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Curator-Led Tour of Look Up to the Sky, Hung Liu’s Legacy of Mentoring Women Artists
March 23 @ 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Free
Join MCAM Director Stephanie Hanor for a curator-led tour of Look Up to the Sky, Hung Liu’s Legacy of Mentoring Women Artists.
An exceptionally gifted educator, Hung Liu (1948-2021) was a vibrant and vital part of the artist community in the Bay Area and beyond. Just before her untimely death in 2021, Liu began conversations with MCAM to organize an exhibition showcasing the work of an amazing group of women artists that she taught and mentored during her tenure as a professor in the Mills College Art Department. Look Up to the Sky, Hung Liu’s Legacy of Mentoring Women Artists is the realization of that idea and features the work of Hung Liu alongside Rosana Castrillo Diaz, Nicole Fein, Danielle Lawrence, Monica Lundy, Nancy Mintz, Sandra Ono, Susan Preston, Mel Prest, Rachelle Reichert, Yoshiko Shimano, Gina Tuzzi, Lien Truong, and Bambi Waterman.
Recognized as America’s most important Chinese artist, Hung Liu’s paintings mine her personal and cultural history to create artwork that calls on the most poignant and intimate aspects of her own memory as well as how place shapes memories and identity. Through her work, Liu had the ability to reveal herself as both immigrant and emigrant, insider, and outsider. She spent her career focusing on the dispossessed, people who have been traditionally elided from historical narratives, giving them a voice and foregrounding their stories.
Born in Changchun, China, in 1948, a year before the creation of the People’s Republic of China, Hung Liu lived through Maoist China and experienced the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Trained as a social realist painter and muralist, she came to the United States in 1984 to attend the University of California, San Diego, where she received her MFA. One of the first people from mainland China to study abroad and pursue an art career, she moved to northern California in 1990 where she was a tenured professor in the Art Department at Mills College for over 20 years.
