Akiko Ichikawa

Akiko Ichikawa (アキーコー・イチカワ also 市川 明子 Ichikawa Akiko) is a New York City-based interdisciplinary visual artist, writer, and editor.^[1][2] She has exhibited her work in The Hague, Berlin, New York City, Washington D.C., Newark, St. Paul, Minnesota, and Incheon, South Korea. She has also written on contemporary and 20th century art and culture for Flash Art, Art in America, zingmagazine, and Hyperallergic.

Her article on the photography of Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and Toyo Miyatake at Manzanar for Hyperallergic went viral in fall 2016, following comments by a spokesperson of a Trump-supporting PAC on Fox News.

Early life and education

Ichikawa's family emigrated to the US, via San Francisco, when she was three. She grew up with two siblings in the suburbs of Boston and Nashville,^[3] and attended Brown University graduating from the former with honors. She moved to New York City four days later eventually entering Hunter College's MFA program. She currently lives and works in New York City.^[4][5]

Work

Her concept-based artwork exists in the forms of performance art, installation art^[6] and net.art. Her performance works^[4][7] include a series of site-specific gifting performances called Limited, Limited Edition which she has presented at Socrates Sculpture Park, in Long Island City, Queens;^[8] in Jamaica, Queens; at the Incheon Women Artists' Biennale in Incheon, South Korea;^[9] at On Stellar Rays gallery in the Lower East Side; in three locations in Newark, New Jersey for Aljira Center for Contemporary Art,^[10] in a school yard in East Harlem; on 14th Street as a part of the Art in Odd Places performance festival, and on H Street NE in Washington D.C.^[11] For Bad Kanji (2015), she painted temporary kanji tattoos on viewers at the Spring/Break Art Show, held in the historic office spaces above New York City's main post office, the James A. Farley Post Office. The work was reviewed favorably.^[12]

She also works as an art historian and has enacted two of Fluxus-member Alison Knowles's event scores, namely #5 Wounded Furniture and #3 Nivea Cream Piece.^[11][13] The latter was live-blogged on Hyperallergic^[14] and well-received, with Kyle Chayka writing that it was "definitely among [his] favorites."^[15] In 2015, Ichikawa wrote about the Japanese American incarceration through the photography of Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and Toyo Miyatake for Hyperallergic went viral, shared over 8,000 times on Facebook.^[16][17] In 2018, she reminded New York art world readers about the Golden Venture incident, which marked the start of contemporary punitive immigration policies at the presidential level, under President Bill Clinton.^[18]

In addition to art in the Aughts that simulated a series of imagined art installations, Ichikawa has created Internet art in the form of a series of Facebook groups around food organized by color, touching upon issues of cultural identity, food sourcing, gentrification, environmental concerns, and greenwashing while sharing nutrition and cost-cutting tips: I ♥ Yellow Food, I ♥ Orange Food, I ♥ Red Food, I ♥ Green Food, and I ♥ Blue Food.^{[19][20][21][22]} While not supportive of Facebook's history of massive online-privacy violations, its carrying the 2016 Republican National Convention, and its other roles in the empowerment of Donald J. Trump's presidential candidacy (along with other mainstream media),^[23][24] the artist nevertheless viewed the social media site as an effective, user-friendly way to include as many participants as possible. She has lately turned also to Instagram, owned by Facebook.^[25]

Ichikawa's art before 2005 was primarily built around the placement and assembly of basic construction materials in gallery spaces. She presented one such installation for her solo exhibition at Momenta Art^[26][27] and another at Andrew Kreps gallery in a group exhibition curated by Dean Daderko^[28][29] (now a curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston).^[30] The series evolved into a Net.art piece, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? that is permanently stored on Rhizome.org.^[22]

Art writing

She has written on contemporary art for Flash Art on the work of Ken Lum, Laurel Nakadate, Dan Peterson, Yasue Maetake, and, for NY Arts magazine, the work of Jane and Louise Wilson^[31] and for Zing Magazine, the work of Siah Armajani.^[32][33]

In 2015, she wrote about the photography of Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and Toyo Miyatake and the Japanese American incarceration for Hyperallergic.^[16][17] The article received its biggest spike in interest (about 5,000 more Facebook shares, totaling 8,000) after the spokesman of a Trump-supporting PAC cited the Japanese American incarceration as precedent for a Muslim registry on Fox News in early November 2016.^[34] In 2018, she covered the folded paper work of the Golden Venture migrants held in York, Pennsylvania that was shown at the Museum of Chinese in America, in New York City.^[18]

She has also written about the closing of Tekserve, the performance of a group of young area Native American musicians, and, with Danielle Wu, performance art by young artists of Asian descent in a New York City-based performance art festival.^[35] In 2018, she wrote about the paper-folding work of the Golden Venture migrants for Art in America online^[36] and served as the social media writer for #callresponse during its New York City exhibition run at EFA Project Space.^[37]

Awards

• 2013 Cuts and Burns Residency, Outpost Artists Resources
• 2003 Longwood Arts Project and Residency, the Bronx
• 2002 Middlebrook-Sugano Fellowship, Djerassi Artists Residency
• 2000 Independent Project Grant, Artists Space

Family

Her younger sister, Yoko Ichikawa, is an Oakland, California-based part-time graphic designer.^[38] Her younger brother, Kenshin Ichikawa,^[39][40] founded and designed Rocksmith streetwear, which has done collaborative lines with the Wu Tang Clan, Malcolm X's daughters, and a music video with Future, among other things. Rocksmith has also been worn by all of the major American hip-hop stars.^[41][42] Yoko is a graduate of Wesleyan University, where she majored in West African dance, Kenshin a graduate of Columbia University, and married to UC Berkeley Food Institute policy director Nina Fallenbaum.^[43][44]

Notes

See also

• Limited, Limited Edition (Incheon) on Vimeo
• Sharing Kanji on Vimeo
• Interview by Native Art Department
• Audience reaction to a 2011 performance of Alison Knowles's #3 Nivea Cream Piece on YouTube