Kelly Akashi: Formations

Kelly Akashi, Hybrid Life Forms, 2019–21. Lost-wax cast bronze, 3.5 × 7.5 × 9.5 inches. Courtesy of the artist, François Ghebaly Gallery, and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.
Kelly Akashi, Figure Shifter, 2018. Steel, wing screws, cherry wood, walnut wood, stainless steel, rope, blown glass, hair, ortho litho film, bronze, cotton thread, silk thread, brass wire, 72 × 72 × 12 inches. Courtesy of the artist, François Ghebaly Gallery, and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. Kelly Akashi: Formations on view at the San José Museum of Art September 3, 2022–April 23, 2023.
Kelly Akashi, Be Me (Japanese California Citrus), 2016. Lost-wax cast and polished stainless steel, 5.75 × 4.25 × 4.5 inches. Courtesy of the artist, François Ghebaly Gallery, and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. Kelly Akashi: Formations on view at the San José Museum of Art September 3, 2022–April 23, 2023.
Kelly Akashi, Inheritance, 2021. Poston stone, cast lead crystal, heirloom (grandmother's ring), 6 × 8 × 6 inches. Courtesy of the artist, François Ghebaly Gallery, and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. Kelly Akashi: Formations on view at the San José Museum of Art September 3, 2022–April 23, 2023.
Kelly Akashi, Cultivator, 2021. Bronze, hand-blown glass, stainless steel, 47.5 × 51 × 50 inches. Museum purchase with funds provided by Kimberly and Patrick Lin. Kelly Akashi: Formations on view at the San José Museum of Art September 3, 2022–April 23, 2023.
Kelly Akashi, Cultivator (Hanami) (detail), 2021. Flame-worked borosilicate glass and lost-wax cast bronze, 9 inches × 10 inches × 4 inches.

Saturday, September 3, 2022 – Sunday, May 21, 2023

Kelly Akashi is known for her materially hybrid works that are compelling both formally and conceptually. Originally trained in analog photography, the artist is drawn to fluid, impressionable materials and old-world craft techniques, such as glass blowing and casting, candle making, bronze and silicone casting, and rope making. Encompassing a selection of artworks made over the past decade, Kelly Akashi: Formations is the first major exhibition of the artist’s work, and will feature a newly commissioned series in which Akashi explores the inherited impact of her family’s imprisonment in a Japanese American incarceration camp during World War II.

Through evocative combinations that seem both familiar and strange, Akashi cultivates relationships among a variety of things to investigate how they can actively convey their histories and potential for change. She often pairs hand-blown glass or wax forms with unique and temporally specific bronze casts of her own hand, each a unique record of the slow-changing human body. Akashi’s interest in time—embedded in the materiality of many of her processes—has led her to study fossils and botany, locating humankind within a longer geological timeline.

Kelly Akashi: Formations is the first major exhibition and catalog of Akashi’s work. The exhibition will be on view from September 3, 2022–May 21, 2023 in San José before a West Coast tour.  After SJMA, the exhibition will travel to the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, June 17—September 3, 2023 and then to Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, September 21, 2023–February 18, 2024.

Exhibition Catalog

The exhibition catalog—the first scholarly monograph on the artist—will feature essays by Lauren Schell Dickens, Ruba Katrib, Dr. Jenni Sorkin; and a conversation between Akashi and painter Julien Nguyen. The book will also feature a special photography project by Akashi, created specifically for this publication.

Purchase now

Artist Biography

Born in 1983 in Los Angeles, Kelly Akashi currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. The artist graduated with a MFA from University of Southern California in 2014. Akashi studied at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste - Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main and received her BFA at Otis College of Art and Design in 2006.

The artist has presented solo projects at Aspen Art Museum (2020) and the SculptureCenter, New York (2017). Other notable group exhibitions include the Clark Art Institute (2021); Hammer Museum’s biennial, Made in L.A. (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (2017); Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, France (2017); The Jewish Museum, New York (2016); Can’t Reach Me There, Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis (2015). Winner of the 2019 Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Art Prize the artist had a residency at the foundation in Ojai, California. Other residencies include ARCH Athens, Greece (2019) and at Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA (2019) - both of which concluded with a solo exhibition.

Kelly Akashi’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Brooklyn Museum, New York; CC Foundation, Shanghai; M WOODS, Beijing; and Sifang Museum, Nanjing, China, among others.

Support

Kelly Akashi: Formations is supported by the SJMA Exhibitions Fund, with generous contributions from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Fellows of Contemporary Art, Kimberly and Patrick Lin, Lipman Family Foundation, Mr. Cole Harrell and Dr. Tai-Heng Cheng, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, Rita and Kent Norton, François Ghebaly Gallery, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Melanie and Peter Cross, and Wanda Kownacki.

Operations and programs at the San José Museum of Art are made possible by generous support from SJMA’s Board of Trustees, a Cultural Affairs Grant from the City of San José, the Lipman Family Foundation, the Adobe Foundation, the Richard A. Karp Charitable Foundation, Sally Lucas, Yvonne and Mike Nevens, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Yellow Chair Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Brook Hartzell and Tad Freese, the SJMA Director's Council and Council of 100, the San José Museum of Art Endowment Fund established by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the William Randolph Hearst Foundation.