KIM YASUDA

(AMERICAN, BORN 1960)

Hunt + Gather, 2012
mixed media
dimensions variable
Laumeier Sculpture Park Commission, with funds from the Mark Twain Laumeier Endowment Fund

Kim Yasuda creates socially engaged projects that rely on the conditions of a particular place to give shape and form to her work. Hunt + Gather, 2012 is designed to make visible the ways in which Laumeier provides a green heart at the center of our community. Yasuda developed this installation through a series of community-based meetings—a Town Hall, a pot luck—focused on this neighborhood garden at Laumeier. Yasuda also re-introduced an element of the rural into the mix with egg-laying chickens which recall the early agricultural roots of the area while producing food to share (within the confines of laws concerning health and safety).

Yasuda uses the very location of place to modify and amplify a new set of relationships that could create a new sense of “home”. By planting beds of herbs and vegetables to be shared with neighbors during the growing season, Yasuda has created a new generation of community in the public space at Laumeier. The neighbors, staff and volunteers maintaining these living works become the performers of neighborliness, finding ways to share the bounty of Yasuda’s Missouri garden.

Sculpture Interaction Guideline: Look, But Do Not Touch

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Kim Yasuda earned her B.F.A. from San Jose State University, California, in 1983 and her M.F.A. from the University of Southern California-Los Angeles in 1988. She is currently a professor of spatial studies in the Art Department at the University of California-Santa Barbara and the co-director of the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts. Yasuda has exhibited at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; the Oakland Museum of Art, California; the Ansel Adams Center for Photography, San Francisco; the Nexus Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta; and Camerawork Gallery, London. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Joan Mitchell Foundation.