Born in Kobe in 1936, Tamiko Kawata came of age in post-war Japan. As such, a persistent defiance of traditional gender roles and class hierarchies became core to both her personal and professional mission. Kawata studied Sculpture at the University of Tsukuba / Tokyo University of Education, where she embraced Bauhaus design principles and the avant-garde aesthetic philosophies of Dada and Bauhaus, breaking free from the dominant “École de Paris” curricula popular in Japan at the time. After graduating in 1959, Kawata worked as an artist-designer with Kagami Crystal Glass Works in Tokyo and, as the company’s first woman designer, earned the second highest salary in the nation, and the highest national women’s salary at age 23. In 1961, satisfied with her glass work and seeking to escape the prevailing expectations of marriage, Kawata immigrated to the United States, settling in New York City in 1962 where she continues to live and work. Once there, built a successful professional life as a designer, producing jewelry and modernist home objects with an acute awareness of material properties. She attended the classes of Adda-Husted Andersen, a Danish silversmith, at the Craft Student League of YWCA. Soon after, Kawata later took her place in a teaching position there for metal fabrication and small sculpture classes from 1979 until they closed the facilities in 2005. After the Craft Students League, Kawata taught at 92nd Street Y until 2015 when her husband’s Lewy Body dementia progressed.
To encounter Kawata’s work is to engage directly with her biography: her intimate practice excavates the intersections of Japanese and American identity, especially the material particularities of her diasporic experience. Kawata first began using safety pins, not commonly used in Japan, to adapt to American clothing sizes, which were often too long for her. Beginning with a safety pin wearable art collection—which was written up in the New York Times in 1973—the artist began weaving them into metal sculptures in 1978.
As a sculptor, Kawata harnesses the safety pin’s interlocking, additive energy, to create delicate chains, sprawling meshes, gridded weavings, and undulating sculptural forms. Inspired by bamboo shoots, nests, and anemones, these works are both biomorphic and geometric. Skillfully experimenting with the textural qualities of metal and thoughtfully-timed exposure to the elements, Kawata achieves a range of tones, from a pristine nickel, to a golden tarnish, to a rich rust. The prosaic safety pin stands as an emblem of women’s labor, namely in the hemming of clothes and work with textile, craft, childcare. In the artist’s sculptural work, they become a clever response to adjacent movements and practices: they nod to Ruth Asawa’s organic looped-wire sculptures while also complicating the minimalist grids of Agnes Martin and Sol LeWitt.
Kawata’s work has been the subject of many solo and group exhibitions. Key institutional holdings include Honolulu Contemporary Art Museum (Honolulu, Hawaii), Lafcadio Hearn/Yakumo Koizumi Art Museum (Matsue, Japan), Museum for Arts & Design/MAD Museum (New York, NY), Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Montreal, Canada), LongHouse Reserve Permanent Collection, (East Hampton, NY), and PREC Institute (Tokyo, Japan) among others.