Barbara Hashimoto’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States, Japan, Europe and the Middle East. It is in more than 300 collections, including The Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of American Art, The Museum of Arts and Design, The National Museum for Women in the Arts, and The Art Institute of Chicago (Joan Flasch Collection.)

Junk Mail | at the artist's studio | Chicago | 2007
photo credit: Eric Hoffhines

Previously based in Tokyo and Los Angeles, Hashimoto relocated to Chicago in 2006 as artist-in-residence at BauerLatoza Studio, a multi-disciplinary architecture firm.  Educated at Yale, she was also apprentice to Junko Yamada (Saitama Japan) and artist-in-residence under “intangible cultural asset” Minoru Fujimori (Shikoku, Japan) and at Umdang Ceramics (Dan Kwain, Thailand.) She studied dance in New York with Merce Cunningham and Meredith Monk and butoh in Tokyo with Iwani Masaki. 

Her most recent solo exhibitions were held at the Musée du Montparnasse, Paris and at Dubhe Carreño Gallery, Chicago.  Currently her work is also touring in Your Documents, Please, which opened at the Museum of Arts and Crafts, Itami, Japan and is traveling to Yokohama, Budapest, Berlin, Bratislava, and Guadalajara.

Though the role of materiality is significant, Hashimoto’s work is researched-based and conceptually driven. The foundation of her work is based in practice and repetition, this influenced by her formative training in dance and her years as an artist’s apprentice in Japan.

She is well known for her ceramic work in which she fires clay with books and reworks the resulting pieces with drawing, painting and collage. Her process alternatively destroys and enhances the original intention of the book and furthers the artist’s concerns with censorship, neo-narrative and the objectification of knowledge.

Hashimoto's integrated installation/performance work was first presented in Japan in the early 1990’s. She received a Durfee Foundation Grantin 2002 to remount these Japan-based works ("Pink Tatami" and "Tokyo Bay Project" in The U.S. "Everyman Was Her Slave" (2002- 2005), based on the writings of Emile Zola, and "Experience" (2005) based on John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding followed. Since 2007, she has been working with environmental/political themes, "Junk Mail" and "White Trash."

Pink Tatami | installation/performance | Japan | 1991
photo credit: Yoshi Hashimoto

The artist's work has been exhibited at The Smithsonian Institution, Museum of Arts and Design (New York), Musée du Montparnasse (Paris), Santa Monica Museum of Art, Laguna Art Museum, Craft, Folk Art Museum (Los Angeles), Paul Kopeikin Gallery (Los Angeles), Center for Arts and Visual Culture at The University of Maryland (Baltimore), Limbus Gallery (Tel Aviv), The New Gallery at Teddy Stadium (Jerusalem), LA Contemporary (Los Angeles), Ruth Bachofner Gallery (Los Angeles), Dubhe Carreno Gallery (Chicago), Dorothy Weiss Gallery (San Francisco), Kohler Art Center (Sheboygan), and more. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the following museums in Japan: Mito Modern Art Museum, Tokyo’s Ueno Royal Museum, Hokkaido Modern Art Museum, Fukuoka Museum, Gifu Museum, Shiga Museum, and Nagasaki Museum, and more.

Reviews and articles about Hashimoto’s work have appeared in Art in America, Art on Paper, The Los Angeles Times, Sculpture Magazine, Chicago Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor, World Sculpture News, ArtScene, L.A. Weekly, Bangkok Post, Asahi Shinbun, Jerusalem Post, Chicago Reader,  and other publications. Her work is featured in Emmanuel Cooper’s Contemporary Ceramics -- International Perspective.

LINK TO BARBARA HASHIMOTO'S RESUME