Pérez Art Museum Miami Presents Anina Major: The Sacred Mangrove

The Bahamian artist’s most significant institutional presentation in the United States to date transforms PAMM’s waterfront gallery into a protective landscape of woven clay, bottle trees, and shells.

On view October 1, 2026–August 1, 2027

(MIAMI, FL — July 30, 2026) — Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) is pleased to present Anina Major: The Sacred Mangrove, on view from October 1, 2026–August 1, 2027. The exhibition marks the Bahamian-born artist’s most significant institutional presentation in the United States to date and a turning point in her practice, expanding her woven ceramic sculptures into an environment where sculpture, architecture, and landscape operate together.

Conceived as a walkable ecosystem, The Sacred Mangrove brings together a series of large-scale woven clay sculptures alongside bottle trees, crushed shells, and materials drawn from the Caribbean landscape. Visitors move among island-like groupings of tower forms, through a forest of protectiveobjects, and along a shell path that turns the gallery into a space for slow looking. Together, the works consider how cultural knowledge is carried, translated, and preserved across materials, places, and generations.

Major’s engagement with weaving is rooted in the work of her grandmother, Saphora Newbold, a Bahamian straw weaver whose palm-leaf hats, dolls, and bags helped support the family and put both Major and her mother through college. Yet, her grandmother hoped the next generation would not need to continue the practice. This contradiction, between weaving as a source of livelihood and independence and as labor to be left behind, became foundational to Major’s work.

After relearning palm-leaf plaiting, Major began rebuilding woven forms strand by strand in clay, preserving their woven structures beyond the natural lifespan of palm. This material shift preserves the knowledge embedded in the practice while questioning what society considers precious or disposable. By translating objects and practices tied to the tourism economy into ceramic sculpture, Major challenges the distinction between craft and fine art and affirms the cultural, ancestral, and economic value of Bahamian weaving.

“The Sacred Mangrove reminds us that culture is not inherited passively—it is made and remade through the work of countless hands across generations. Major honors those often-unseen histories by transforming weaving into sculpture and the gallery into a living landscape where memory, ancestry, and care become tangible experiences,” said PAMM Curator Jennifer Inacio.

The exhibition’s title draws on the mangrove as both a living Caribbean landscape and a model of reciprocal care. Mangroves protect shorelines and sustain complex ecosystems; people, in turn, must safeguard the mangroves that make life along those shores possible. Major extends this relationship into an environment shaped by responsibility, tenderness, resilience, and protection. Bottle trees reference a folk tradition in which glass vessels capture and ward off malevolent spirits, while shells evoke both safety and what remains after a living body has departed. Reused ceramic shards bring earlier works into new forms, allowing destruction and renewal to coexist within the installation.

The installation incorporates Water Tower (2024), a work from PAMM’s permanent collection made from glazed stoneware, melted sea glass, and sand. These materials register the land and sea within the ceramic surface like birthmarks. Around it, a congregation of pillar-like woven sculptures transforms the plait into a standing form. Major developed the vertical works in response to a vintage postcard depicting a straw vendor embracing a rolled mat, the woman and the object mirroring one another. Gathered together, the sculptures evoke feminine strength and the often-unacknowledged role of women as structural supports within families and societies. One work preserves a photograph of Major’s grandmother on ceramic, giving physical permanence to a family artifact and the knowledge it represents.

Installed in PAMM’s waterfront lobby gallery, The Sacred Mangrove remains in direct conversation with the world outside the museum. Biscayne Bay and the cruise ships visible through the gallery’s windows extend its themes into Miami’s present-day landscape. Tourism is not an abstract subject here; the systems of movement, consumption, and exchange that shape the Caribbean can be seen beyond the glass. In a city with deep historical and cultural ties to the Caribbean, Major’s work places local experience within a wider geography of labor, migration, memory, and belonging.

Anina Major: The Sacred Mangrove is organized by PAMM Curator Jennifer Inacio. Ongoing support for PAMM’s project galleries from Knight Foundation and support from PAMM’s International Women’s Committee is gratefully acknowledged.

ABOUT ANINA MAJOR

Anina Major (b. 1981, Nassau, Bahamas; lives in New York) is a visual artist working across ceramics, sculpture, and installation. Her practice investigates the relationship between self and place through the vernacular of craft, using anthropological research, oral histories, and material traditions to examine nostalgia, identity, migration, and belonging. Major holds an MFA in ceramics from Rhode Island School of Design and a BS in graphic design from Drexel University. Major is a recent 2026 USA Fellow, a finalist for the 2025 LOEWE Foundation Craft Prize, a recipient of the 2024 Pommery Prize at The Armory Show and a 2023 Joan Mitchell Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited throughout The Bahamas, Europe, and the United States, with a permanent display at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC. Her work is held in the collections of the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Carnegie Museum of Art; Detroit Institute of Arts; Rhode Island School of Design Museum; Pérez Art Museum Miami; and others. Major’s work is included in Phaidon’s Great Women Sculptors.

ABOUT PAMM

Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), led by Sandra and Tony Tamer Director Franklin Sirmans, promotes artistic expression and the exchange of ideas, advancing public knowledge and appreciation of art, architecture, and design, and reflecting the diverse community of its pivotal geographic location at the crossroads of the Americas. The 42-year-old South Florida institution, formerly known as Miami Art Museum (MAM), opened a new building, designed by world-renowned architects Herzog & de Meuron, on December 4, 2013 in Downtown Miami’s Maurice A. Ferré Park. The facility is a state-of-the-art model for sustainable museum design and progressive programming and features 200,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor program space with flexible galleries; shaded outdoor verandas; a waterfront restaurant and bar; a museum shop; and an education center with a library, media lab, and classroom spaces.

Accredited by the American Alliance of Museums, Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) is sponsored in part by the State of Florida through the Division of Arts and Culture and the National Endowment for the Arts. Support is provided by the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners.

Additional support is provided by the City of Miami and the Miami OMNI Community Redevelopment Agency (OMNI CRA). Pérez Art Museum Miami is an accessible facility.

Press Release

Art Spiel; Shiva Ahmadi – Tangle at Shoshana Wayne

Installation View; Tangle

First thing that pulled me into Shiva Ahmadi’s Tangle exhibition were the pressure cookers. It took me a moment to recognize them: from a distance, they appeared as intricate decorative objects and archaeological relics simultaneously. While the vintage pressure cookers evoked associations of domestic warmth and memories of my grandma’s kitchen, their surfaces etched with Arabic calligraphy and floral ornamentation recall artifacts from a Persian or Arabic cultural heritage museum. The patience and meticulous craft of such engraving parallels the labor of generations of women who spent countless hours in the kitchen crafting their family’s meals.

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New York Times; Anina Major: From Basketry to Clay, the Bahamas to New York

Anina Major’s exhibition “The Landing” at the Armory Show in New York City

Image courtesy of Silvia Ros

by Sarah Archer

At first glance, the shimmery green and deep orange surfaces of Anina Major’s sculptural works look as though they would clink audibly if you dared tap them with something metal.

“Beneath the Docks” takes the form of a basket with a handle, covered with an algae-colored glaze. The angled posture of “Hermit Armor” captures the stance of a cautious crab on the go. Their surfaces also bear the unmistakable pattern of woven fiber, material that’s soft and yielding, that twists and stretches, then inevitably frays and falls apart.

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Frances Trombly receives Miami Individual Artist (MIA) Grant for 2024-2025

Image courtesy of Sonya Revell and the artist

The Miami Individual Artists (MIA) Grants Program provides non-matching awards to individual artists of all disciplines in Miami-Dade County on a competitive basis to support their artistic development and practice.

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Rockefeller Brothers Fund Awards 2024 Pocantico Prize For Visual Artists To Chie Fueki

Chie Fueki. Photo by Pierre Le Hors, courtesy of the artist and DC Moore Gallery, New York.

by: Sarah Edkins

April 18, 2o24

The Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF) announced it would award its annual Pocantico Prize for Visual Artists to Chie Fueki. The artist will receive a $25,000 grant and a two-month residency at The Pocantico Center, a cultural venue and conference center on the former Rockefeller family estate in Tarrytown, NY. Art lovers of all ages can meet the artist and experience her creative process during an open studio on May 18.

“From our earliest years, we imbue symbols with deep meaning that can connect or divide us across cultures and generations. I choose connection—I choose communication, beauty, exploration, and surprise,” Fueki said. “The Pocantico Prize and my residency at The Pocantico Center will afford me an opportunity to continue discovering new perspectives and imagining new linkages.”

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New York Times; Dinh Q. Le, Artist Who Weighed War and Memory, Dies at 56

Dinh Q. Le at the opening of his show at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010. Much of his work focused on his home country of Vietnam. “If you know a history,” he once said, “you own it.”Credit...Jason Kempin/Getty Images

by: Holland Cotter

April 19, 2o24

Dinh Q. Le, a Vietnam-born artist whose best-known work combined and compared the on-the-ground realities of the 20th-century war that devastated his homeland with the fantasy versions of that war projected by Hollywood, died on April 6 at his home in Ho Chi Minh City.

The death, confirmed by his New York gallery, PPOW, was caused by a stroke. He was 56, according to his sister, Ly P. Le-Cao, though his precise date of birth in 1968 was unknown.

Mr. Le (pronounced LAY) gained international attention, beginning in the 1990s, with a series of large, tapestry-like woven collages. As a child, he had learned the weaving technique from an aunt who used it to make grass mats. For his own version, though, he used photographs that he had cut into strips.

Dinh Q. Le, Untitled, (Paramount), 2003. The work uses strips of photo paper woven together to create its image. The technique came from Mr. Le’s aunt, who used it to make grass mats.Credit...Dinh Q. Le, via P.P.O.W. Gallery NYC

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Artforum; Dinh Q. Lê (1968-2024)

Dinh Q. Lê. Photo: Tyuki Imamura.

by News Desk
April 9, 2024 1:12 pm

Vietnamese-born multimedia artist Dinh Q. Lê, whose work explored the trauma wrought by the Vietnam War, died of a stroke April 6 at his home in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. He was fifty-six. His death was confirmed by New York gallery P.P.O.W. In a practice that encompassed photography, video, sculpture, and installation, Lê explored the experiences and perspectives of his forebears as well as his own as a Vietnamese American gay man to create work of tremendous emotional power. Much of his art critiqued the American take on the Vietnam War—or the American War, as it was known in his own country—and addressed the issues of identity and history that arose from the conflict, including stereotyping, censorship, migration, and exploitation. “The continued systematic erasure of the history of Southern Vietnam by the current government, the lack of analysis of our cultural resources, strict governmental control of the flow of information, and the self-censorship that is so deeply ingrained in current Vietnamese society have together led us to a point at which we know very little about either who we were or who we are,” he told the Guggenheim’s Zoe Butt in 2013. “There is an urgent need for expressions of collective memory freed from restraint; many people are actively engaged in building these narratives—I chose to do so through art.”

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Art Now LA; Rachel Lachowicz: ‘The Gravity of Color’ Combining Materials in Surprising and New Ways

Packets of Light (Yellow Field), 2024. Galvanized metal, eyeshadow tin plate pans, powder coat. 53” x 134” x 11”

February 29, 2024 by Jody Zellen

Throughout her thirty-year career, Rachel Lachowicz has been celebrated for her inventive experimentation with non-traditional materials. In the 1990s, she began to use cosmetics— specifically eyeshadow and lipstick— to remake Minimalist forms created by iconic male artists such as Carl Andre or Donald Judd. Using a seductive combination of wax and red lipstick, her sculptures “feminized” these hard-edged works. Lachowicz also appropriated sculptures by Kurt Schwitters and imagery by Chuck Close and Andy Warhol, recreating likenesses of their pieces with grids of eye shadow containers. She also crafted geometric abstractions and pieces that recalled the works of California Light and Space artists with subtle colors of pressed eye shadow.

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BOMB Magazine; Ashwini Bhat by Soumya Netrabile Working with clay to connect the human, natural, and divine.

Ashwini Bhat, Self Portrait, Yakshi (Bird of Paradise), 2023, glazed ceramic, 26 × 10 × 6 inches. Photograph by John Janca. Courtesy of the artist and Project 88.

Soumya Netrabile

FEBRUARY 14, 2024

Arriving at visual art from a background in Indian classical dance and literature, Ashwini Bhat has consistently been pushing her personal language through sculpture, installation, and film. Her ceramic sculptures, ranging in size from intimate relics to expansive wall and floor installations, utilize and stretch abstraction and color to explore intra- and extra- personal relationships between humans and nature. Bhat always comes back to her physical body as the connecting locus between the natural world and her work. Much of her recent work is influenced by the nature of California, where she lives and works. Her new exhibition at Project 88 in Mumbai marks a return not only to her homeland but also to the roots of influence that started her journey in the arts.

—Soumya Netrabile

Read Full Interview

The Utah Review; Mesmerizing portrayals of auras, energies of individual, place in Chie Fueki’s Doctorow Prize show at Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (Copy)

December 4, 2023 by Les Roka

In Chie Fueki’s portraits, the auras and energies emanating from the individuals are mesmerizing, a fantastic probe of a deeper understanding of one’s self as an aggregate of their environment, interests, identities and their interactions with a physical world. Personality tests, zodiac charts and quizzes about being introverted or extroverted might be revealing to some and nonsensical for others. But, there also are photographers and painters such as Fueki, who works with many different motifs in her art, that create complex, rich portraits either showing how one’s inner energies and auras evolve and morph with their experiences or auras that are set and constant. In some instances, they are clear while in others, the individual appears absorbed in complex, dense networks indicating many potential points for intersecting moods, vibes and energies.

A finely curated exhibition of some of Fueki’s portraits as well as examples of her more recent work portraying interior settings without figures is up through Jan. 6 at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (UMOCA) in downtown Salt Lake City. Currently based in New York’s Hudson River Valley, Fueki, who was born in Japan and raised in Brazil, received the 2023 Catherine Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting. The prize, which has been awarded every two years since 2011, is supported by the Doctorow Foundation. Fueki also received a $15,000 unrestricted cash award.

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Dovetail Magazine; Born of Earth and Fire

December 2, 2023

by Kate Mothes

Ashwini Bhat explores the elemental relationship between earth and fire

When Ashwini Bhat first visited the U.S. from her small, rural hometown in southern India in 2012, she knew only two people in the country. Three years later, she migrated on an artistic merit visa, and in 2017, she was ready to set down roots in Petaluma, Sonoma County, California. In October of that year, the catastrophic Tubbs Fire swept through neighboring Santa Rosa, burning much of it to the ground. “While it was terrifying, I was deeply moved by the way the community came together to help one another,” the artist says. “Until the Tubbs Fire encounter, I had thought of fire mostly as a generative force. But observing the devastation in Santa Rosa, I found myself wanting to better understand the phenomena of forest fires and the complex natural history of California.”

Starting in 2018, Bhat endeavored to learn as much as she could about the nature of forest fires, teaming up with biologists who were documenting how post-fire sites were gradually re-inhabited. This experience spurred the artist’s ongoing project Assembling California, comprising what she calls a “a personal, artistic field survey of California’s ecology in a time of climate change, shifting habitats, and devastating forest fires.”

Assembling California borrows its title from John McPhee’s 1994 narrative of California’s geologic and human time, documented via trips over the course of fifteen years with tectonicist Eldridge Moores, as they traversed fault lines through a range of the state’s diverse landscapes. Through her own observations, Bhat says, “I started thinking through images, textures, and the smells of forests and the human body—the relatedness of my own brown skin to the wood and the land—and my sculptures took shape in reference to my long-term reflections on the interdependency of species.”

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Utah's Art Magazine; Chie Fueki Redefines the Portrait: A Journey Across Cultures

Chie Fueki, “Mountain Altar,” 2023, acrylic and colored pencil on mulberry paper on wood, 30” x 36”

November 13, 2023

Geoff Wichert

For centuries, Western artists labored to understand and reproduce the appearance of the natural world. Art created in the 19th-century academies of Europe testifies to their eventual success, so that by 1905, Picasso could move on, reminding writer and collector Gertrude Stein that, according to previous standards, the portrait of her he was painting would not look very much like her. The implication of his warning was that he, and art, had moved on: that there were now other, more important things that art could attempt than to copy what the evolved but untrained eye could see.

Stein’s image then set in motion a reappraisal of the portrait as genre that culminated during the interpersonal isolation brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular in half-a-dozen portraits by Chie Fueki. Born in Yokohama, Japan, and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, Fueki has adopted an appropriately multi-cultural approach to art-making that over time has won her both Joan Mitchell and Guggenheim Fellowships. Her exhibition at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art  comes in response to her winning the 2023 Catherine Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting. The exhibition also includes a recent work, “Mountain Altar,” part of a series developed in her studio in New York’s Hudson Valley. Just as she reimagined the portrait, here she reconsiders the influential American landscape that began in, and has since been associated with, the Hudson River Valley.  

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Gallery Rounds: Terri Friedman in Artillery

Terri Friedman, REFRESH (2022). Cotton, hemp, acrylic, wool, chenille, metallic fibers. 88” x 78”

November 8, 2023

by Jody Zellen

Terri Friedman’s wonderful woven tapestries are on display in “tomorrow is just a thought,” the artist’s solo exhibition at Shoshana Wayne Gallery. Friedman has been creating her “yarn paintings”—applying formal principals of color, shape, and texture to her compositions as if they were traditional “paintings”—for years, and her stunning installation showcases these works and a new series of woven “portraits” each titled after a different feeling or emotion. Her works respond to internal and external uncertainty, and she presents positive possibilities through bright colors, unusual materials, and open-ended, non-objective abstraction. While some of the compositions contain words, they are meant to be suggestive rather than didactic. Friedman’s visual emphasis on positive suggestions is indicative of her interest in neuroplasticity—the capacity humans have to reshape their brains toward a more optimistic outlook, which she cites as one of the motivating forces behind her endeavors.

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Hyperallergic; Nardeen Srouji Selected for Miami’s Fountainhead Residency 2024

October 18, 2023

Every year, Fountainhead Residency, a fully funded residency in Miami, Florida, welcomes 33 national and international artists to live and work in its midcentury home in the city’s historic Morningside neighborhood. The program is pleased to announce its 2024 artist residency selections, a roster of 30 exceptional contemporary artists working across various media.

This year’s applications were thoughtfully reviewed by Lauren Kelley, a Fountainhead alum based in Texas; Zoe Lukov, the co-founder of Art in Common in Los Angeles; Ché Morales, a curator and founder of OG Magazine in New York; and Gilbert Vicario, chief curator at Pérez Art Museum Miami.

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Ashwini Bhat included in YBCA's Triennial Exhibition, Bay Area Now 9

(right) Ashwini Bhat, The Earth Under Our Feet, 2022/2023. Single channel video, sound, 03:53 min.

August 2023

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) is thrilled to announce Bay Area Now 9 (BAN9), the ninth iteration of the institution’s signature triennial exhibition, opening on October 6, 2023. On view through May 5, 2024, BAN9 will feature a broad range of creative practices including visual art, dance, performance, music, film, sound, new media, technology, fashion, poetry, and social practice—underscoring YBCA’s role as one of the only interdisciplinary arts centers in the Bay Area. This edition holds particular significance, taking center stage in YBCA’s 30th anniversary celebration and marking three decades of groundbreaking art and community connection.

Bay Area Now has long been recognized as a platform for showcasing the vibrant artistic ecosystem and the rich diversity of cultures and communities that define this region. Spanning YBCA’s entire campus, including outdoor spaces, BAN9 will include site-specific commissions as well as new and historic work. The exhibition is curated by Martin Strickland, Director of Curatorial Initiatives, and independent curator Fiona Ball, under the artistic leadership of Amy Kisch, Head of Art + Public Programming, alongside a Curatorial Counsel of eight individuals from diverse disciplines and communities from throughout the Bay Area.

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Gil Yefman's "It Ain't Necessarily Soft" featured in CARLA's Editors' Picks

Gil Yefman, It Ain’t Necessarily Soft (installation view) (2023)

August 2023

⋆｡˚ ⋆｡˚ Gil Yefman at Shoshana Wayne Gallery ⋆｡˚ ⋆｡˚

Gil Yefman’s exhibition at Shoshana Wayne Gallery traffics in undertones. Don’t get me wrong, overtness abounds, too, like in Tumtum (2012), a large, tangled orb of knitted phalluses and labia that hangs from the ceiling. The artwork’s kitschy flair and bright pinks, reds, and golds belie its nuanced undertones—Tumtum, a Hebrew word meaning “hidden,” was used in biblical times to refer to a person with ambiguous genitalia, although, in modern day, the word is often deployed to mean “stupid.” This slippage of language points to deeply-seated prejudices, a theme that continues across the exhibition as Yefman, an Israeli artist based in Tel Aviv, approaches another sinister topic: the Holocaust.

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Artforum: Elaine Reichek

Elaine Reichek, Artemisia Gentileschi Robe, 2020, digital embroidery on linen, 13 1⁄2 × 12".

Elaine Reichek’s “Frock-Conscious” further developed “Material Girl,” her 2022 show at New York’s Marinaro gallery. The mini survey in Los Angeles—featuring some fifty works, the majority of which were made over the past five years—emphasized her long-standing interest in the history of textiles and the presumptive gendering of their makers and wearers alike. For this outing, Reichek took a cue from The Diary of Virginia Woolf (1915–41), citing this passage from the work in the accompanying checklist: “My present reflection is that people have any number of states of consciousness: & I should like to investigate the party consciousness, the frock consciousness, &c.” The installation here cohered around twenty-four linen panels centering on richly colored digital or hand-embroidered sections of garments taken from paintings, drawings, and sundry designs, including a drapery study by Michelangelo; the deep golden folds of the dress worn by Artemisia Gentileschi’s subject in Conversion of the Magdalene, ca. 1620; the winsome rainbow bands covering the chemise of Henri Rousseau’s supine protagonist in The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897; and the pulsating pinstripes of a pair of skintight pants sported by a leather man in Ed Paschke’s Sunburn, 1970. Kerry James Marshall’s Untitled (Gallery), 2016, was the most recent citation. Its depiction of a woman before a white wall of framed images was recapitulated by Reichek as a vertical diptych of pattern atop pattern: The subject’s tessellated shirt wryly quotes Jasper Johns’s crosshatches, and her verdant, leaf-printed skirt comes courtesy of Rousseau’s unreal phytology.

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Anina Major Awarded Joan Mitchell Prize

August 22, 2023

Anina Major (New York, NY; b. 1981) draws on the ancient weaving practice of plaiting to create ceramic sculptures, having begun by employing the traditional styles from The Bahamas, her birthplace, and expanding the research to illuminate kinship connections across the Black diaspora that manifest through the act of making. Further emphasizing the historical importance of weaving as a means of communication that can address issues of cultural erasure and preservation through archival engagement, Major’s fellowship will support additional anthropological research, along with legacy planning and professional development opportunities.

About the Fellowship

In 2021, the Joan Mitchell Foundation reconceived and relaunched our primary granting program to more actively explore the ways in which multi-year financial support can help artists transform their practices and secure their legacies. Central to the structure of our Fellowship is longitudinal support that recognizes that the greatest benefits of fellowship opportunities are often nurtured over time, through sustained engagement and relationship-building.

The Fellowship’s monetary award for recipients extends over a five year period, with an initial $20,000 payment this year followed by four years of $10,000 installments. The Foundation also provides opportunities for artists to engage in programs that focus on personal finance, legacy planning, and self-advocacy, among other opportunities. Layered into the support structure are annual in-person convenings that build connections among the Fellows and virtual engagement sessions that further foster a peer learning community.

“The 2023 cohort of Joan Mitchell Fellows again underscores the value of a multi-year program, as it brings together a group of artists with diverse practices, interests, and backgrounds, all of whom articulated, in their Fellowship applications, the impact that financial and professional support over time will have on their work and their lives,” said Christa Blatchford, Executive Director at the Joan Mitchell Foundation. "This commitment to extended engagement is also in line with the legacy of Joan Mitchell herself, who so often offered personal assistance to other artists, and whose directive for her foundation was to continue that approach of direct support for working artists.”

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Tadaaki Kuwayama, 91, Dies; Painter Who Carved His Own Spare Path | New York Times

September 15, 2023

Tadaaki Kuwayama, a celebrated painter who forged a distinctively minimal path with cool but vividly colored monochromes, died on Aug. 18 in Manhattan. He was 91.

His wife, the artist Rakuko Naito, said the cause was a cerebral hemorrhage after a fall.

When he arrived in New York City in 1958, Mr. Kuwayama was intent on distancing himself from nihonga, the traditional Japanese painting style in which he’d been trained. But the gestural individualism of Abstract Expressionism, then at the tail end of its dominance, held no appeal for him.

He found instead that he had more in common with friends and acquaintances like Donald Judd and Frank Stella, whose work would later be tagged Minimalist, though he had no use for that label, either. As he put it in a 2012 interview, he wanted to “create works with no trace of touch that can be made by anybody and replicated endlessly.”

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Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong to design the memorial to victims of the 1871 Chinese massacre with Judy Chui-Hua Chung

The memorial will mainly consist of a grove of 18 tree-like sculptures where the massacre started on Los Angeles Street. The sculptures represent those killed.

(Design by Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong and Judy Chui-Hua Chung

May 8, 2023

An artistic duo from Los Angeles has won the competition to design the city’s memorial to victims of one of the deadliest attacks on Chinese people in U.S. history.

To come up with their design, artist Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong and writer Judy Chui-Hua Chung spent months meticulously researching and photographing the various sites where the Chinese Massacre of 1871 unfolded across downtown L.A.

On Oct. 24, 1871, a mob killed at least 18 people (about 10% of the city’s Chinese population), most by lynching. The mass killing remains little-known even among Angelenos. Currently, the only marker of the massacre is a sidewalk plaque.

Leong and Chung said they both only learned about the attack several years ago and described feeling shock and sorrow that it took so long.

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