Professor
Global Arts, Media, and Writing Studies
ShiPu Wang is the Coats Family Chair in the Arts and professor of art history at UC Merced. His scholarship has centered around rediscovering and reevaluating the work and legacy of diasporic American artists of Asian descent in the first half of the twentieth century, during the Exclusion Era. An awards-winning author of four books and numerous journal articles, Dr. Wang has also curated two internationally and nationally touring art exhibitions: Chiura Obata: An American Modern (2018–2020), and Pictures of Belonging: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Miné Okubo (2024–2027). Dr. Wang has served on the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s Board of Commissioners, the editorial board of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s academic journal, American Art, and as a Terra Foundation Senior Fellow at both the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
