Yuriko Yamaguchi | Artist & Sculptor

Yuriko Yamaguchi received her MFA from the University of Maryland and her BA from the University of California at Berkeley.  Her works are in museum collections, among them the Museum of Modern Art, Kanagawa, Japan, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the National Museum of Women in the Arts and Smithsonian American Art Museum.  She has earned many awards and fellowships for her work including Jentel Artist residency, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center residency, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the Joan Mitchell award and National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship.  Yamaguchi has executed major public commissions at the Hartsfield International Airport, Atlanta, Georgia, the Washington Convention Center, Washington, DC and the Light Rail Project (called CATS: Charlotte Area Transit System), Charlotte, North Carolina.  She has exhibited widely across the United States, including the Los Angeles County Museum, Hirshhorn Museum, and Museum of Modern Art in Kamakura, Japan, Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton, MA, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC among others.  She is represented by Adamson Gallery in Washington, DC, Howard Scott Gallery in New York, Koplin Gallery in Los Angels and Don Soker Gallery in San Francisco.  She is currently an adjunct professor of Sculpture at the George Washington University in Washington, DC.  Web site:  http://www.yurikoyamaguchiart.com

Yamaguchi’ sculptures, compelling in their ambiguity, explore the interconnectedness of humans and nature with themes that include growth, change, and vulnerability.  Yamaguchi is known as an “ecophilosopher,” someone who seeks to find the “hidden connections between everything,” from nature to the computers.  She is fascinated by the paradox of how humans struggle with ‘individual free will in a terminally interdependent world’ represented in the form of abstract sculpture made mostly of inorganic materials such as resin, steel, wire, brass.  Yamaguchi models and manipulates the inorganic gives dynamic life and emotion to each piece while exploring the interconnectedness of our world. (by Megan Cox, Kreeger Museum intern, Washington, DC)