Previously based in Tokyo and Los Angeles, sculpture, installation and performance artist, Barbara Hashimoto is currently in Chicago where she has established a studio in the city’s historic Motor Row District in a 100-year-old former car showroom.
Born in New Jersey and educated at Yale, Hashimoto’s work has been exhibited throughout Japan, The United States, and The Middle East. It is in more than 250 public and private collections including The Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of American Art, The Museum of Arts and Design (New York), and The National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Though the role of materiality is significant, Hashimoto’s work is researched-based and conceptually driven. She addresses women’s societal roles, cross-cultural identity and “...the structures and strategies of power.”[1] The foundation of her work is based in practice and repetition, this influenced by her formative training in dance and her years as an artist’s apprentice in Japan.
She is best known for her ceramic work in which she fires clay with books and reworks the resulting pieces with drawing, painting and collage. Her process alternately destroys and enhances the original intention of the book and furthers the artist’s concerns with censorship, neo-narrative and the objectification of knowledge.
Hashimoto’s integrated installation/performance work was first presented in Japan in the early 1990’s. She received a Durfee Foundation Grant to remount these Japan-based works in The U.S. for her retrospective exhibition at Fullerton College Art Gallery in 2002.
In collaboration with Carlos Grasso, Hashimoto created the multimedia installation/performance work “every man was her slave” (2002-present). The installation/performance is part of her Queens/Queans series, which is based on the literary works and research notes of Emile Zola. She reunited with Grasso for “Experience” which premiered at her retrospective exhibition at Xiem Gallery in 2005. This work is based on the writings of John Locke and is part of Hashimoto’s Tabula Rasa series.
Hashimoto has had solo exhibitions at Ruth Bachofner Gallery (Santa Monica), Wood Street Gallery (Chicago), Dorothy Weiss Gallery (San Francisco), Kohler Art Center (Sheboygan), LA Artcore (Los Angeles), Gallery Soolip (West Hollywood), and others. She has participated in group exhibitions at The Smithsonian Institution, Museum of Arts and Design, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Laguna Art Museum, Craft and Folk Art Museum (Los Angeles), Paul Kopeikin Gallery (Los Angeles), Center for the Arts and Visual Culture at The University of Maryland (Baltimore), Limbus Gallery (Tel Aviv), The New Gallery at Teddy Stadium (Jerusalem), and more. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the following museums in Japan: Mito Modern Art Museum, Tokyo’s Ueno Royal Museum, Hokkaido Modern Art Museum, Fukuoka Museum, Gifu Museum, Shiga Museum, and Nagasaki Museum.
Reviews and articles about Hashimoto’s work have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Sculpture Magazine, World Sculpture News, ArtScene, L.A. Weekly, Bangkok Post, Asahi Shinbun, Jerusalem Post and other publications.
(1) Chattopadhyay, Collette, “Barbara Hashimoto’s Critique of Power”, Sculpture Magazine, October 2001