Zully Adler
How Many Worlds?: Martin Wong in San Francisco and Humboldt Bay
Solomon “Zully” Adler is a curator and doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford, where his dissertation considers the life and work of Martin Wong. Adler’s projects focus on underground and countercultural artforms, primarily in California. He is the recipient of the Watson Fellowship, the Marshall Scholarship, the Shorenstein Research Fellowship at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Clarendon Scholarship in support of his studies at Oxford. Previous exhibitions include Brook Hsu: Signs of Life and Melvino Garretti at Vernon Gardens, Los Angeles, Mythos Psyche, Eros: Jess & California, co-curated with Nancy Lim at SFMOMA, and Redd Ekks: X at Arcadia Missa, London. Adler runs the Goaty Tapes music label and House Rules press, through which he published Casual Junk & Bedroom Mythology and Charlie Nothing: State of the Ding. His article on Wong’s early years in Eureka, “Humboldt Fog”, can be found in the November, 2022 issue of Artforum.
Barry Blinderman
Barry Blinderman is an essayist, lecturer, and musician living in Los Angeles. From 1980 to ’87, he directed Semaphore Gallery and Semaphore East in New York City, where he championed the work of Robert Colescott, Lady Pink, Keith Haring, Ellen Berkenblit, Tseng Kwong Chi, and other notable artists. As director of University Galleries of Illinois State University from 1987 to 2018, he curated traveling museum surveys for David Wojnarowicz, Michelle Grabner, Walter Robinson, Keith Haring, Jane Dickson, and many others. His interviews and essays have been published internationally in museum catalogues, literary journals, anthologies, and art magazines.
Blinderman held Martin Wong’s first solo exhibition, “Paintings for the Hearing Impaired,” at Semaphore Gallery in 1984, with additional shows in 1985 and 1986. In 1998, he and Dan Cameron co-curated Wong’s first retrospective, Sweet Oblivion: The Urban Landscape of Martin Wong, which opened at the New Museum in New York. Blinderman’s essay “Martin Wong’s Chains of Desire” was published in The Evergreen Review in 2022.
Margo Machida
Martin Wong: Renewing Our Conversation
Margo Machida, Ph.D. is Professor Emerita of Art History and Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut. Born and raised in Hawai‘i, she is a U.S.-based scholar, independent curator, and cultural critic specializing in Asian American art and visual culture. Her monograph, Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary (Duke University Press, 2009) received the Cultural Studies Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies. She has published extensively, frequently contributing to journals including Pacific Arts: The Journal of the Pacific Arts Association, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, and Third Text; and to edited volumes and exhibition catalogues including: the digital Martin Wong Catalogue Raisonné (Stanford University, 2022), Carlos Villa: Worlds in Collision (University of California Press, 2022), XianRui: Ten Years (Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco, 2018), Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader (NYU Press, 2013), A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), and Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970 (Stanford University Press, 2008). Machida is also a co-founder of GODZILLA: Asian American Art Network (1990–2001).
Louise Siddons
A Rhinestone Cowboy in Chinatown USA: Martin Wong’s Queer Architectures
Louise Siddons is Professor of Visual Politics and Head of the Department of Art & Media Technology at the University of Southampton’s Winchester School of Art. Her research focuses on intersectional visual resistance to structures of marginalisation in modernity and has covered topics from the eighteenth century to the present. Immediately prior to joining the University of Southampton, she was a Visiting Researcher at the University of Sussex Humanities Lab (UK) and Professor of Art History at Oklahoma State University (USA), as well as founding co-director and curator of the Oklahoma State University Museum of Art, for which she wrote the first collection catalogue, Sharing a Journey (Oklahoma State University, 2014). Her first monograph, Centering Modernism (2018, University of Oklahoma Press), addressed the coastalisation of the postwar American art world. She is currently completing a monograph about photographer Laura Gilpin that examines the intersection of lesbian and Navajo sovereignty politics at mid-century (forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press, 2024). Her research has been supported by grants from the British Library, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, the US-UK Fulbright Commission, and others.
Al Hoyos-Twomey
Ambivalent archives of loss: Martin Wong’s storefront paintings, 1984-1986
Al Hoyos-Twomey is currently undertaking a PhD in Art History at Newcastle University. His research examines Nuyorican art and anti-gentrification activism in New York’s Lower East Side in the 1980s, with a focus on the cultural and community centre El Bohío.
