on to write for Artforum, Arts Magazine, frieze, Brooklyn Rail, and Hyperallergic, as well as write catalog essays and contribute to museum publications. His many monographs include Eric Aho (2026), John Pai: Liquid Steel (2023), Joe Brainard: The Art of the Personal (2022), Liu Xiaodong (2021), and A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns (2008). His most recent book of essays, Please Wait by the Coatroom: Reconsidering Race and Identity in American Art (2023), received an American Book Award. His curatorial projects include the widely acclaimed The Unseen Professors: Leo Amino (1911–1989), Minoru Niizuma (1930–1998), John Pai (b. 1937) for Tina Kim Gallery (2021). His awards for criticism, poetry, and contributions to culture include a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry (2006), Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters (2010), the Jackson Prize in Poetry (2017), and the Rabkin Prize in Art Criticism (2021). The author of more than twenty books of poetry, his most recent is Diary of Small Discontents: New & Selected Poems 1974–2024 (2025). He lives in Beacon, New York.