Professor ShiPu Wang /wong/ joined UC Merced in 2006 and was the founding faculty of the Global Arts Studies Program (GASP), as well as the founding director and curator of the UCM Art Gallery. He became the first Coats Family Chair in the Arts at UC Merced in 2018, the same year he began a four-year tenure on the editorial board of American Art, the academic journal of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM). In 2020, Prof. Wang was appointed by the Smithsonian Institution's Board of Regents to the National Portrait Gallery's Board of Commissioners.
Dr. Wang specializes in 20th-century American art history and visual culture in an international context, and he is one of a small group of specialists who have produced extensive scholarship on the critical rediscovery and reexamination of the work of pre-WWII American artists of Asian descent. A 2014 Terra Foundation for American Art Senior Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and a 2022 Terra Foundation Senior Fellow of Asian American Art at the Brooklyn Museum, Prof. Wang's scholarship has appeared in major publications in three languages, including American Studies, Trans-Asia Photography Review, AAPI Nexus, and Journal of Aesthetic Education, the official publication of the National Taiwan Arts Education Center. His essay, "Japan against Japan: U.S. Propaganda and Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s Identity Crisis,” won the 2008 Patricia and Phillip Frost Essay Award, a prize given by SAAM to recognize excellence in scholarship in the field of American art history. In 2023, Dr. Wang became a Scholarly Adviser to the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Asian American Art Initiative.
He is the author of Becoming American? The Art and Identity Crisis of Yasuo Kuniyoshi (University of Hawaii Press in 2011) and The Other American Moderns. Matsura, Ishigaki, Noda, Hayakawa (Penn State University Press, 2017), which received positive reviews and won the 2018 Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Book Prize, given every three years to honor the author of a book that influences ideas about American Modernism.
Dr. Wang also authored and edited the exhibition catalogue, Chiura Obata: An American Modern (University of California Press, 2018), to accompany a retrospective of the same name that he curated. The exhibition, organized by UC Santa Barbara’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum, toured internationally, thanks to a major exhibition grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art. After a successful run at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in the summer of 2018, the retrospective traveled to the Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art in Japan (January 18—March 10, 2019), the Crocker Art Museum in California (June 23—September 29, 2019), and concluded its tour with a six-month display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (November 27, 2019—May 25, 2020; cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns).
Dr. Wang's current projects include an exhibition that he has curated—Pictures of Belonging: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Miné Okubo—that features the artworks of three American artists who share the distinction of being trailblazing women of Japanese descent of the pre-WWII generations. The unprecedented exhibition, to be organized by the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) in Los Angeles, has garnered the support of the Terra Foundation for American Art in the form of a major exhibition that enables JANM to tour the 90-object show to four partner museums between 2024 and 2027. An accompanying exhibition catalogue of the same name, authored and edited by Dr. Wang and co-published by JANM and UC Press, is due out in late 2023. See the PoB page for more detail
In addition, Dr. Wang's scholarship has appeared in major publications, including the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery's 50th-anniversary special volume, Beyond the Face: New Perspectives on Portraiture (D. Giles Ltd., 2018), the Whitney Museum of American Art's Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925-1945 (Whitney Museum of American Art, 2020), and The Unforgettables: Expanding the History of American Art (UC Press, 2022).
Dr. Wang holds a Ph.D. in Art History from UC Santa Barbara, and a M.A. in Art History from Indiana University in Bloomington, where he also earned a B.A. in Studio Art. He can be reached by email: swang7@ucmerced.edu.