NATALIA NAKAZAWA USA

CAMPO AIR December resident
natalianakazawa.com

Natalia Nakazawa is a NYC-based interdisciplinary artist working across the mediums of painting, textiles, and social practice. Utilizing strategies drawn from a range of experiences in the fields of education, arts administration, and community activism, Natalia negotiates spaces between institutions and individuals, often inviting participation and collective imagining. Natalia received her MFA in studio practice from California College of the Arts, a MSEd from Queens College, and a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. She has presented work at the Arlington Arts Center, Transmitter Gallery, Wassaic Project, Museum of Arts and Design, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Natalia has been an artist in residence at MASS MoCA, SPACE on Ryder Farm, among others, and will be a forthcoming Wave Hill Winter Workspace resident.

Poems to Myriam

Working in painting, textiles, and through direct community engagement, Natalia Nakazawa re-imagines alienating systems of collection and presentation. Drawing on her own multi-cultural background, Nakazawa seeks to heal collective amnesia by “filling in the gaps” in institutional narratives. Nakazawa poetically mines, integrates and honors individual diasporic archives and multi-cultural mythologies, often in the form of a tapestry that is simultaneously warm and disruptive. How do we understand who we are? How do we collectively create memory? For this body of cyanotype artworks, titled, “Poems to Myriam”, the artist  conceives of engaging with the landscape of Uruguay as an homage to her  grandmother, who passed a year ago. Working on inherited linens is an embodied nod to the generations of women’s labor and care that feeds into a long lineage of shared knowledge. The scents of eucalyptus, jazmin, and wild plant species populate the imagery – bringing together sensory memories of childhood. Community members of Pueblo Garzon were invited by the artist to create collective foraged patterns and bring them together to make a banner with these found materials.