Mami Takahashi will present and discuss recent video and performance work that uses the body to explore notions of cultural identities, inbetweenness, and legibility in conversation with artist and curator Kristan Kennedy.
About the Artists
Mami Takahashi is a Japanese multidisciplinary artist and scholar based in Portland. She integrates traditional and contemporary approaches in ideas, methods, and media to address foreignness and Americanisms.
Takahashi received her MFA in Contemporary Studio Practice from Portland State University (Portland, OR) in 2013. She earned a BFA in Japanese painting from Joshibi University of Art and Design (Japan) where she was awarded a prize for her thesis work. Takahashi also obtained an Associate of Fine Art in Aesthetics from Aoyama-gakuin Women’s College (Tokyo, Japan). Currently, she is a research scholar at the University of Oregon focusing on the conceptual understanding of Japanese aesthetics. Her work has been collected and exhibited internationally. For more, visit mamitakahashi.virb.com.
Kristan Kennedy is a Portland-based artist, curator, and educator. She is the Visual Art Curator at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA). For the last decade, Kennedy has focused on commissioning new work by international emerging artists in the form of large-scale, site-specific installations and solo projects that exist at the borders of genres. Kennedy takes an expansive view of visual art; in addition to presenting the plastic arts, she organizes music, performance art, publications, and new media projects as part of PICA’s year-round programming and for the organization’s annual Time-Based Art Festival.
Kennedy teaches Contemporary Art History at Portland State University, where she also organizes their MFA Visiting Artist Program and Lecture Series. She sits on the advisory board for the Headlands Center for the Arts and is the former Board President of the Independent Publishing Resource Center. She is represented by Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland, Oregon.