kristine aono - july 24, 2020
Kristine Aono is a Sansei artist who uses a wide variety of materials to explore themes of personal narrative and history. Her art tells stories of her family’s Japanese-American experience and cultural, racial, and social issues that reflect both historical events and present day circumstances. Input and interaction with communities is often an integral component of her artwork.
Aono has received a MacDowell Colony Fellowship and numerous grants, including the National Endowment for the Arts (Visual Artist/Public Projects),
Maryland State Arts Council Individual grant, Civil Liberties Public Education Fund, and Art Matters. She holds a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She has served on the Board of the Washington Project for the Arts, participated as a founding member of the Corcoran Arts Mentorship Program, created an arts-based mentorship program called ArtPartners, served on numerous art panels, given workshops and presentations, and is currently lead teaching artist for high school youth at Arts on the Block.
Aono’s installations and solo shows include “Relics from Camp” and “Common Ground: the Heart of Community” at the Japanese American National Museum (Los Angeles, CA, curator: Karin Higa); “Relics from Camp: an Artist Installation by Kristine Aono & the Japanese-American Community” at National Museum for Women in the Arts (Washington, DC, curator: Angela Adams); “Kristine Aono” at the International Sculpture Center (Washington, DC, curator: Sarah Tanguy); “The Nail That Sticks Up the Farthest” part of “”If You Remember, I’ll Remember” at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art (Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, curator: Janet Dees); “Deru Kugi Wa Utareru” part of “Relocations and Revisions” at the Long Beach Museum of Art (CA, curator: Noriko Gamblin); “Relics from Camp” at the Harold Washington Library (Chicago, IL); and “Issei, Nisei, Sansei,…” at the Washington Project for the Arts (Washington, DC, curator: Alan Prokop and Jock Renolds).
Aono has been in group exhibits in places such as the Bronx Museum of Art (NY); National Academy of Design (NY, NY); Japan Cultural Center (Embassy of Japan, Washington, DC); Wichita Art Museum (Wichita, KS), Guadalupe Cultural Art Center (Guadalupe, TX), the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), and the Ellipse Art Center (Arlington, VA).
Aono has been featured in articles, broadcasts, and interviews, with reviews in ARTFORUM International, Artspace Magazine, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and Yomiuri Shimbum. She is included in books such as Exhibitions for Social Justice (Elena Gonzales), Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary (Margo Machida), Community of Creativity: A Century of MacDowell Colony Artists (Andrew P. Spahr), and Art and Diversity in the US (New Museum of Contemporary Art, Ed: Susan Cahan).
Kristine Aono’s studio is in Maryland, in the Washington, DC region.
You can visit her website at www.KristineAono.com. And follow her on Instagram at @KristineAono
lillian michiko blakey - july 17, 2020
Lillian Michiko Blakey, a third generation Japanese Canadian, was born in Coaldale Alberta in 1945, where her family was forcibly relocated by the Canadian government in WWII, to hard labour in the sugar beet fields for ten years.
Her family came to Toronto in 1952. She is a graduate of Fine Art, University of Toronto. She was formerly a Visual Art teacher and a consultant for Equity in the Curriculum with the North York Board of Education. She served as a member of the Board of Directors of the John B. Aird Gallery in Toronto. Currently, she is a member and past president of the Ontario Society of Artists, Canada’s longest continuing art society since 1872.
She has explored her family’s story through her art for twenty years and has shared the journey in many exhibitions at both mainstream galleries and at venues for Japanese Canadian audiences. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Government of Ontario Art Collection and in the Nikkei National Museum. In 2019, her work, along with the work of seven other Japanese Canadian artists, was included in the Royal Ontario Museum’s exhibition, “Being Japanese Canadian: reflections on a broken world” in the Sigmund Samuel Gallery of Canadian History. This exhibition was co-curated by Bryce Kanbara.
She has published written works about her Japanese Canadian experience – an essay “Is it Japanese Artist or Artist Who is Japanese?” in Talking about Identity: Encounters in Race, Ethnicity and Language; a short story, “Konnichiwa” in the Nikkei Voice; “The Picture Bride” in Ricepaper Magazine, 2019
Her current work includes a partnership, “Identity Through the Arts” with the York Region District School Board. It is an initiative designed to raise anti-racist awareness among children and welcome diverse communities.
Most recently, she is collaborating with Japanese Canadian artist/filmmaker, Jeff Chiba Stearns, on an intergenerational story on Japanese Canadian family history and cultural identity. Through the blending of two unique artistic styles, Jeff’s “hapanimation” and Lillian’s sketched realism, twelve-year-old Emma, who is a Gosei and ‘quarter’ Japanese, learns about her Japanese roots through the story of her great-great grandmother Maki, a Japanese picture bride who journeyed to Canada at the turn of the 20th century. Through Maki’s story of extreme perseverance and sacrifice, having been inrerned and then deported to Japan after WWII, Emma discovers a deeper connection to her Japanese Canadian identity in “On Being Yukiko”.
ellen bepp - july 31, 2020
Ellen Bepp was born in San Jose, California’s Japantown community soon after World War II and remembers a home full of Japanese art and textiles. As a third generation Japanese American, she was greatly influenced by her grandmother who taught flower arranging and kimono-making and her grandfather’s calligraphy. The 1960s Civil Rights era spurred her to question the status quo and she became involved in the Asian American political/cultural movement. In 1974 she began studying taiko under Grand Master Seiichi Tanaka of San Francisco Taiko Dojo. She went on to become a co-founding member of San Jose Taiko and then later co-founded Somei Yoshino Taiko Ensemble. Taiko became a vehicle for her to express her Asian American identity as well as through her creation of Asian-inspired ‘wearable’ textile art. Through her mixed media work she has addressed issues of social injustice such as the World War II American concentration camps, the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings, and the genocide of Indigenous peoples. Her political activism and interest in the folk art traditions of Asia and Latin America led to her involvement in arts research in indigenous communities of Guatemala, Peru and Mexico as well as humanitarian and cultural exchange projects in Nicaragua, Cuba and Mexico. Since 1980 she has exhibited her art nationally, including at the Oakland Museum of CA, the Berkeley Art Center and the Euphrat Museum of Art. In 1988 she co-founded 9-11 Studios, an artist-owned live/work complex in Oakland where her studio is still based. Ellen continues to explore the political connections between art, culture and humanity as it informs her identity as an Asian American woman artist.
reiko fujii - july 31, 2020
Reiko Fujii was born in Riverside, California. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received a Master of Fine Arts degree from John F. Kennedy University in 2004. She also earned a K-8 Elementary School Teaching Credential and a BA in Psychology, both from the University of California, Berkeley. She was one of the four featured Sansei Japanese American women artists in the seminal exhibit “Distillations: Meditations on the Japanese American Experience" in 2010 at the John F. Kennedy University Art Gallery. She was the recipient of the “Susan Seddon Boulet Award” from JFK University in 2004, received the “Steven P. Corey Award” at the 2006 PCBA Bookworks Exhibit, and also received several awards for her glass art at Ohlone College in Fremont, California. She has been teaching, creating and exhibiting art since 1989 and has shown her work extensively in the Bay Area and other venues in California.
paul kitagaki, jr. - june 26, 2020
SF Bay area native Paul Kitagaki Jr. has traveled the world covering natural and human-caused disasters, documenting the lives of everyday Iraqis living under Saddam Hussein, Mexico City residents digging out of a deadly earthquake, Asian factory workers laboring for pennies to produce high-end athletic shoes for the U.S. and international athletes competing for gold at nine different Olympic Games.
Kitagaki’s work has been honored with dozens of photo awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, and been nominated for Emmys. He’s been published in news outlets worldwide, including National Geographic, Time, Smithsonian Magazine, Sports Illustrated, Stern, People, Mother Jones, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, as well as in his home paper, The Sacramento Bee.
“Gambatte! Legacy of an Enduring Spirit” documents and illuminates a dark episode in our country's history, the relocation and internment of more than 120,000 ethnic Japanese Americans. A national traveling exhibition appearing at the Smithsonian and in cities throughout the country, Kitagaki has spent the last 15 years locating the families who lived through the internment camps, documenting their stories of survival and inner strength to overcome injustice, racism, and wartime hysteria.
His award-winning book “Behind Barbed Wire, Searching for Japanese Americans Incarcerated during WWII” has won a Independent Book Publisher Peacemaker Award gold medal and an International Photography Awards Professional Documentary book.
In 2014, he was featured in the PBS film “American Masters – Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning,’’ on the life and times and the woman whose work sparked his own journey. The cinematographer for the show, Dyanna Taylor, is Lange’s granddaughter and an award-winning visual journalist in her own right. He is also featured in the 2019 Abby Ginzberg documentary “And Then They Came For Us.”
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emily momohara - august 14, 2020
Emily Hanako Momohara was born in Seattle, Washington where she grew up in a mixed race family. Her work centers around issues of heritage multiculturalism, immigration and social justice.
Momohara has exhibited nationally, most notably at the Japanese American National Museum in a two-person show titled Sugar|Islands. She has been a visiting artist at several residency programs including the Center for Photography at Woodstock, Headlands Center for the Arts, Fine Arts Work Center and Red Gate Gallery Beijing. In 2015, her work was included in the Chongqing Photography and Video Biennial. Momohara has created socially driven billboards for For Freedoms and United Photo Industries. She lives and works in Cincinnati where she is Associate Professor of Art at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and heads the photography major.
emma nishimura - august 7, 2020
Based in Toronto, Canada, Emma Nishimura works with a diversity of media, including printmaking, photography, sculpture and installation. Her work addresses ideas of memory and loss that are rooted within family stories and inherited narratives. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including, the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, ON; the Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK; the International Print Center New York, NY, NY; California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, CA and the Taimiao Art Gallery, Beijing, China. Emma’s work is in a number of public and private collections, such as the Japanese Canadian National Museum, and Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada. She has received grants from the Ontario Arts Council, and won awards from Open Studio, the International Print Center New York, Art in Print, The Print Center and the Queen Sonja Print Award 2018. Emma received her BA from the University of Guelph, and her MFA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Emma is an Assistant Professor and the Chair of Photography, Printmaking and Publications at OCAD University.
round rock collective - july 3, 2020
The Round Rock Collective (founded 2018) features creative collaborations by the Ishimaru cousins. Their work integrates each of their individual practices: Miki Palchick as a ceramic artist, Sophie Sarkar as a photographer and painter, and Andrienne Palchick as a print and documentary artist. Together, they explore themes based in nature, growing, home-making, and the rituals that accompany them-- celebrating the grounding in times of dislocation. Ishimaru means Round Rock.
shane sato - july 10, 2020
na omi shintani - july 17, 2020
Na Omi Judy Shintani earned her Masters in Arts & Consciousness, Transformative Art from JFK University, Berkeley and her Bachelor’s of Science in Graphic Design from San Jose State University.
Her artistic career focuses on community engagement, art concerning culture, the Japanese American Incarceration, and women’s issues. Shintani has exhibited throughout the United States and internationally including at the Canadian Anthropology Society CUBA Conference in Santiago, Cuba, Fresno State, JFKU, Springfield College, MA, University of Pittsburgh, Station Museum in Houston, Santa Fe Art Institute, Peninsula Museum of Art in Burlingame, 516 Arts in Albuquerque, artExchange Gallery in Seattle, the San Francisco Presidio.
She was honored with an Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center Sponsorship Award (2014) for curating “Our American Stories, Illuminating Asian American History, Culture, and Identity” at City College Of San Francisco. She was the recipient of the Peninsula Arts Council (2012) Award for donor support for her curation of Coastside Artists for Doctors Without Borders Art Auctions (2007-2013). Shintani also co-curated Distillations, Meditations on the Japanese American Experience, Meditations on the Japanese American Experience by Four Sansei Women Artists (2010).
She was awarded a fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center (2017), was an artist in residence at Santa Fe Art Institute (2015) and at Creativity Explored (2016) in San Francisco. Most recently Shintani was the artist and residence at San Joaquin Delta College in November 2019. She is on the faculty of Foothill Community College and an adjunct faculty for JFKU in Berkeley. Shintani owns and runs the Kitsune Community Art Studio in an old dairy barn in Half Moon Bay. She is a member of the Asian American Women’s Artist Association and on the board of the Northern California Women’s Caucus for Art.
teresa tamura - august 7, 2020
Photo Credit: Johnny Valdez 2012
Photographer Teresa Tamura is a third-generation Japanese American born and raised in Idaho. She received an M.F.A. in photography from the University of Washington. She taught photojournalism in the School of Journalism at the University of Montana from 2002 to 2007. Teresa resides in Walla Walla, Washington. Email: ttam2wawa@gmail.com
setsuko winchester - june 19, 2020
Setsuko Winchester
Ceramicist/photographer/artist and journalist
Setsuko Winchester was born in New York City to Japanese immigrant parents and first worked in finance in the late 80's before turning to journalism after graduating from the Graduate School of Journalism at NYU in the early 90’s. She began first as an editor and producer at WNYC in NY City and then at NPR in Washington, DC for Morning Edition and Talk of the Nation. Throughout it all, she maintained an avid interest in ceramics after receiving instruction from a ceramics professor who studied under the famed ceramicist Tashiko Takaezu. In 2006, she moved to Western Massachusetts to pursue a life-long interest in ceramics and the visual arts. Together with her writer husband, she embraced the rural life, learning how to make organic cider, harvesting honey, raise chickens as well as helping to found the local newspaper in her town of Sandisfield, MA.
In 2012, after the death of her mother, she began looking into her own history and into the history of Japanese Americans and Asian peoples in the United States. Her latest project is a work of conceptual art that incorporates photography, ceramics and history.
The Freedom from Fear/Yellow Bowl Project is part of a trilogy. Part One, "Yellow Bowl Project" explores the war time incarceration of persons of Japanese ancestry during WWII. Part two called "The Dissent Collars" is a ceramic work (in progress) which explores America's "Whiteness Laws" which were predominantly passed after the Civil War, and helped designate who could not naturalize because they were "not white" as stipulated by legislation or by the courts. The third in the series is called "Buried History: The Plate Project." This last work (in the concept phase) will document some of the most damaging laws to individual freedoms written or determined by the courts against entire groups of people held to be "not white" (or black) by law and thus "ineligible to naturalize." Many of these laws are being used today.