Exhibition Grants

Pictures of Belonging foregrounds the rich and heterogeneous oeuvres of the artists Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Miné Okubo. Their lives, taken together, spanned eight decades and four states (California, Utah, New Mexico, and New York) and encompassed the diverse communities in which they flourished before, during, and after World War II. The result of nearly two decades of research and rediscovery, the exhibition shifts away from an almost exclusive focus on the injustice and tragedy of Japanese American incarceration and instead seeks to illuminate a broader picture of the compelling but divergent artworks and life stories of these women of Japanese descent. The project invites the viewing public to reflect on critical questions: What did American art, and being American, mean in specific historical moments? How and why do existing accounts make women artists of color “peripheral/marginal” or even invisible? What can we collectively do to encourage a more inclusive, expanded, and nuanced understanding of American art?

Pictures of Belonging has been a profound success, with impressive audience numbers at each of its venues. During its presentation at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (February 24–June 30, 2024), the exhibition welcomed 35,674 visitors and engaged 4,055 participants through public programs. Its recent showing at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (November 15, 2024– August 17, 2025) attracted an extraordinary 880,544 visitors and 5,052 program participants—demonstrating the exhibition’s powerful national resonance and appeal. The exhibition will travel to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Monterey Museum of Art before its tour ends at the Japanese American National Museum.

ShiPu Wang, Coats Family Chair in the Arts and Professor of Art History at University of California, Merced, and the exhibition’s curator, observed that “since Pictures of Belonging began its Terra Foundation-supported national tour in early 2024, the most gratifying part has been watching the exhibition bring together people from such diverse backgrounds. Visitor comments reveal a deep appreciation for and connection to the beautiful and meaningful work and the artists’ inspiring life stories. The exhibition seems to be offering many of its visitors an impactful and timely viewing experience.”

Michael Galban, Historic Site Manager, reflects: “WAMPUM/OTGOÄ was an exhibition of rare objets d’art from the Musée du Quai Branly that we brought to the heartland of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) with the intention of reconnecting people with a historical Indigenous art aesthetic and ideology. The exhibition was groundbreaking not only in its scope and breadth but also in its ability to reestablish relationships that had once existed between tribal and non-tribal nations. The multilayered exhibition displayed the wampum pieces and objects of diplomatic significance alongside contemporary Indigenous art, and it also helped the public understand the globality of Haudenosaunee people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and ultimately to rekindle the relationships between various Indigenous tribal nations as the originators of the objects and the old colonial nations where they reside. It is not well known that the earliest and, in many cases, the most exciting examples of Indigenous art from the eighteenth century and earlier are housed in Europe. Modern Indigenous communities have not been able to interact with these objects and have had little exposure to them. Our exhibition was designed to fill that gap, providing the venue for reestablishing a relationship with the art and, along the way, inspiring and intriguing the public. WAMPUM/OTGOÄ was an incredible experience for all involved and to the thousands who experienced it.”

The Other Side of Now featured three films and related sculptures by Vietnamese American artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen. The exhibition explored the transnational entanglements created by colonization and war. Attending to the erased voices of Vietnamese, Senegalese, and Moroccan history, it proposed a space for communal healing and remembrance. The exhibition title highlights the shifts in and between time that are ever present within the artist’s work. What is the other side of ‘now’? Is it ‘then’? And when was ‘then’? And what waits to be revealed when we arrive on the other side?

The exhibition forms part of Zeitz MOCAA’s ongoing series of in-depth, research-based solo exhibitions that bring into focus and contextualize the practices of important artists from Africa and the Diaspora, and those whose work focuses on seminal topics in African history.