Tomie Arai's works consist of temporary and permanent multimedia site-specific art pieces that deal with topics of gender, community, and racial identity, and are influenced by her Japanese heritage and the urban experience of living in New York.
17 Facts About Tomie Arai
1.
2.
Tomie Arai is highly involved in community discourse, co-founding the Chinatown Art Brigade.
3.
Tomie Arai's work is nationally exhibited and can be found in the collections of the Library of Congress, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Japanese American National Museum, the Williams College Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum.
4.
Tomie Arai's experiences growing up Asian American in New York City deeply color her work as an artist, as many of her works deal with the urban experience and attempt to make connections to her family and community through art.
5.
Tomie Arai joined the Basement Workshop in 1972 and there, learned about Asian American activism and making art along with other Asian American artists, including Arlan Huang.
6.
Between 1972 and 1979, Arai worked at Cityarts Workshop as a resource center coordinator and mural director, painting a series of community murals in New York City's Lower East Side.
7.
At the time, Tomie Arai created posters, brochures and promotional materials for community groups as part of Citibank's Graphic Support program.
8.
Tomie Arai was a co-founding member of the Asian American arts collective Godzilla, active in New York City during the 1990s.
9.
Tomie Arai stresses that artists need to build relationships with organizations and communities.
10.
An Asian American activist who participated in the political movements of the 1960s, Tomie Arai is still engaged in community work.
11.
Tomie Arai sat on the Boards of the Museum of Chinese in the Americas, where she served as its first artist-in-residence, the Lower East Side Printshop, Printed Matter, the Women's Studio Workshop and the Bread and Roses Cultural Project of the 1199 Health and Hospitals Workers Union.
12.
Tomie Arai is currently serving on the Board of Directors of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.
13.
Renewal by Tomie Arai was commissioned in 1995 and was installed in the Ted Weiss Federal Building in 1998.
14.
Later, in 2006, Tomie Arai constructed the site-specific work Swirl out of wood, steel, and silk screened photographs of local members of the community.
15.
Tomie Arai created Back to the Garden in 2007, located in Pelham Parkway.
16.
Tomie Arai's work is in the permanent collections in museums including the Museum of Modern Art, Library of Congress, Museum of Chinese in the Americas, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
17.
In 1997 Tomie Arai was included in Just Like Me: Self Portraits and Stories which was edited by Harriet Rohmer and published by Children's Book Press.