Join us for a walkthrough of Voice a Wild Dream: Moments in Asian American Art and Activism, 1968-2022 with curator Kris Kuramitsu.
Kris Kuramitsu is Curator at Large at The Mistake Room, where she has organized exhibitions and programs such as Matsumi Kanemitsu: Metamorphic Effects (2014); Cao Fei: Shadow Plays (2015); Carlos Amorales: A Film Trilogy (2015); Histories of a Vanishing Present: A Prologue (2016) (co-curator); A Tender Spot: Sky Hopinka and Karrabing Film Collective (2018); Susu Attar: Isthmus (2018); Gaëlle Choisne: Temple of Love – ADORABLE (2019); and Where the Sea Remembers (2019) (co-curator).
As an independent curator, she has organized exhibitions for institutions such as LAXART, Los Angeles; Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, California; Instituto Cervantes, Madrid; Paramo, Guadalajara; and the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, in addition to managing private art collections. Most recently, she launched the Candlewood Arts Festival—an annual temporary public art exhibition project for the Under the Sun Foundation in the Anza Borrego Desert (2019-present).
She teaches at Harvey Mudd College, and, this fall, at Occidental College. Her previous posts include Associate Director for Artis; Programs Director at Creative Link for the Arts, New York; Curator for the collections of Eileen and Peter Norton and the Collection of Eileen Harris Norton; and the Arts Programs Director for the Peter Norton Family Foundation.
OXY ARTS’ curatorial residency program supports leading Los Angeles curators in a semester-long residency, providing the resources and support for them to teach a course centered on their scholarship for Occidental’s Art and Art History Department, and curate a group show that exhibits the themes illustrated in the course. Kuramitsu will be teaching “Seeing Asian American Art” in conjunction with this exhibition. Key texts from the course will be made available in the gallery space to visitors, and students from the course will participate in the exhibition’s public programs. The structure of the curatorial residency—bridging the academic and public programs at OXY ARTS—provides broader access to pedagogical resources and engages critical conversation around the works.
