Rising senior Sumin Hwang awarded 2021-22 Camfield Undergraduate Fellowship

As the recipient of the 2021-2022 William A. Camfield Undergraduate Fellowship, Sumin Hwang will work as an intern in the coming academic year at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston under the guidance of professional museum curators in the Asian Art department. She will be responsible for researching in the Houston Asian American Archive (HAAA) at Rice University in connection with a future MFAH exhibition.

Learn more about Sumin's robust experiences, goals, and research below:

As an upcoming senior at Rice working on a double major in Art History and Visual and Dramatic Arts with a minor in Museums and Cultural Heritage, Sumin Hwang has contributed to a variety of research initiatives at Rice, centering the relationships between art, racialized histories, and Houston-based political organizing. Sumin hopes to channel her past experiences into researching the Houston Asian American Archive (HAAA), a collection deeply connected to her personal background, while also integrating aspects of her own arts practice into curatorial research with the 2021-22 Camfield Fellowship. As an Asian-American student, she is excited about the opportunity to engage closely with the HAAA through a curatorial lens on a larger scale and is passionate about the foregrounding of the pluralistic narratives of the Asian diaspora in art and museums. In her work with the Humanities Undergraduate Research Center’s Museum Practicum program and research with the Racial Geography Project, she has prioritized critical questions of how institutional histories affect research and representation, particularly within the context of race and class. Sumin hopes to use this research opportunity to further a dialogue on the relationship of Asian American history and populations to both Rice and arts institutions in Houston, integrating discussions of access and representation into these central research questions.