Yao Wang (b. 2002 - San Gabriel, California) is an American artist, writer, and educator from Los Angeles, California. Her work explores how cultural symbolism and everyday objects can articulate nuanced depictions of the immigrant experience and poignant critiques of violent Western landscapes. Situated between themes of labor, loss, and poverty, Yao generates new images of Asian-American life in the contemporary United States.
As an arts educator, Yao challenges the limitations of traditional Fine Art by developing accessible and sustainable K-12 art curricula that focus on the expansiveness of art - art as anything and everything; using what already exists in someone’s community, lineage, and identity to make art. From 2021 to 2024, in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania's Netter Center for Community Partnerships and the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, Yao founded and led Art For All Hands, the first free after-school studio art program offered to public high school students in West Philadelphia.
In 2024, Yao served as Arts Education Manager at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), overseeing and directing the Center for Arts Education. Managing all youth and family programs at the museum and across Philadelphia K-12 schools, Yao developed tours, workshops, and programs that shared PAFA’s historic and contemporary collections of American art to highlight stories of marginalized people often erased in American and colonial art. In addition, her time at PAFA is marked by her contributions to expanding free art programming for Philadelphia’s low-income Hispanic and Asian migrant families through the K-5 Partnership Program, which welcomes new audiences into the museum who have historically been overlooked.
Yao graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, where she studied decolonial, queer, and Marxist scholarship in the English and Anthropology departments. She is an alumna of the Yale Norfolk School of Art and the CAMRA Mellon Fellowship Program (Collective for Advancing Multimodal Research Arts). She is currently a student at the University of California, Los Angeles, pursuing her Master of Fine Arts in sculpture.
wangyaostudio@gmail.com
CV
Education
2024 BFA, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
2023 Yale Norfolk School of Art, Artist-in-Residence, Litchfield County, CT
2022 CAMRA Mellon Fellowship Program, Fellow, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
Speaking Engagements
2023 Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies Conference on Abolition, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
2023 CAMRA Screening Scholarship Media Festival, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
Solo Exhibitions
2023 7/11 SLURPEES 4 LIFE, 305 S San Gabriel Blvd, San Gabriel, CA
Group Exhibitions
2024 Stand / Still, The Charles Addams Fine Arts Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
2023 Bedroom Bedroom Bathroom Bathroom, Triangle Project, Miami, FL
2023 Sports!, The Charles Addams Fine Arts Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
2023 Pond Theory, Yale Norfolk School of Art, Norfolk, CT
2023 Seoul, Gamsahabnida, The Charles Addams Fine Arts Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
2023 Embodied Ethnography, The Slought Foundation, Philadelphia, PA
2023 Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain America, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA
2023 2nd Art Student Biennial, William Way LGBT Community Center, Philadelphia, PA
2021 Rotten Foundations, Dangerous Footholds, Slought Foundation, Philadelphia, PA
Grants, Awards & Honors
2023 University of Pennsylvania Summer Research Grant
2023 Yale Norfolk Community Art Grant, Yale Norfolk School of Art & Norfolk Foundation for Living
2023 Howard A. Silverstein and Patricia Bleznak Silverstein Studio Abroad Grant
Permanent Collections
2024 Center for Experimental Ethnography, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA