A multi-generational conversation about the significance of textiles

MONDAY MARCH 9th 2020
5:30 PM RECEPTION
6:30 PM LECTURE

LUKE AUDITORIUM
WO INTERNATIONAL CENTER
PUNAHOU SCHOOL
1601 PUNAHOU ST
HONOLULU, HI 96822

Co-Jurors Junco Sato Pollack and Maika Pollack share a conversation about fiber art, framed through their familial relationship. Textile artist and Professor Emeritus Junco Sato Pollack will discuss life as an artist after retirement, and share work from her recent solo exhibitions, as well as new work on paper made from Kudzu fiber. Art historian and curator Maika Pollack brings a cross-disciplinary perspective to consider fiber art in the larger context of cultural production and the history of art.

Sato Pollack will present a video of an exhibit mounted recently by the Kyoto Merchants Association on the history of kimono. The mother-daughter pair will discuss the art form of kimono, and what it means to each of them. Sato Pollack writes, "In the quest of where I came from and where I am going to, at every turn of my life, I find myself grounded in the tactile comfort of fabrics, fibers and colors, allowing me to express my knowing and its processes.”

FREE TO THE PUBLIC

Maika Pollack is the new director and chief curator of the John Young Museum of Art and University Galleries at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, where she is also assistant professor of art and art history. Pollack is an art historian, critic, and former gallery owner. In 2000, Pollack co-founded Southfirst, an art space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that was a reliable source of venturesome and eclectic shows by a multigenerational cast of artists. Pollack is also the founder of the publishing imprint Object Relations, and before opening Southfirst, she was a curatorial assistant at PS1 in Queens. Pollack received her Ph.D. from Princeton, with a dissertation on Odilon Redon focused on color and colonialism in French painting and printmaking of his era. She was a faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, from 2013 to 2018. She has also taught at Pratt and New York University.

Junco Sato Pollack (MFA, Textile Design, Rochester Institute of Technology 1991) is an artist and retired Associate Professor of Textiles at the E. G. Welch School of Art and Design of Georgia State University in Atlanta, GA, where she served 1992 – 2012. Native of Japan, and having lived in the United States for over 40 years, Pollack creates Zen-inspired meditative, abstract art textile works, fusing the Eastern aesthetics and sensibility with the kinetic energy of the West, and incorporating chance composition. Junco’s works are on display in public spaces, and are housed in the permanent collection of the Museum of Art and Design (MAD), New York, the Francis Loeb Library Materials Collection of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and the Wallace Library Collection of RIT, Rochester, New, York, and are included in numerous corporate and private collections. Her works are exhibited internationally in 30 cities in 13 countries around the globe in the past 30 years. Junco served as a jury for Fiber Hawaii '99, and now travels regularly between Georgia and Honolulu to visit her daughter and grand daughter.