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December 17, 2008
Daniell Cornell and Mark Dean Johnson, eds. Asian/American/Modern Art: Shifting Currents, 1900–1970 Exh. cat. San Francisco and Berkeley: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in association with University of California Press, 2008. 176 pp.; 95 color ills.; 12 b/w ills. Cloth $45.00 (9780520258648)

Exhibition schedule: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, de Young Museum, San Francisco, October 25, 2008–January 18, 2009; Noguchi Museum, Long Island City, NY, February 18–August 23, 2009

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CrossRef DOI: 10.3202/caa.reviews.2008.124

Large
Chiura Obata. Setting Sun: Sacramento Valley (ca. 1925). Hanging scroll: mineral pigments (distemper) and gold on silk. 107 1/2 x 69 in. Courtesy of Gyo Obata.

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“Forty years ago there were no Asian Americans,” reads the provocative first sentence of Gordon H. Chang and Mark Dean Johnson’s introduction to the catalogue for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco exhibition Asian/American/Modern Art: Shifting Currents, 1900–1970. It seems that until the first recorded use of “Asian American” at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1968, the terms for Americans of Asian ancestry were either “Orientals” or more ethnic-specific descriptors. As early as...