California Collectives: Asian American moderns, 1924-1965

11/21/2026 - 03/06/2027

OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, November 21, 2026

California Collectives: Asian American Moderns, 1924-1965 features more than fifty paintings, drawings, watercolors, prints, and photographs by American artists of Asian descent. Drawn from the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), including several new acquisitions, the exhibition examines the wide-ranging influence of Asian American artistic networks in California during the Exclusion Era (1882–1965)—a period that witnessed the spread of anti-immigration and anti-Asian laws, notably the Asian Exclusion Act (1924) and Executive Order 9066 (1942), authorizing the incarceration of Japanese Americans. Yet amidst xenophobia and racial discrimination, American artists of Asian descent created thriving networks of artistic exchange, forming collectives and staging high-profile exhibitions across the golden state—from San Francisco’s Bay Area to Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo, including the East West Art Society, the Shaku-Do-Sha, the Japanese Camera Pictorialists of California, and the
Los Angeles Oriental Artists’ Group, among several others.

The exhibition examines how many of these artists, some American citizens to immigrant parents, leveraged art making as a critical tool to participate in, contribute to, and shape the development of modern American art. But why do we know so little about these artists and see so few of their works represented in major American museum collections? By retracing their prolific careers, the exhibition highlights their far-reaching accomplishments and expands our understanding of their diverse artistic output. It thus adds to recent scholarly efforts to present a more accurate, and hence more inclusive, history of twentieth-century American art, revealing how Asian American moderns leveraged their collectivity to prominently assert their power and place within California’s art world.