Akiko Ichikawa

Akiko Ichikawa (アキーコ・イチカワ also 市川 明子 Ichikawa Akiko) is a New York-based interdisciplinary visual artist and writer. In addition to four boroughs of New York City, she has exhibited her work in The Hague, Berlin, Washington DC, Newark, St. Paul, Minnesota, and Incheon, South Korea.^[1][2] She has written for Flash Art, Hyperallergic, Zing Magazine, and other publications.

Early life and education

Her family moved to the US, San Francisco, when she was three. She grew up in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts and Nashville, Tennessee and attended Brown University and Hunter College's MFA program. She currently lives and works in New York City.^[3][4]

Work

Her concept-based work exists in the forms of performance art, installation art^[5] and net.art. Her performances^[3][6] include a series of site-specific gifting performances called Limited, Limited Edition she presented at Socrates Sculpture Park, in Astoria, Queens;^[7] in Jamaica, Queens; at the Incheon Women Artists' Biennale in Incheon, South Korea;^[8] at On Stellar Rays gallery in the Lower East Side; in three locations in Newark, New Jersey for Aljira Center for Contemporary Art,^[9] in P.S. 101's school yard in East Harlem; and on H Street NE in Washington D.C.^[10] For Bad Kanji, a 2015 gifting performance, she painted temporary kanji tattoos at the Spring/Break Art Show, held in the Skylight Studios above the James A. Farley Post Office in New York City.^[11]

She has performed two of Fluxus-member Alison Knowles's event scores, namely #5 Wounded Furniture and #3 Nivea Cream Piece.^[10][12] The latter was live-blogged on Hyperallergic.^[13]

In addition to an early work on Rhizome that simulates a series of imagined but impossible art installations for the Internet, Ichikawa has created has a series of blogs on Facebook around food organized by color, touching upon issues of cultural identity, politics, gentrification, and environmentalism while addressing nutrition and greenwashing: I ♥ Yellow Food, I ♥ Orange Food, I ♥ Red Food, I ♥ Green Food, and I ♥ Blue Food.^{[14][15][16][17]} While not enthusiastic about Facebook's history of massive online-privacy violations, the artist nevertheless views the social media site as an effective, user-friendly way to reach as many viewers and participants as possible.

Ichikawa's art before 2005 was primarily built around the placement and assembly of basic construction materials in open spaces. She presented one such installation for her solo exhibition at Momenta Art^[18][19][20] and another at Andrew Kreps gallery in a group exhibition curated by Dean Daderko, now a curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.^[21]

Art writing

She has written on contemporary art for Flash Art, the Milan-based art magazine, on the work of Ken Lum, Laurel Nakadate, Dan Peterson and, for NY Arts magazine, the work of Jane and Louise Wilson^[22] and for Zing Magazine, the work of Siah Armajani.^[23][24]

In 2015, she wrote about the photography of Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and Toyo Miyatake and the Japanese American incarceration for Hyperallergic.^[25][26]

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

She has a younger sister, Yoko Ichikawa, an Oakland, California-based graphic designer who teaches part-time at San Francisco's Academy of Art University,^[27] and a younger brother, Rocksmith streetwear founder and president, Kenshin Ichikawa.^[28][29] Yoko is a graduate of Wesleyan University, Kenshin a graduate of Columbia University, who is married to food writer Nina Fallenbaum.^[30]

Notes

See also

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