The George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation

Project Title: Making San Francisco Chinatown 

Marci Kwon is Assistant Professor of Art History at Stanford University, and co-director of the university’s Asian American Art Initiative.  Her work explores alterity, minorness, value, and the ethics of relation in art and material culture, with a special focus on the history of Asian American/diasporic artists and makers.  Kwon’s writing has appeared in Third Text,  Modernism/Modernity Print+, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, and in edited volumes about the early history of the Museum of Modern Art, social art history, folk and self-taught art, and the K-pop group BTS. She has contributed catalog essays to exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. She is a co-editor of the online Martin Wong Catalogue Raisonné, and an editorial advisor to May’s Photo Studio and the Golden Age of San Francisco Chinatown, a Google Arts & Culture Project. Kwon’s first monograph, Enchantments: Joseph Cornell and American Modernism was published by Princeton University Press in 2021.  At Stanford, Kwon is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Asian American Studies, American Studies, the Center for East Asia, and Feminist and Gender Studies, and serves on the steering committee of Modern Thought and Literature.  She is the recipient of the Asian American Studies Faculty Prize, the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity Teaching Award, the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award, the Faculty Women's Forum's Inspiring Early Career Academic Award, the Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders Award, and the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.