Session 5: Aya Rodriguez-Izumi

Monday, June 14, 2021, 9 am EST
Webinar Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87834665716
Webinar ID: 878 3466 5716

Portrait of the artist with “Gate: II”, Socrates Sculpture Park 2021

In the final session of this series, we will hear from Aya Rodriguez-Izumi - artist, educator, and organizer of this section “Activating the Archive” of the AIR x BATURU program. This talk will focus on her long term research stemming from histories presented in the book “Okinawa’s Tragedy: Sketches from the Last Battle of WWII”. We will explore her work with communities and use of history to connects with a broad and contemporary audience in a search for the global connections, as well as documentation as a way to confront the hegemony of history.

Aya Rodriguez-Izumi is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work blends installation, performance, community engagement, documentation and beyond to explore aspects of ritual retention, cross-cultural identity and histories that risk erasure. She was born in Okinawa, Japan, and grew up between that island and East Harlem, NY, where she currently lives and holds a studio. Her work has been exhibited through group and solo presentations at venues such as El Museo del Barrio, MoCADA, the Knockdown Center, Rush Arts Gallery, Pulse Miami Beach, the Material Art Fair in Mexico City the NUS Museum in Singapore, and the International House of Japan in Tokyo among others. She was a recipient of the A.I.R. Gallery Fellowship New York in 2017-2018, a Jerome Foundation Fellowship at Franconia Sculpture Park in Minnesota in 2018, the 2018-2019 JUSFC Creative Artist Fellowship and was a 2020 artist fellow at Socrates Sculpture Park. Rodriguez-Izumi earned a BFA in Fine Arts from Parsons the New School for Design in 2009, and an MFA in Fine Arts from The School of Visuals Arts in 2017. In 2019 she joined the MFA Fine Art faculty at her graduate alma mater of SVA.