Based in New York City since 2001, Nagasawa was born in Tokyo, and raised in Europe and Japan, and received her MFA at Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. She came to the United States as a visiting scholar through the invitation of California Institute of the Arts in 1986, where she studied visual art, critical theory and music. She is an interdisciplinary artist whose site-specific work explores the places, politics, ecology and psychological dimensions of space and people. Her work involves in depth research into the cultural history and memory, and extensive community participation. She was an Associate Professor at University of California, Santa Cruz, and currently teaches at SUNY Stony Brook University.
Her extensive exhibition records include: the Royal Garden of the Prague Castle in the Czech Republic, Ludwig Museums in Germany and Hungry, Rufino Tamayo Museum in Mexico, the Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities in the United States, Alexandria Library in Egypt, as well as exhibitions in Denmark, Italy, United States and Japan. She has been a representative of International venues; Asian Art Biennial (Bangladesh, 2002), International Biennial (Egypt, 2002) Sharjah Biennial (United Arab Emirates, 2003), Echigo-Tsumari Triennial (Japan, 2003) and Sinop Biennial (Turkey, 2006).
She has received numerous grants from DAAD from Germany, Berlin State Grant, Rockefeller Grant, California Arts Council Fellowships Award, Brody Arts Fund and Japan Foundation Grants, among others. In New York, she was a recipient of the Space Program of the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, and Established Artist Studio Fellowship from Urban Glass.
Her work has been reviewed in The Los Angeles Times, Art in America, Art Asia Pacific and Sculpture magazine, and most recently in The New York Times by Holland Cotter. Her work has been published in many books, which include: Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against The Sky (Alexandra Munroe, Abrams, Inc, 1994), Lure of the Local-Senses of Place in Multicentered Society (Lucy Lippard, New Press, 1997) and Epicenter: San Francisco Bay Area Art Now (Mark Johnstone, Leslie Aboud Holzman, Chronicle Books, 2002).
In the field of public art, she has been commissioned for more than 20 public art projects in California, Washington, Texas, New York, Berlin and Japan. She received Design Excellence Award for Architecture and Public Art in 1997 through the Office of Cultural Affairs in Los Angeles. In 2000, she designed 42.000-square-foot plaza for the Urban Government Center, commissioned by the Ministry of Construction of the Metropolitan Government in Japan. Her public art project for the Austin City Hall and Public Plaza with Antoine Predock was featured as one of the best projects nationwide in Art in America 05-06 Annual Review.
In 2005, she created a suspended light and sound tapestry sculpture of woven fiber optic for the Seattle City Hall by using some of the leading edge development in science and technology. The pulsations of shifting hues of blue light, cascading up and down the length of the fiber tapestry, are synchronized through real-time acoustic analysis with the ebb and flow of waves of Puget Sound. Her current projects include transit projects in San Francisco and Los Angeles. In New York, she has been working on a Greenway project along the river on Columbia Street commissioned by the Office of the Cultural Affairs Percent for Art Program in 2004. In February, she was awarded a commission for the main entrance of the UCLA Hospital designed by I.M. Pei in Los Angeles.
Nobuho Nagasawa’s work is currently on view at Zone: Chelsea Center for the Arts on 601 West 26th Street, #302, NYC, Tuesday through Saturday from 11am to 6pm. www.zonechelsea.org
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