As a young hiker in the Japanese Alps, Tamiko Kawata would crane her neck toward pine trees, mountains, and waterfalls—each encounter a lesson in scale and interdependence. These early experiences impressed upon her the sublime realization of one’s own fragility and interconnectedness within vast natural systems. In our contemporary moment, where individual agency often feels diminished by legislative oversight, the omnipresence of media, and deepening political division, Kawata’s artistic practice—and indeed her very way of being—urges a return to the small, the tactile, and the human. Her largest work to date, Together II, is a monumental, site-specific installation that magnifies the conceptual and poetic possibilities of her signature material: the safety pin. Through Kawata’s transformative vision, this humble everyday object becomes a metaphor for collective resilience and interdependence.
While studying Sculpture at the University of Tsukuba / Tokyo University of Education, Kawata developed her practice under the influence of avant-garde movements such as Dada and Bauhaus abstraction—all of which championed unconventional materials and the social significance of artistic production in the immediate aftermath of the war. When she immigrated to the United States from Japan in 1961, these ideas found physical form in the most modest of materials. Faced with the practical challenge of resizing American clothing that hung too long on her frame, Kawata turned to safety pins—then uncommon in Japan—as a quick fix. Necessity, however, gave way to discovery. The safety pin’s precise geometry, its quiet strength, and its capacity to bind inspired a career-long exploration. Kawata found beauty in what was meant to be hidden and supportive, a sense of elegance in the glint of steel, and a metaphor in the act of pinning. Through this object, she articulated the nuances of her diasporic experience: the interlocking of Japanese and American identities, the collective mending that defined her postwar youth, and the continual process of transformation through touch, adaptation, and intimate contact with the world.
Over the years, Kawata began ordering pins in bulk from a single wholesaler, Island Sewing Supplies, Inc., sustaining a relationship that now spans half a century. When contacted to fill the Together II order, Island’s Gilbert Colon responded with disbelief: “I was twenty years old when you first ordered from me—now I’m seventy!” This enduring exchange speaks to the care that threads itself through Kawata’s practice: an ongoing dialogue between artist, material, and community.
Together II comprises 150 boxes—over 600 pounds—of safety pins, totaling approximately 216,600 individual units. The work unfolds across the gallery walls as an immense, undulating wave of silver. At eighty-nine years old, Kawata embarked on this ambitious project in the same collaborative spirit that has long animated her work. In a new commission produced with Alison Bradley Projects, Kawata held a series of public workshops over two weeks in New York City. More than 120 participants—artists, students, neighbors, and volunteers—gathered to learn Kawata’s sculptural technique, assembling ten-foot chains of interlinked pins. The repetitive yet mindful act of linking pins became an exercise in both craft and communion, an embodiment of the interpersonal connections that sustain community life.
By openly inviting diverse volunteers of varying experiences into the creative process, Together II transforms collective labor into collective meaning. The installation foregrounds the generative power of organizing and mutual care in a time of fragmentation and uncertainty. As its title suggests, Together II continues the conversation begun with Celebration/Together (2020), a work that marked the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the defeat of Donald Trump, and Kamala Harris’s historic vice presidency. Similarly, Together II stands as both a political gesture and a social meditation—an act of gathering in the face of forces that seek to divide. Against the backdrop of resurgent nationalism, intolerance, and xenophobia, Kawata’s shimmering cascade of pins becomes a quiet but forceful countercurrent: a monument to inclusion, repair, and solidarity. The safety pin—long associated with working-class resilience and acts of mutual aid—here becomes a symbol of radical tenderness, linking together histories of labor, gender, and migration into one gleaming continuum.
Visually, the installation evokes the waterfall, a flowing torrent of silver that glimmers and sways against a deep indigo backdrop. This image draws from Kawata’s concept of nagare, the unifying flow of a running stream merging into larger waters. Through this metaphor, Together II invites viewers to imagine themselves as part of a global current—each individual strand contributing to a greater whole. Kawata’s sensitivity to materials mirrors that of a weaver, creating a texture that resembles draping fabric or rippling silk. The safety pin, humble on its own, gains strength through relation. The work thus becomes an embodiment of collectivity itself—its strength derived not from singularity but from the act of connection. The medium is the message: to link, to hold, to share weight is to be human.
In an era when traditional monuments—statues, plinths, memorials—are increasingly questioned for what and whom they commemorate, Kawata’s work proposes a different kind of monumentality: one rooted not in power, but in relation.Together II asks us to reconsider what endures and holds us together when so much seeks to pull us apart. Built through many hands and infused with many stories, the work offers itself as a living monument—an overflowing, life-giving refuge celebrating the generative potential of interdependence.
Text by Sofia Thiệu D’Amico
