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What is called the imagination (from image, magi, magic, magician, etc.) is a practical vector from the soul. It stores all data, and can be called on to solve all our “problems.” The imagination is the projection of ourselves past our sense of ourselves as “things.” Imagination (image) is all possibility, because from the image, the initial circumscribed energy, any use (idea) is possible. And so begins that image’s use in the world. Possibility is what moves us.
—Amiri Baraka, “The Revolutionary Theatre”, Liberator, July 1965
Marci Kwon
Marci Kwon is Assistant Professor of Art History at Stanford University. Her first book, Enchantments: Joseph Cornell and American Modernism, will be published in 2020 by Princeton University Press. This book tracks the changing status of metaphysical belief in American art from the perspective of a single artist. Additional articles address Isamu Noguchi, Appalachian Spring and Japanese internment; Japanese internment crafts Surrealism and folk art at the Museum of Modern Art; and Martin Wong and Orientalism. Her research has been supported by grants from the ACLS/Luce Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Mellon Foundation, and the Hellman Fellows Fund. She is currently a fellow at Yale’s Center for the Study of Material & Visual Cultures of Religion. At Stanford, Kwon is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Asian American Studies, African and African American Studies, American Studies, and Modern Thought and Literature.
Stanford University, Assistant Professor