Upcoming Exhibitions

Press Release

Wakana Kimura

Journey to the West: Alien of Extraordinary Ability

Exhibition Dates: Saturday, November 2nd – Saturday, December 14, 2024
Reception: Saturday, November 2nd, 4:00 pm – 6:30 pm

Events listed at the end of the page

PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is pleased to welcome Japanese artist Wakana Kimura in her first solo exhibition with the gallery, Journey to the West: Alien of Extraordinary Ability. 

The classic Chinese novel Journey to the West, attributed to Wu Cheng’en, is a tale of pilgrimage, hardship, and loss. It tells the story of the Buddhist monk Tang Sanzang, who travels West to gather sacred texts, encountering many challenges and enduring great suffering throughout their passage. Tang Sanzang is not alone on this pilgrimage; he has guardians to protect as well as demons to obstruct. This legendary tale parallels the 7th-century Buddhist monk Xuanzang, whose travels to the Western regions (India) took 17 years, resulting in a collection of original Sanskrit texts conveyed to China using scores of mules. 

The title of Wakana Kimura’s exhibition Journey to the West: Alien of Extraordinary Ability offers homage to this extraordinary tale. Kimura presents a personal story, in pictorial majesty, of her journey West, but for her story, West is Los Angeles, California. In Kimura’s chronicling, her 17 year odyssey is of a young Japanese woman who leaves her culture and home, moves to Los Angeles, goes to school, works, lives, and learns the language and culture of a country and region unfamiliar to her. She receives a visa, then a green card, identifying her as an “Alien of Extraordinary Ability.” Metaphorically retracing the rewards and hardships of the Journey to the West, she blazes her future. Her demons and guardians are front and center in this exquisite body of paintings, not as a threat or regret but as a powerful reimagining of retaining and transcending identity.

Kimura’s unique studio practice is a symbolic mash-up of East and West, graffiti, Japanese Anime, Buddhist painting. She employs hybrid Buddhist iconography and mythological characters from many cultures, mixing them in her loose, brushy drawings and paintings of mixed metaphors. Her contemporized figures are cloaked in hot colors, genderless, and exaggerated with distorted time lines and mismatched cultures. Her work also speaks of the migration of culture, as people sought safety from India to China, to Korea, and Japan; how cultural accommodation was shaped by the impact of multiple wars, dominated by warring patriarchies. Understanding the recondite paintings of Kimura is its own journey through symbolic language.

On view in the exhibition will be Wakana Kimura’s Guardian portraits mounted on scrolls by Master Hyogushi, Shosaku Yoshimura. Mr. Yoshimura is a third-generation hyogushi (master scroll and screen mounter), one of only a handful of hyogushi who are allowed to repair and restore Japanese national treasures. The collaboration between Mr. Yoshimura and Kimura is unique; he agreed to come out of retirement to design and mount Kimura’s paintings because he valued her vision and relished the challenge of melding a centuries-old tradition with a contemporary artist’s vision of Buddhist iconography. The paintings are on Udagami paper, traditionally produced in Yoshino, Nara Prefecture, a type of pure mulberry paper containing white clay derived from crushed limestone, often used for the restoration of Japanese cultural properties.

Along with the stunning scrolls will be a large mural, LA Mandala, exhibited during the 2023 City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs Independent Master Artist Project (COLA) exhibition. We expect the 314-inch-wide painting, comprised of four panels, to span the length of the gallery’s first room. 

We’re also pleased to announce that Wakana Kimura’s select scroll paintings will be on view in our booth at Untitled Art Fair in December 2024.

Wakana Kimura was born in 1978 in Izu, Shizuika, Japan. She lives and works in Los Angeles and Japan. She received her MFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2011 and a BFA from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2002. Kimura is the recipient of the 2023 COLA Independent Artist Project, Los Angeles; the 2017-2020 Robertson Recreation Center mural from the Department of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles; and in 2013, she received a commission from the Los Angeles Metro, Through the Eyes of the Artist. Museum exhibitions include RSVP Los Angeles: The Project Series at Pomona, Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont; IMA, Hinokisoken, Museum Meiji-Mura, Aichi, Japan; and Invoke, Udatsu no Kogei Kan Museum, Fukui.

Event:
Saturday, November 16^th at 1:00 pm
In Conversation: Asian art historian Meher McArthur interviews artist Wakana Kimura.

Meher McArthur is an Asian art historian specializing in Japanese art, with degrees from Cambridge University and London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). She was Curator of East Asian Art at Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena, CA (1998-2006), Creative Director for the Storrier Stearns Japanese Garden, Pasadena (2014-2020), Academic Curator for Scripps College, Claremont (2018-2020) and Art and Cultural Director for JAPAN HOUSE Los Angeles (2020-2022).

Select publications include Gods and Goblins: Folk Paintings from Otsu, Pacific Asia Museum; Reading Buddhist Art, Thames & Hudson; The Arts of Asia, Thames & Hudson; An ABC of What Art Can Be, Getty Museum and New Expressions in Origami Art, Tuttle.

Press Release

Untitled Art Miami Beach

With great pleasure, we announce our participation in Untitled Art Miami Beach 2024. Each year, new and long-standing exhibitors are selected by Untitled Art’s evolving curatorial team for their artistic integrity and international reach. Untitled Art will take place Wednesday, December 4 through Sunday, December 8, 2024, with a VIP and Press Preview Tuesday, December 3rd.

PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY will present three artists: from Japan, the scrolls of Wakana Kimura; from the San Francisco Bay Area, the glitter works of Jamie Vasta; and from New York, the mixed media sculpture of Linda Sormin. PDF Previews will be available upon request in October.

• Address: Ocean Drive and 12th Street, Miami Beach, Florida

• VIP and Press Preview: Tuesday, 3 Dec 10am-7pm

• Opening Hours:

  Wed, 4 Dec 11am-7pm
  Thurs, 5 Dec 11am-7pm
  Fri, 6 Dec 11am-7pm
  Sat, 7 Dec 11am-7pm
  Sun, 8 Dec 11am-5pm

Press Release

John Paul Morabito

Take Me To Heaven

Exhibition Dates: January 11 – February 22, 2025
Reception: Saturday, January 11th from 4:00 pm – 7:00 pm

Events: TBA

PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is thrilled to present the dazzling woven, beaded tapestries of John Paul Morabito in their first one-person exhibition with the gallery. The title of the exhibition, Take Me To Heaven, references the famed Black, Queer, disco icon of the 70’s, Sylvester! Sylvester’s music, lyrics, and gender fluid persona gave voice to the cultural and political shifts in America when sexual energy pulsed in clubs throughout urban centers, where seduction, drag, sparkle, protest, coming out, demands for equal rights and decriminalization began ripping through the hetero-normative walls of the United States. Morabito’s luminous tapestries tower as a metaphoric rallying cry, “This is a retracing of the queer resistance born in urban discos of a prior generation. As social and political forces once again seek to eradicate queer people, I, like those who came before me, reach for the promise of queer futurity.”