Nobuho Nagasawa
Site InSight, Inc.
Based in New York City since 2001, Nagasawa was born in Tokyo, and raised in Europe and Japan, and received her MFA at Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. She came to the United States as a visiting scholar through the invitation of California Institute of the Arts in 1986, where she studied visual art, critical theory and music. She is an interdisciplinary artist whose site-specific work explores the places, politics, ecology and psychological dimensions of space and people. Her work involves in depth research into the cultural history and memory, and extensive community participation. She was an Associate Professor at University of California, Santa Cruz, and currently teaches at State University of New York, Stony Brook University.
Her extensive exhibition records include: the Royal Garden of the Prague Castle in the Czech Republic, Ludwig Museums in Germany and Hungry, Rufino Tamayo Museum in Mexico, the Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities in the United States, Alexandria Library in Egypt, as well as exhibitions in Denmark, Italy, United States and Japan. She has been a representative of International venues; Asian Art Biennial (Bangladesh, 2002), International Biennial (Egypt, 2002) Sharjah Biennial (United Arab Emirates, 2003), Echigo-Tsumari Triennial (Japan, 2003) and Sinop Biennial (Turkey, 2006).
She has received numerous grants from DAAD from Germany, Berlin State Grant, Rockefeller Grant, California Arts Council Fellowships Award, Brody Arts Fund and Japan Foundation Grants, among others. In New York, she was a recipient of the Space Program of the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, and Established Artist Studio Fellowship from Urban Glass. Her work has been reviewed in The Los Angeles Times, Art in America, Art Asia Pacific and Sculpture magazine, and most recently in The New York Times by Holland Cotter.
Her work has been published in many books, which include Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against The Sky (Alexandra Munroe, Abrams, Inc, 1994), Lure of the Local-Senses of Place in Multicentered Society (Lucy Lippard, New Press, 1997) and Epicenter: San Francisco Bay Area Art Now (Mark Johnstone, Leslie Aboud Holzman, Chronicle Books, 2002).
In the field of public art, she has been commissioned for more than 20 public art projects in California, Washington, Texas, New York, Berlin and Japan. She received Design Excellence Award for Architecture and Public Art in 1997 through the Office of Cultural Affairs in Los Angeles. In 2000, she designed 42.000-square-foot plaza for the Urban Government Center, commissioned by the Ministry of Construction of the Metropolitan Government in Japan. Her public art project for the Austin City Hall and Public Plaza with Antoine Predock was featured as one of the best projects nationwide in Art in America 05-06 Annual Review. She has been awarded a commission for the UCLA Hospital designed by I.M. Pei in Los Angeles.
In 2005, she created a suspended light and sound tapestry sculpture of woven fiber optic for the Seattle City Hall by using some of the leading edge development in science and technology. The pulsations of shifting hues of blue light, cascading up and down the length of the fiber tapestry, are synchronized through real-time acoustic analysis with the ebb and flow of waves of Puget Sound. Her current projects include transit projects in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
In New York, she has been working on a Greenway project along the river on Columbia Street commissioned by the Office of the Cultural Affairs Percent for Art Program in 2004, in which she received “Art Commission Awards for Excellence in Design,” from the Mayor and the City of New York in 2007. The design was exhibited at the Center for Architecture in New York. The Exhibition announcement notes: Since1982, The Art Commission of the City of New York has recognized outstanding public Projects with its annual Awards from Excellence in Design. The winning projects are selected by the Commission from the hundreds of submissions reviewed each year and exemplify the highest design standards.
In Fall 2007, she participated in four exhibitions, one in Hungary, and three in New York City: "Making A Home" Japanese Contemporary Artists in New York, featured Exhibition of the Centennial Program Japan 100: Celebrating A Century (1907-2007) curated by Eric Shiner at the Japan Society, “exhibition at Zone Chelsea, and “Berlin - New York Dialogues: Building in Context” at the Center for Architecture. This exhibition was presented as part of the Center for Architecture’s Global City Dialogues series exploring differences and commonalities between distinctive international cultural centers and New York City, and traveled to the German Center for Architecture DAZ in Berlin in 2008. Most recently, her work was part of a multi media exhibition, “Sonic Residues” in New York.
ARTICLES:
NagasawaNobuho_LATimes_Article.pdf
LINKS:
Recent Metro Art Commission - Los Angeles, CA