Tamiko Kawata. Photograph © Robert Palumbo.
It happened to be…
I was born female.
I was born in Kobe Japan, 1936.
I grew up in Tokyo from 5 years old.I chose…
to become an artist.
to live in New York City in 1962.to become an American citizen in 2004.
Now I am an “American, born in Japan.”
I am a human being who lives on the earth with all the people on the earth.— Tamiko Kawata
Tamiko Kawata (b. Kobe, 1963) is a multimedia artist with a career of over six decades. Kawata's work is invested in rigorous experimentation and acute awareness of material properties, specifically in everyday, surplus media. Kawata's work has been the subject of many solo and group exhibitions. Key institutional holdings include Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Montreal, Canada), Honolulu Contemporary Art Museum (Honolulu, Hawaii), Museum for Arts & Design/MAD Museum (New York, NY), Racine Art Museum (Racine, WI), Lafcadio Hearn/Yakumo Koizumi Art Museum (Matsue, Japan), LongHouse Reserve/Jack Lenor Larsen Permanent Collection, (East Hampton, NY), and PREC Institute (Tokyo, Japan) among others.