Kazuko Miyamoto: A Symposium

Held in conjunction with the exhibition, Kazuko Miyamoto: To perform a line (exhibition now extended through July 24), this half-day symposium on the artist features an interdisciplinary group of artists, curators and scholars. Each speaker will discuss an important perspective on Kazuko Miyamoto’s innovative practice over the past five decades. Topics include feminism in the arts, close readings of specific works, the New York avant-garde, and the role of collaboration and community in artistic practice. The closing panel will reflect on the themes and ideas that have emerged from the earlier presentations as well as broaden the conversation to engage with contemporary matters and practices.

Kazuko Miyamoto: To perform a line—the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition—traces the conceptual complexity and visual range of an artist who has challenged and broadened the legacy of post-1960s international art. Miyamoto was born in Tokyo in 1942, and has lived and worked in New York City’s Lower East Side neighborhood since 1964. From 1968, the artist responded to and critiqued the innovations of Minimalism by emphasizing a handmade process and performance. Her involvement as an early member of New York’s A.I.R. (Artists in Residence) Gallery, the first all-female collective in the United States, and the establishment of her own Gallery Onetwentyeight in 1986, underscore the importance of feminism, collaboration and community in her practice.

Speakers

Elise Armani, art historian

Roxana Fabius, Executive Director of A.I.R. Gallery

Leon Ransmeier, exhibition designer and founder of Ransmeier, Inc.

Barbara Stehle, curator, and art historian

Kunie Sugiura, artist

About the Speakers

Elise Armani is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History and Criticism at Stony Brook University, where her dissertation examines transnational artist networks on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Her MA thesis was the first scholarly investigation of Kazuko Miyamoto’s time in New York from 1964 to the present. She is a Graduate Council Fellow, a recipient of the Miriam and Maurice Goldberger Fellowship, and was the president of the Art History Graduate Student Organization from 2020 to 2022. She holds a BA in Gender Studies and BFA in Art Practice from the University of Minnesota. In correspondence with her scholarship, Armani has an active independent curatorial practice and has contributed to projects at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, the Weisman Art Museum and TANK Shanghai.

Roxana Fabius is the Executive Director of A.I.R. Gallery, an artist-run nonprofit arts organization and exhibition space founded in 1972 as the first all-female artist cooperative gallery in the United States. She has served as an adjunct professor at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and Tel Aviv University, and has organized exhibitions at the Judd Foundation (New York), The Park Avenue Armory (New York) and the Cultural Center of Spain (Uruguay), among others.

Leon Ransmeier is the founder of Ransmeier Inc., a New York-based design office. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, his work has been published internationally and is included in permanent collections at SFMOMA and The Corning Museum of Glass. Clients include 2016/ Arita, HAY, Herman Miller, Japan Creative, Maharam, Mattiazzi, and SPACE10. He is a founding member of the Tokyo-based coffee products company ENTO. Ransmeier has spoken at Aalto University in Helsinki, California College of the Arts and Pratt Institute, and has lectured and led multiple design workshops at Cranbrook Academy of Art. He is an ongoing visiting critic at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Parsons School of Design and his research has been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

Barbara Stehle is an independent curator and art advisor who has worked for several museums in Europe and the United States, including the Centre Georges Pompidou and The Kunsthaus Zürich. She has written extensively on modern art, contemporary art and architecture, and has published a seminal thesis on the work of Max Beckmann. Stehle teaches at New York University and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Kunié Sugiura practice explores a diverse range of photographic expression. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 1967. At SAIC, Sugiura studied under the conceptual photographer Kenneth Josephson. After experimenting with color photography in the 1960s and combining acrylic paint with photography on canvas in the 1970s, Sugiura began producing photograms with everyday objects in the 1980s. While pursuing connections between photography and other media, she has also been interested in photography’s materiality, and the way that this materiality can be abstracted. Her works are included in the permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.