Kwan Tang

Kwan Tang's picture

Education History

B.A., cum laude, Art History, Williams College, 2013

Research Interests

Race; gender; technology; aesthetics and activism

Biography

Kwan Tang is a PhD student in History of Art and Film and Media Studies. Before coming to Yale, she received her BA in Art History at Williams College. She is a Beinecke scholar and former DAAD Visiting Fellow at Humboldt-Universität Berlin, working on race and gender in modern and contemporary art and media. Her work addresses the poetics and politics of aesthetics, calling for the possibility and the necessity of so-called ‘identity politics’ in our critical frameworks for artistic production. Her dissertation project argues for a theory and history of the (Afro)futurist avant-garde that is necessarily cross-cultural, formed by the particularities and peculiarities of racialized existence, and inevitably crossing and crossed by others. 

In January 2016, she curated New Genealogies: 2016— at the Yale School of Art’s Green Gallery with John Edmonds (Yale MFA Photo ’16), featuring intergenerational alumni, teachers, and current students spanning more than three decades from the School of Art. Most recently, she presented on the work of David Hammons for The Museum of Modern Art’s Museum Research Colloquium on race and the museum. She has worked at The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Museum of Modern Art, and The Noguchi Museum, amongst others. In addition to a forthcoming contribution on Alteronce Gumby to the 2016 Yale MFA Painting thesis catalogue, she has written for Berlin Art Link and Courtauld Reviews. An exhibition catalogue for New Genealogies is forthcoming this year.