Elaine Y. Yau is associate curator of the African American quilt collection at BAMPFA, where she is organizing an exhibition from Eli Leon’s historic bequest of approximately 3,000 quilts for fall 2024. She co-curated Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective in 2020 with Larry Rinder, an exhibition deepened her long-standing engagement with art at the intersection of discourses on folk art, vernacular culture, and modernism. She has published on Gertrude Morgan and Minnie Evans, and her critical essay on folk art was included in The Routledge Companion to African American Art History. Her research has been supported by the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art; and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
As an academic liaison to faculty members and other campus partners at UC Berkeley, she builds meaningful curricular connections across BAMPFA’s collections, exhibitions, and programs, including through the museum’s four Study Centers: the Film Library and Study Center, the Florence Helzel Works on Paper Study Center, the James Cahill Asian Art Study Center, and the Steven Leiber Conceptual Art Study Center.
For more information please see: https://bampfa.org/about/people/curators
