Kunié Sugiura (b. 1942, Nagoya, Japan) In 1963 Sugiura moved to the United States to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) where she received her BFA in 1967. While at the SAIC, Sugiura studied under the conceptual photographer Kenneth Josephson. Sugiura works in varied photographic mediums. During the 1970s Sugiura’s practice combined photography with acrylic paint on canvas. These photo-paintings remain some of the artist’s most seminal works in her oeuvre. In the 1980s, Sugiura began creating photograms using objects from everyday life including flowers, plants, animals, which led her to create her famous Artist and Scientist series of photograms that depict the unmistakable silhouettes of figures like Yayoi Kusama, Takashi Murakami, Carolee Schneemann, and Dr. James Watson.
Sugiura lives and works in New York City’s dynamic Chinatown neighborhood, where the pulse of the city and its residents continue to inform her work and artistic practice. Sugiura’s work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout North America, Japan, and Europe. Her works can be found in esteemed private collections, museums and cultural institutions including the San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey; the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida; the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; Tochigi Prefecture Museum of Art, Japan; Hiroshima MOCA, Hiroshima, Japan; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan; Tate Modern, London, England; and Vivendi Universal, Paris, France.