Alison Bradley Projects is pleased to present Together Too, Tamiko Kawata’s second exhibition with the gallery. Spanning six decades of creative inquiry, the exhibition brings together works on paper, sculptures, and a new site-specific installation.
At the core of the exhibition is Kawata’s largest work to date, Together II: Waterfall, a monumental installation comprising approximately 216,600 safety pins arranged in sweeping silver waves that inundate the gallery walls. Created in collaboration with Alison Bradley Projects, the installation emerged through a series of public workshops, where over 120 participants joined Kawata to assemble chains of interlinked pins. The collective process—repetitive, tactile, and meditative—embodies the work’s themes of labor, unity and mutual care.
To encounter Kawata’s work is to engage directly with her biography. Her intimate practice excavates the intersections of Japanese and American identities, particularly 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. 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.
Fashioned by many hands with many stories, Together II is both a political gesture and a social meditation on what connects us — and divides us. Tamiko Kawata: Together Too demonstrates not only Kawata’s decades-long investigation into her chosen medium, the safety pin, but also invites the viewer to consider its multiplicity not only as a humble fastener but as a medium of relationality and connectivity.
For more information, please contact Claire Foussard at claire@alisonbradleyprojects.com.
Dates:
November 20, 2025 – January 24, 2026
Reception: Thursday, November 20, from 6:00–8:00 p.m.
Location:
Alison Bradley Projects
526 West 26th Street, Suite 814
New York, NY 10001
