Barbara Schroeder

Karin Higa: Hidden in Plain Sight was coorganized by AAPI Arts Network and Hammer Museum to highlight the legacy of the late curator, writer, and cultural activist Karin Higa. to explore the many legacies of the late curator, organizer, and art historian Karin Higa (1966–2013). Artists and curators Kelly Akashi, Anna Sew Hoy, Karen Ishizuka, Marci Kwon, Sonia Mak, and Mika Yoshitake discuss the reverberations of Higa’s work in the present.

This conversation coincided with the publication of “Hidden in Plain Sight: Selected Writings of Karin Higa,” a substantial illustrated volume surveying her curatorial and scholarly work released in October 2022 by Dancing Foxes Press.

Karin Higa: Hidden in Plain Sight was coorganized by AAPI Arts Network and Japanese American National Museum to highlight the legacy of the late curator, writer, and cultural activist Karin Higa. The program explored and celebrated the intersections of art, community, and organizing in Higa’s work. Among her many accomplishments, Higa was senior curator at JANM from 1992-2006. Her creative, intellectual, and political commitments to Asian American art, the Japanese American experience, the Little Tokyo community, and their deft interweaving with broader contexts, continue to be powerful inspiration for artists, art historians, and many other cultural workers. 

Panelists included Howie Chen, curator and writer who recently edited the book “Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network;” Bruce Yonemoto, an artist who, along with his late brother Norman, worked very closely with Higa on the exhibition “Bruce and Norman Yonemoto: Memory, Matter, and Modern Romance;” and Julie Ault, editor of “Hidden in Plain Sight: Selected Writings of Karin Higa.” The panel was introduced by Higa’s niece and recent JANM Getty Marrow Undergraduate intern, Rose Keiko Higa, and moderated by writer, curator, and organizer Ana Iwataki, who worked under Karin Higa as a JANM Getty Marrow Undergraduate intern. 

This conversation coincided with the publication of “Hidden in Plain Sight: Selected Writings of Karin Higa,” a substantial illustrated volume surveying her curatorial and scholarly work released in October 2022 by Dancing Foxes Press.

In PPI#3, Hewitt attempts to come to terms with both the teaching and the unlearning of photographs through an examination of reportage photography, portraiture, and conceptual art. Through a staging of and search for mediated sites of resistance, this process expands on how a public might collectively reconcile grief and images of trauma. In an effort to redress these issues through public dialogue, Hewitt organized two pivotal conversations over the course of 2020, one with artist, author, and scholar Deborah Willis; and the other with author, curator, filmmaker, and theorist of photography and visual culture Ariella Aïsha Azoulay. By presenting a range of conceptual and historical strategies over the course of the issue, Hewitt finds ways to address images, moving with agency to reclaim power in spaces that attempt to arbitrate critique and exhibit care for the lives of people and the afterlives of their images.

LESLIE HEWITT is an associate professor of art at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York. Her work, which utilizes photography, sculpture, and site-specific installations to address the mechanisms behind the construction of meaning and memory and to contend with shifting notions of space and time, has been shown internationally at such venues as Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Menil Collection, Houston; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Power Plant, Toronto, Ontario; and Sculpture Center, New York. She has held residencies at the American Academy, Berlin; Konstepidemin, Göteborg, Sweden; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Project Row Houses, Houston; the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, among others.

OMAR BERRADA is a writer and curator whose work focuses on the politics of translation and intergenerational transmission. He is the author of the poetry collection Clonal Hum (2020) and the editor or co-editor of several books, including Album: Cinémathèque de Tanger, about film in Tangier and Tangier on film (2012); The Africans, on racial dynamics in North Africa (2016); and La Septième Porte, a posthumously published history of Moroccan cinema by Ahmed Bouanani (2020). Berrada’s writing was included in numerous exhibition catalogs, magazines and anthologies, including Frieze, Bidoun, Asymptote, The University of California Book of North African Literature, and Poetic Justice: An Anthology of Contemporary Moroccan Poetry. Currently living in New York, he teaches at The Cooper Union where he and Leslie Hewitt co-organize the IDS Lecture Series.

“Postscript: Archives, Annotations, and the Unfolding of Time as Image and Agency” is the third issue in the series Pounds Per Image, a collaboration with Pratt Photography Imprint, a serial experiment in pedagogy through the activities of publishing.