ASF x Cantor Arts Center Tour
This event is open to:
Dr. Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, curator of the exhibition Spirit House, led ASF members through a tour in which ancestral spirits and ghostly narratives come to life through art. Our members learned how the included artists materialize prayers, evoke spirits, and intertwine histories into tangible forms, creating a dialogue between the living and the dead.
Aleesa is the Robert M. and Ruth L. Halperin Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and Co-director of the Asian American Art Initiative (AAAI) at the Cantor Arts Center. Spirit House is a feature show of the Asian American Art Initiative and will be accompanied by a major scholarly catalog, the first of a series of AAAI-related books the museum will produce to foster scholarship on Asian American artists and to introduce leading Asian American art to wider audiences.
About the Tour Lead: Dr. Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander
Aleesa is the Robert M. and Ruth L. Halperin Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and Co-director of the Asian American Art Initiative (AAAI) at the Cantor Arts Center. Aleesa manages the AAAI’s curatorial program, cultivating relationships with community members, donors, artist estates, and living artists to help build the Cantor’s growing collection of Asian American art, which is now one of the best nationally.
Aleesa’s writing has been published in Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, and several exhibition catalogues. Her exhibition catalogue for Spirit House is the first major publication of the AAAI. Aleesa frequently lectures at museums, universities, and non-profit organizations on topics related to Asian American art and museum practice. Her scholarship has been supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design, and the American Craft Council. From 2017 to 2018 she was a Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she completed her dissertation, Unaccountable Modernisms: The Black Arts of Post-Civil Rights Alabama. She received her PhD in art history from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2018.