ARTnews Awards 2025 Best Thematic Museum Show: ‘Legacies’

“Legacies: Asian American Art Movements in New York City” at 80WSE, New York
Curators: Howie Chen, Jayne Cole Southard, and christina ong
September 11–December 20, 2024

“Legacies: Asian American Art Movements in New York City” was billed as the first institutional show ever to survey artists of Asian descent in its titular city, a distinction that would make this show significant enough its own right. But curators Howie Chen, Jayne Cole Southard, and christina ong also demonstrated that the 90 artists included in the show did not only make art about their race, in the process complicating the relationship between one’s work and one’s identity in a nuanced way.

Surveying the period from 1969 to 2001, the show was centered around three organizations: Godzilla: Asian American Art Network, the Basement Workshop, and the Asian American Arts Centre. All three entities were explicitly branded as art spaces for Asian American artists, whose work was largely marginalized by mainstream institutions at the time. All three also had a protest-minded ethos, with Godzilla memorably writing the Whitney Museum a letter about the lack of Asian American participants in the 1991 Biennial. (After that letter, Eugenie Tsai, a Godzilla member, was named a curator at the museum.)

But “Legacies” was not merely a survey of these three entities, since it also explored artists who operated outside them. Many of these artists did make work about their identity, which some approached with irony. The teaser image for the show was a 1985 photograph by Hanh Thi Pham in which the Vietnamese American artist is shown holding a pipe to her mouth, a pose that vaguely recalls a similar one adopted by white male painters of the early 20th century. The photograph questions which kinds of people we typically consider to be artists.

Other artists went at the subject in more oblique ways. Chinese American artist David Diao was represented here by his 1974 painting Odd Man Out, which he has called an expression of his “outsider status,” even though it is an abstraction with no clear figurative elements. This work looks quite unlike the kind of paintings for which Diao is known, since it doesn’t explicitly critique the limits of the modernist canon, but it is emblematic of “Legacies,” which sought to explore lesser-known sides of the artists it featured.

“Legacies” was staged by 80WSE, an art space on Washington Square Park that is part of New York University; Chen, one of the cocurators, serves as its director. It is notable that this exhibition was put on not by a major museum but by this small institution, whose contributions to the New York ecosystem are large in spite of the space’s modest size.

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Special Mention: “Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica” at Art Institute of Chicago (December 15, 2024–March 30, 2025)