This volume presents a selection of paintings, poetry, essays, and ephemeral writings by the Chinese American modernist Yun Gee (1906-1963), together with essays about the artist.

Yun Gee arrived in San Francisco from Guangdong Province at the age of fifteen and within a few years established himself as one of the city's most daring avant-garde painters. But all of his astonishing efforts with the brush and palette ran up against an intense anti-Chinese sentiment. He seemed never to escape the high social price of being Chinese--not in San Francisco, Paris, or New York,...

Elizabeth Catlett, born in Washington, DC, in 1915, is widely acknowledged as a major presence in African American art, and her work is celebrated as a visually eloquent expression of African American identity and pride in cultural heritage. But this is not the whole story. She has lived in Mexico for 50 years, as a citizen of that country since 1962, and she and her husband, artist Francisco Mora, have raised their children there. For 20 years she was a member of the Taller de Grafica Popular (Popular Graphic Arts Workshop) and she was the first woman professor of sculpture at the...

The relationship between writers and artists has long been a collaborative one. Plato used the word ekphrasis to describe what happens when a writer writes creatively, as opposed to critically, about art. Gertrude Stein claimed that her innovative writing style was inspired by the paintings of Cezanne -- and then went on to tell Hemingway to study Cezanne if he wanted to learn to write.

In Looking Together, a dozen writers working in a range of styles and forms respond to works of art held in the permanent collection of Seattle's Frye Art Museum or exhibited there. Romantic...

"Multiple backgrounds can form such two- and three-dimensional ideas that they take you to the brink of lunacy, but I have used this rich background and ethnic landscape for creating art. As a student at the University of Minnesota, I often wondered what the study of Russian history, Shakespeare, English literature, or Freud . . . had to do with cleaning onions in Hollandale, Minnesota, picking potatoes in Hoople, North Dakota, or visiting relatives in Michoacan. This diversity of ideas can produce a three-headed monster or an artist, and I chose the latter." -Ruben...