Art at Americas Society is pleased to present "The Appearance: A Conference by Americas Society and Asia Society," in collaboration with Asia Society. Join us in person on Tuesday, October 29, at 2:30 pm for an afternoon-long symposium.

This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.

Schedule of Events

2:30-3:15 p.m., Asia Society: Artist spotlight, Chantal Peñalosa Fong in conversation with Yasufumi Nakamori 
3:30-5:00 p.m., Asia Society: Roundtable with Mariola Alvarez, Howie Chen, and Kolleen Ku, moderated by Tie Jojima and Yudi Rafael 
5:00-5:30 p.m., Americas Society: Transfer from Asia Society to Americas Society (The Appearance exhibition will be open)  
5:30-6:00 p.m., Americas Society: The Appearance’s curatorial statement by Tie Jojima and Yudi Rafael
6:00 - 6:45 p.m., Americas Society: Keynote presentation by Tao Leigh Goffe
6:45-8:00 p.m., Americas Society: Closing reception, The Appearance exhibition on view

This program is organized with Art at Americas Society's current exhibition, The Appearance: Art of the Asian Diaspora in Latin America & the Caribbean.

Speaker Biographies

Mariola V. Alvarez is associate professor of Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art and director of Graduate Studies at Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University. She is the author of The Affinity of Neoconcretism: Interdisciplinary Collaborations in Brazilian Modernism, 1954-1964, published by the University of California Press in 2023. She co-edited with Ana Franco, New Geographies of Abstract Art in Postwar Latin America with Routledge, which expands the current research by leading scholars in the field. In 2024 Alvarez was appointed co-editor-in-chief of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture. She is currently working on her second book, for which she was the recipient of a Fulbright U.S. Scholar award, on the art of the Japanese diaspora in Brazil. She received her PhD from the University of California San Diego.

Howie Chen is a New York–based curator engaged in collaborative art production and research. He is currently the director and curator of 80 Washington Square East (80WSE) gallery at NYU.

A founding director of Chen’s, a townhouse gallery in Brooklyn, and Dispatch, he has held curatorial roles at the Whitney Museum of American Art and MoMA PS1. His writings have been published by Primary Information and Badlands Unlimited and have appeared in magazines such as Artforum, Frieze, and Art in America. He was the Jane Farver Memorial curator in residence at the International Studio & Curatorial Program and a board member of W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy).

Chen is the editor of the anthology Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network 1990-2001 (Primary Information, 2021), a comprehensive collection of writings, art projects, publications, correspondence, organizational documents, and other archival ephemera from the trailblazing Asian American artist collective that sought to stimulate social change through art and advocacy. As part of curatorial consultancy Chen & Lampert, Chen co-publishes an advice column appearing monthly in Art in America.

He has been on the faculty at the New York University Steinhardt School and a lecturer at the Art, Culture and Technology program at MIT, Parsons School for Design, and Rhode Island School of Design. Chen holds a degree in economics from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program as a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow.

Tao Leigh Goffe is Associate Professor of literary theory and cultural history with a focus on Afro-Asian intimacies at Hunter College, City University of New York. She has conducted over a decade of research and teaching on Black feminist engagements with Indigeneity and Asian diasporic racial formations. This work is the basis of Afro-Asia Group, which she founded in 2019 for the study of race, art, technology and diaspora. Her essays and art criticism have been published in Asia Art Archive, Amerasia Journal, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, and Artsy. Dr. Goffe graduated with an undergraduate degree in English literature at Princeton University before earning a PhD at Yale University where she continued studies on racial formation and global colonial desire. Professor Goffe’s new book DARK LABORATORY: ON COLUMBUS, THE CARIBBEAN, AND THE ORIGINS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS [(Doubleday, Hamish Hamilton (Penguin Books UK)], provides a hemispheric history of the climate crisis and Afro-Asian ecologies.

Tie Jojima is Curator of Global Contemporary Art at the Phillips Collection. Jojima is completing her doctoral dissertation at the Graduate Center, CUNY, where she has focused her research largely on postwar Latin American art. At Americas Society she has co-curated the exhibitions The Appearance (2024), El Dorado: Myths of Gold (2023–2024), Deep Marajó (2023), and Geles Cabrera: Museo Escultórico (2022) and worked as associate curator for Bispo do Rosario: All Existing Materials on Earth (2023). Jojima has worked on the organization of several publications, exhibitions, and public events, including Tropical Is Political: Caribbean Art under the Visitor Economy Regime and This Must Be the Place: Latin American Artists in New York, 1965–75. She has published academic and curatorial texts in Vistas: Critical Approaches to Latin American Art (ISLAA) and Arte & Ensaios, as well as for the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), El Museo del Barrio, and other institutions.

Kolleen Ku is a PhD candidate in Art History at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, working on global modern and contemporary art. Her dissertation project explores the convergence of modernist abstraction, Asian racialization, and alien citizenship through the work of East Asian diasporic artists in the early twentieth-century United States. Originally from Hong Kong, Kolleen received her B.A. from Columbia University in Art History and English. She was the 2023-24 Mellon-Marron Research Consortium Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art.

Yasufumi Nakamori Yasufumi Nakamori joined Asia Society in August 2023 as Director of the Museum and Vice President of Arts and Culture. An experienced museum leader, curator, and noted scholar, he is responsible for overseeing the museum’s exhibition program and collection, as well as arts and culture programming across the organization.

Nakamori received a BA from Waseda University in Tokyo, a Juris Doctor from the University of Wisconsin Law School, an MA in the History of Art from Hunter College, the City University of New York, and a PhD in the History of Art and Visual Studies from Cornell University.
 

Chantal Peñalosa Fong (b. 1987, Tecate, Baja California, México) studied for a Bachelor’s Degree in Visual Arts at the Autonomous University of Baja California, Tijuana campus, and the University of São Paulo, in São Paulo, Brazil. Her solo exhibitions include: Otros Cuentos Fantasmas, Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico (2024); Atlas Western, CEINA, Santiago de Chile, Chile (2023); Ghost Stories/Cuentos de fantasmas, Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City (2023); Another Million Moments, Centro de las Artes Nave Generadores, Monterrey, N.L. (2022); Mujeres en un jardín, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (2021); Atlas Western, MUAC, Mexico City (2021); There's Something About the Weather In This Place, Best Practice, San Diego, California, United States (2021). She has also been part of group exhibitions at Fondazione Prada, Venice (2023); Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2021); M HKA, Antwerp (2019), among others. Her work has appeared in publications such as Prime: Art’s Next Generation, Phaidon, 2022; Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023; Chantal Peñalosa: A Universe On The Line, ESPAC, 2024, among others. She is currently part of the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum in New York.

Yudi Rafael is an independent curator based in São Paulo, Brazil. He is the curator of Transoceanic Perspectives—a long-term research and exhibition program dedicated to the arts of the Asian diasporas—at Almeida & Dale, in São Paulo, where he curated the solo shows Candice Lin: Hospitality for Ghosts (2023), and Mario N. Ishikawa: Archaeological Site (2023). His recent curatorial projects include the shows The Appearance: Art of the Asian Diasporas in Latin America and the Caribbean, cocurated with Tie Jojima at Americas Society (New York, 2024), Chen Kong Fang—O refúgio, cocurated with Paulo Miyada at Instituto Tomie Ohtake (São Paulo, 2024), The Sun’s Path at Gomide&Co (São Paulo, 2023), and Parable of Progress, cocurated with Lisette Lagnado and André Pitol at SESC Pompéia (São Paulo, 2022). He holds an MA and MPhil in Latin American and Iberian cultures from Columbia University and is the cotranslator to Portuguese, with Jorgge Menna Barreto, of Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World (O cogumelo no fim do mundo, n-1 edições, 2022).

In partnership with Americas Society