Shigeko Kubota

Shigeko Kubota was a Japanese video artist, sculptor, and avant-garde performance artist primarily based in New York City. Recognized as one of the pioneers in using the portable video camera Sony Portapak, she pushed the boundaries of visual art through the innovative use of technology.

Biography of Shigeko Kubota

Shigeko Kubota was born in 1937 in Niigata, Japan. She completed her B.A. in sculpture from Tokyo University of Education and furthered her studies at New York University and the New School for Social Research.

In 1964, Kubota relocated to New York and became the Vice Chairman of the Fluxus Organization. Throughout her career, she held teaching positions at the School of Visual Arts and served as a video artist-in-residence at both Brown University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. From 1974 to 1982, she was the video curator at Anthology Film Archives.

Kubota received numerous grants and awards, including a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst Fellowship in Berlin, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, New York State Council on the Arts grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and an NEA/ Visual Arts grant. Her works are part of permanent collections at The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Toyama Museum of Art in Japan.

Her video sculptures, installations, and videos have been exhibited internationally, including at prestigious institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art (Projects), Documenta 6 and 8 in Kassel, the Folkwang Museum in Essen, Kunsthaus Zurich, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Kulturhuset in Stockholm, Japan Society in New York, and The Kitchen in New York.

Kubota also participated in the 1990 Venice Biennale and the 1990 Sydney Biennale. In 1991, the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York held a retrospective of her work, and in 1996, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York presented a solo exhibition.

Shigeko Kubota passed away in 2015.

Shigeko Kubota's Art Style

Shigeko Kubota brought a unique sensibility to her video sculptures, multi-media installations, and single-channel videos. Over her five-decade career, she masterfully combined personal experiences with technological elements, often using electronic processing techniques to merge images and objects from nature, art, and everyday life. Her work is known for its poetic and witty fusions of the organic, art historical references, and electronic media.

Kubota was an active participant in the international Fluxus art movement in the 1960s and was significantly influenced by Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. Her works often explored interconnected themes, including direct homages to Duchampian ideas and icons, as seen in her Meta-Marcel and Duchampiana series. She also drew inspiration from Japanese spiritual traditions of nature and landscape, particularly water and mountains, as evident in works like "River" (1981) and "Niagara Falls" (1985). Additionally, Kubota maintained a diaristic approach, chronicling her personal life on video.

Her distinctive style and innovative techniques have left a lasting impact on the art world, blending the personal with the technological in a way that remains both evocative and thought-provoking.