Kazuko Miyamoto – Conversations

With String Constructions, KW Institute for Contemporary Art presents the first solo presentation of Japanese-American artist Kazuko Miyamoto (b. 1942, Tokyo) in Germany, focusing on Miyamoto’s works from the 1970s and 1980s. The exhibitionwill feature a selection of Miyamoto’s key works, with a particular focus on her String Constructions and paperwork installations. Spread across the institution’s first, second, and third floor, the presentation lends a voice to Miyamoto; a leading figure in the Post-Minimal and feminist movements in New York since 1964. Meeting artist Sol LeWitt in 1968 and becoming his long-term assistant, Miyamoto became crucial in the production and development of LeWitt’s cube sculptures and wall drawings. Yet, her own spatial installations, i.e., in her sculptures made of string and nails, tookon a much more performative sensibility, looking at the body’s relationship to space, material, and politics of labor and display. Beginning of the mid-1970s, the artist organized presentations at the artist-run A.I.R. Gallery from 1974 to 1983, which was the first exhibition space run by and dedicated to women artists. As the founder of Gallery Onetwentyeight, Miyamoto also played a vital role in promoting feminist art and collective art practices. 

Kazuko Miyamoto: Conversations is the accompanying publication of the exhibition featuring newly commissioned conversations and contributions by key persons who’ve lived and worked with Miyamoto throughout her career, as an attempt to circle in on her very distinctive and embodied process of working as well as on the ephemeral quality of her works. The conversations will span the different decisive phases of Miyamoto’s career and their inherent turns – and count voices like i.e., Carol LeWitt, Eizan Miyamoto, Senga Nengudi, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Adrian Piper, as well as archival documents from A.I.R. Gallery and more.