30 Facts About Shigeko Kubota

Shigeko Kubota was a Japanese video artist, sculptor and avant-garde performance artist, who mostly lived in New York City.

Shigeko Kubota was a key member and influence on Fluxus, the international group of avant-garde artists centered on George Maciunas, having been involved with the group since witnessing John Cage perform in Tokyo in 1962 and subsequently moving to New York in 1964.

Shigeko Kubota was deemed "Vice Chairman" of the Fluxus Organization by Maciunas.

Shigeko Kubota is known for her contribution to the expansion of the field of video into the field of sculpture and for her works addressing the place of video in art history.

Shigeko Kubota's work explores the influence of the technology, and more specifically the television set, on personal memory and the emotions.

Shigeko Kubota was born as the second oldest of four girls to a family of monk lineage associated with a Buddhist temple in Niigata Prefecture, Japan, where she lived through World War II.

Shigeko Kubota described herself as "of a religious Buddhist family," and familial connections to monastic life would inform later Zen concepts in her work.

Shigeko Kubota drew on these vivid memories of death in her video art.

Shigeko Kubota's parents appreciated the arts and supported their children in studying them, despite the expectation of women to work as part of the productive force at the time.

Shigeko Kubota's maternal grandfather was a calligrapher and landowner who encouraged his daughter and his granddaughters to pursue various arts.

Shigeko Kubota observed how untraditional the tour performers, including Yoko Ono, were in destroying every convention of music; she thus thought to herself that if Cage's music was accepted in New York, she should be accepted there, too.

Shigeko Kubota found affinities between herself and Cage because she felt unappreciated in the Japanese art world due to her unconventionality.

Shigeko Kubota actively maintained close relationships with Japanese avant-garde artists in Tokyo, especially bringing the activities of Hi Red Center to the attention of Maciunas and other Fluxus members.

Shigeko Kubota continued her studies at New York University and the New School for Social Research.

Shigeko Kubota taught at the School of Visual Arts, and was video artist-in residence at Brown University in 1981; at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1973,1981,1982, and 1984; and at the Kunst Akademie in Dusseldorf in 1979.

Shigeko Kubota helped to coordinate the first annual Women's Video Festival at The Kitchen in 1972.

From 1974 to 1982 Shigeko Kubota served as the first video curator, and one of the few women or people of color, associated with the Anthology Film Archives.

Shigeko Kubota died in Manhattan, New York on July 23,2015, at the age of 77 from cancer.

Shigeko Kubota became the founding director of the Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation, located in her historic home in SoHo.

Shigeko Kubota emphasized eulogy in many of her artistic pursuits and was similarly eulogized by museums and the foundation created in her name.

Shigeko Kubota was one of the first artists to commit to video art and new media, long before its status as an art form was widely recognized.

Shigeko Kubota was known for early video making on the Sony Portapak, one of the first compact individually-operated cameras, as previous models required whole crews.

Shigeko Kubota utilized especially the landscapes of the American West as an infinite and untamed expanse that recall the nomadic movements of people, including herself as a Japanese artist living in America and moving through the international art world.

In 1977, Shigeko Kubota married the artist Nam June Paik after divorcing her first husband, the composer David Behrman, in 1969.

Shigeko Kubota didn't listen to me, so I decided to do it myself, in the late Sixties.

Shigeko Kubota did not explicitly include feminist themes in her artwork, but rather allowed her own views on gender issues, femininity, the male gaze, and the intersection of the body with technology and nature, to influence her artwork.

Midori Yoshimoto writes that Shigeko Kubota's Vagina Painting, which is her most explicit work about gender in art, was poorly received by her peers involved in Fluxus, similarly to ways in which Yoko Ono and Carolee Schneemann's performances were considered "un-Fluxus" because of their strong emphasis on feminine subjects.

Shigeko Kubota exhibited tons of crumpled paper, which she called 'love letters' mounted on the walls and ceiling and covered in white cloth, which she called a Beehive.

Shigeko Kubota placed the paintbrush at the site of phallic lack, which breaks into a new type of female empowerment.

In Video Poem, Shigeko Kubota's self-portrait is displayed on a small monitor that viewers can see through a vulva-shaped opening of a purple bag.