Buried Balloon Flower (2022), digital painting.
Kathy Aoki creates a faux-museum exhibit depicting a fictional
character who collects and destroys artwork by Jeff Koons. The immersive satirical tableau, with a mesmeric diorama and new works on paper, brings the viewer in on the joke that reveals the hypocrisy and patriarchy of the art world, represented by Koon’s enormous financial success as a male artist who focuses on the banal. Aoki uses humor to explore gender and beauty issues through mock historical artifacts and documentation. Leveraging the exaggerated authority of institutional settings, à la institutional critique artist Andrea Fraser, she includes wry, museum-style labeling to present the work.
The exhibition you see installed at New Museum Los Gatos is a conceptual installation in the form of a museum exhibition set in the future, on the grounds of the imagined estate of the fictional collector Dorothea Vadas James.
The artist Kathy Aoki has modeled the character of Dorothea Vadas James after a real artist and colleague of hers. Each of the works of art that you see installed in the lobby at NUMU, including framed prints, sculpture, diorama, and paintings, were created by Kathy Aoki.
We invite you to let yourself be immersed in the story that Aoki has crafted. Learn the history of the James Estate and the mission of the Save the Public Eye Foundation, so that you can enjoy the humor and critical perspective on the prominent American sculptor, Jeff Koons.
Buried Bourgeois Bust (2022), digital painting.
About the Artist
Kathy Aoki is the Lee and Seymour Graff Professor of Studio Art at Santa Clara University. With a Master of Fine Arts degree in Printmaking from Washington University in St. Louis, she has received commissions to make Political Paper Dolls for the San Jose Museum of Art, a Hello Kitty Monument for the ICA San Jose, and Teenscape dioramas for the Palo Alto Art Center based on community involvement. Past residencies include the Recology Artist in Residence Program (San Francisco), the Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris, France), the Djerassi Resident Artist Program (Woodside, CA), Frans Masereel Centrum (Kasterlee, Belgium), and the Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, CA).
Aoki’s work resides in the permanent collections of public and private institutions including the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, the Civic Art Collection of Seattle, the Harvard University Art Museums, the New York Public Library, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. You can learn more about her work on her website.
Upcoming Programs + Events Featuring Kathy Aoki
In the Artist's Studio is generously supported by the Borgenicht Foundation and Wanda Kownacki.
The Borgenicht Foundation works to promote the understanding of secularism as the way and hope for establishing peace in the world. In addition, the Foundation supports social justice, conservation and historic preservation, the arts, health, and education.
