Artist Story: Gabriel Bizen Akagawa

I was born in 1977 in St. Paul, MN. When I was a toddler, I fell into a hole filled with water that had been dug to plant a silver maple. I bobbed up and down with my diaper as a floatation device. This tree grew to over thirty feet tall due to, as my mother claims, my excellent digestive system. I was educated in the public school system. During this time I volunteered planting gardens and trees with my mother and sister. My high school seemed to be built to resemble a prison. My mother felt it was her (our) responsibility to change this aesthetic by greening the landscape despite the concerns of the administration that bushes and trees would be havens for concealing deviant behavior and crime.

For my undergraduate education, I attended Macalester College where I studied studio art and crafted wooden sculpture and utilitarian objects. I used tree trunks and limbs from the city’s recycling center where we acquired woodchips for community planting projects. After storms that broke branches and uprooted trees, giant piles would be accumulated and lay bleached by the sun for months before being mulched. These stacks of limbs reminded me of images of severed elephant tusks, the bounties of poachers I had seen in National Geographic. They were remains of creatures longer-lived than myself.

After receiving my B.A., I moved to Chicago with my spouse for graduate school. Anne Knafl is a biblical scholar at University of Chicago. Her academic concentration on anthropomorphism in the bible influenced my inclusion of collecting and crafting tree stories into my woodworking practice. Wood as a ubiquitous material became as interesting to me once I realized its pervasiveness as a mythical creature.

I received a post-baccalaureate certificate and MFA in sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where I began to integrate ideas of art from life. I started to turn gallery spaces into social spaces where benches and sculpture became locations of conversation. My actions were motivated by the hope of changing my relationship to the audience from passive to familial. To do this, I drew from my own family in Chicago, St. Paul, Tokyo and Akita.

My Oba-chan and Ojii-chan (grandmother and grandfather) were barbers and taught their daughter and her husband the art of a practical haircut, commonly accompanied with a massage. I give free massages in performances to encourage relaxation and physical awareness. Many people sit at desks and work late into the night, ignoring the needs and rhythms of our bodies. My own indiscretions, compromising my health while creating art or working on the computer too long, have motivated this project. It is difficult to find quiet moments in our lives to notice our physical needs and even pain. I am interested in raising awareness about both personal and physical boundaries. These “free” massages are often in exchange for local stories about “nature” and “health” creating a dialog between members of a larger family community.

Before moving to Chicago, my mother wanted me to tear out her old deck and build a new one. The back deck of my mother’s house had rotted out after 25 years. For me, a deck is a tree. Although stripped, sawn, shipped, and screwed, it is a manifestation of its history. I brought left-over cedar planking from the deck to Chicago. I decided to create my own, portable, backpack deck. In the Deck Project, I elevated mundane habits of daily life, such as sitting on a deck, into ritual status. In Chicago, the ever-present, often postage-stamp sized decks confused me. The small city deck is a strange liminal space, which is both public and private, which I imitate for intimate physical and verbal exchanges. On many apartments and condos, deck patios can measure less than 12 square feet, but somehow important connection to the outdoors, “nature”, and to others as a socializing space.

Downtown, everyone seemed to be a commuter, a nomad. I became one of them, traveling with my home, or a part of it, on me. Often wearing a hanten, a traditional Japanese housecoat, I started to perform massages for people who sat in the plastic chair on top of my cedar deck. These head, neck, hand and arm massages further suggested intimate space by providing a gift through physical communication.

My family and life with them are intimately connected to my activities as an art practitioner. My great-uncle was a lantern maker, and I am told my ancestors were sword-smiths to Samurai. I teach object making, craft, and casting metal. My uncle is a businessman who incorporates green technology into his designs for water filtration. I use methods of construction that use local products, reusing materials, as well as trading and collaborating in an attempt to have a more harmonious relationship with the world. My in-laws are academics in the field of nursing. I teach art theory and process of art as medicine. My mother, a German-Minnesotan, was trained as a painter and designs and plans gardens. I grew up eating whole and minimally processed foods and vegetables from our gardens and from local farmer’s markets and coops. We recycled and reused because these were practices passed down from my grandparents “green” actions during war and on my great grandparents’ farm during the Great Depression. Caring about materials is about respecting the relationships to the environment of the past, present and future.

Gabriel Bizen Akagawa currently teaches in the Sculpture department and is an Academic Advisor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Akagawa primarily works locally in Chicagoland. His art works takes many different forms including objects, installations, performances, social events, curatorial, collaborative and web-based projects. He situates his art and curatorial practices in the context of nature, holistic structures, and medicinal values.