Kazuko Miyamoto

Among the freest of free spirits, few artists wore that distinction as well as Kazuko Miyamoto. A wide-angle view of her sixty-year practice reveals a methodical investigation of structuring principles grounded in material and corporeal forms in service of feminist doxa and praxis. From the String Constructions of the 1970s—nail-pinned, cotton string spatial drawings—to the kimono-shaped wooden patterns and fabric garments of the 2000s, Miyamoto’s work combines conceptual rigor and formal generosity. This generosity extended into activism: from participant to organizer and ultimately gallerist, Miyamoto supported women artists through the collective, woman-only A.I.R. Gallery (since 1974) and her own no-membership space, Onetwentyeight, still active at 128 Rivington Street. From Sol LeWitt to David Hammons, Ana Mendieta, and Howardena Pindell, Miyamoto’s exhibition-making activities and how they sprung from the artistic life on the streets are presented for the first time at the 13th Berlin Biennale in a slideshow rendered in the grainy iconicity of historical memory.

Yet, it is still another aspect of Miyamoto’s work, integral to her existence as a non-European immigrant artist active in the precarious downtown New York art scene of the vanishing twentieth century that is most fittingly presented in Artists’ Street: her keen attention to the street and its inhabitants, from the sex workers who allowed her to photograph them to the homeless men with whom she collaborated, as exemplified by Waiting for the Carnival (1983). Referencing Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952), Waiting for the Carnival is remembered through artistic photographs of Miyamoto dressed as a homeless person meandering from the A.I.R. Gallery through the Lower East Side and ending in front of the avantgarde performance art space, Franklin Furnace. Life performs art performs life.

Text: Claire Tancons