WHAT WE’VE DONE

Shadows From the Past, American Concentration Camps

Shadows From the Past, American Concentration Camps, focuses on the art of a select group of  Sansei artists whose work illustrates how they view their challenging cultural, historical and political place in America. With immigration reform proposals targeting entire groups as suspect, each artist contributes something vital and unique to the collective memory and struggles of the Japanese American people.

This exhibition debuted at the Monterey Museum of Art and is now traveling.

The New Domestics, Finding Beauty in the Mundane

The New Domestics, Finding Beauty in the Mundane examines topical issues currently explored from coast to coast and globally in the art world through the use of unconventional mediums in various media and forms.

Artists in the exhibition utilize domestic and quite ordinary materials to generate art objects that conceptually and formally belie their humble origins. In highly skilled, labor intensive, often obsessive traditional manufacturing methods, they have taken their work beyond normal expectations of what thread, yarn, felt, cloth, metal, wood can do. The materiality of the objects informs the artistic concepts that each artist is exploring.

The exhibition questions societal ideals of beauty and usefulness, gender, identity, and politics through the use of materials and processes previously relegated and identified with the “craft world.” Each artist has amalgamated these materials with domestic practices, shifting the perception of how materials operate within a conceptual framework. The artwork explores these issues in ways that most typical paintings and sculptures cannot because, in essence, the inherent content of the work stems from the very methods and materials used to make it.

This exhibition debuted at the Monterey Museum of Art and is now traveling.